Smith has often been accused of boasting, and some have said that he was
guilty of great exaggeration or something worse, but it is certain that he
repeatedly braved hardships, extreme dangers, and captivity among the
Indians to provide food for the colony and to survey Virginia. After
carefully editing _Captain John Smith's Works_ in a volume of 983 pages,
Professor Edwin Arber says: "For [our] own part, beginning with
doubtfulness and wariness we have gradually come to the unhesitating
conviction, not only of Smith's truthfulness, but also that, in regard to
all personal matters, he systematically understates rather than exaggerates
anything he did."

Although by far the greater part of Smith's literary work was done after he
returned to England, yet his two booklets written in America entitle him to
a place in colonial literature. He had the Elizabethan love of achievement,
and he records his admiration for those whose 'pens writ what their swords
did.' He was not an artist with his pen, but our early colonial literature
is the richer for his rough narrative and for the description of Virginia
and the Indians.

In one sense he gave the Indian to literature, and that is his greatest
achievement in literary history. Who has not heard the story of his capture
by the Indians, of his rescue from torture and death, by the beautiful
Indian maiden, Pocahontas, of her risking her life to save him a second
time from Indian treachery, of her bringing corn and preserving the colony
from famine, of her visit to England in 1616, a few weeks after the death
of Shakespeare, of her royal reception as a princess, the daughter of an
Indian king, of Smith's meeting her again in London, where their romantic
story aroused the admiration of the court and the citizens for the
brown-eyed princess? It would be difficult to say how many tales of Indian
adventure this romantic story of Pocahontas has suggested. It has the honor