"
America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain
Smith, but he owes his place in human memory today to the
physical and mental energy with which he met the demands of a new
situation, and to the vividness with which he dashed down in
words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in that agreeable
passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a little, no
one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this
peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an
indulgent audience.
But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William
Strachey's "True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt.,
vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas" may or may not have
given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene in "The Tempest."
In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive,
shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia, mingles,
like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an
exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage
mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a
language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of
illness and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans.
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