[264] great happiness, had they not so much doted on their tobacco, on whose furnish1 foundation there is small stability; there being so many good commodities besides.
Xiii.âCaptain John Smith's recollections of his own life.
[also written in the last year of his life,â1631.]The wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa, taught me how to subdue the wild savages in Virginia and New England in America . . . . Having been a slave to the Turks, prisoner amongst the most barbarous savages; after my deliverance commonly discovering and ranging those large rivers and unknown nations, with such a handful of ignorant companions, that the wiser sort often gave me for lost; always in mutinies, wants, and miseries; blown up with gunpowder; a long time prisoner among the French pirates, from whom escaping in a little boat by myself, and adrift all such a stormy winter night, when their ships were split, more than an hundred thousand pound lost, we had taken at sea, and most of them drowned upon the Isle of Ree,2 not far from whence I was driven on shore in my little boat, &c.; and many a score of the worst of winter months lived in the fields; yet to have lived near thirty-seven years in the midst of wars, pestilence, and famine, by which many an hundred thousand have died about me, and scarce five living of them went first with me to Virginia, and see the fruits
