Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[26] gallant Captain is also capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes back to the London stockholders of the Virginia Company: “When you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have.”

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,