as President of the Colony, addressed in 1608 to the Treasurer and Council for Virginia in London, although written with soldierly brusqueness, is a lasting monument of his practical wisdom in grasping the conditions that had to be conformed to if the settlement was to be placed on a permanent footing. It stamps him as the real founder of Virginia, the one man who early recognized, and who labored hard while in power to carry out the true principles of action which should have been followed by the small band of colonists planted on the Powhatan, principles only adopted by his successors after a useless waste of life and treasure.[1]
The sound judgment prompting Smith to oppose, in the situation of the Colony at that time, the search for gold, impelled him also to discourage for the present all attempts to find the South Sea by sending expeditions into the Monacan country. The hope that the settlers in Virginia would discover an overland route to that sea was hardly less vivid in the minds of the members of the London Company than that gold and silver would be found in the Colony. A desire to throw open a new highway to the Indies by sailing westward was the principal motive governing Columbus when he set out on his immortal voyage from Palos, and that motive in a modified form remained dominant in the Spanish mind until Magellan penetrated the Straits which bear his name. The determination to discover a passage to the Orient
- ↑ Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 442. These principles were, first, to keep the savages always in awe of the settlers, and, second, that the settlers should rely upon the fertility of the Virginian soil and their own industry for their subsistence, instead of looking to England for support, as was the case for so many years. If these two principles had been strictly followed, the massacre of 1622 would not have occurred, and the growth of the Colony in all the elements of strength and prosperity would have been steadily maintained from the beginning.
