Hoobler, Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler.

Hoobler, Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler. Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream. New York: Wiley, 2005. The colony of Jamestown in Roanoke, Virginia, often remains a shadowy period of American history in most American's understanding of their nation's origins. If they know anything about Jamestown and its founder Captain John Smith, it likely comes from romantic tales of Smith's rescue from death by the Indian chief's daughter Pocahontas, rather than knowledge about how and why the colony experienced such difficulties during its early years.

However, the historians Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler suggest in their text Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth of the American Dream that the ideals, values, and principles of America can be traced back to this early effort of colonization. The Hooblers' thesis is that Jamestown's founder, even though the colony itself was ultimately, famously unsuccessful, was a kind of an early embodiment of the ideal of the self-made man.

Smith, in the portrayal of the Hooblers, emerges from the text as both a pirate and a pioneer, and a true, budding entrepreneur even though he was born an Englishman. Smith came to America after living a life more akin to an action hero than an administrator of the Crown. He had battled upon the high seas, and even been sold into slavery. He was born in a seafaring English community where regular maintenance of the dikes was necessary to keep the town, quite literally, afloat.

This was an early example of the value of hard work and effort to the young Smith. Smith was did not come naturally fame and fortune, in short, he had to work for it -- and did so through seafaring. Smith fought the Spanish in France for the English, but then sailing from Marseilles to Italy, he was thrown overboard and rescued by pirates. In 1601, he joined the Austrian army as a mercenary to fight the Turks in Hungary but was captured by the Turks and temporarily lost his liberty.

However, he narrowly escaped and made his way across Europe back to England. Others might have decided to call an end to a career at sea after this venture, but undaunted, in 1606, he sailed to Virginia to begin anew in Jamestown and enter a new, unknown world. Of course, one of the most interesting scenes dissected in the text is that of the saving of Captain Smith by the Indian princess Pocahontas, the most romantic incident in an already romantic life.

"God made Pocahontas the King's daughter the means to deliver me," wrote Smith (132-133). At first, this account was accepted as literally true, but then Smith was condemned as a liar and a myth-maker who made up the whole scene to aggrandize his own place in history.

Was the Pocahontas tale fantasy or fact? The Hooblers believe that such allegations about Smith's self-aggrandizement were created during the 19th century, after the victory of the North in the Civil War by New England historians such as Henry Adams who wished to discredit the role of the South in the founding of America (131).

Smith's long delay in putting the story into print (he waited until 1642, after writing the account of the Jamestown colony in 1609 and his own life in 1612) has been seen as counting against his veracity, even by contemporary historians, although this would seem to suggest he did not believe event could enhance a reputation he supposedly desperately wanted to inflate.

Smith's first reference to a relationship with the Indian princess is in a 1612 chronicle of his life, when he specifically said that he did not wish to marry Pocahontas "to have himself made a king" of her tribe (133).

Instead, the Hooblers propose an alternative theory, that the scene described by Smith, when King Pocahontas' father Powhatan orders his braves to hold Smith's head down on a rock and then club him to death, only to be interrupted when young Pocahontas pleads for the captive's life, is actually a deliberate ritual of cementing friendship of the tribe. In other words, it did happen, but Smith's life was never at risk, rather the ritual's purpose was to initiate Smith into the tribal group, and had been performed many times before.

There is a record of a similar account found in a chronicle of the Spanish voyager to the new world Hernando De Soto (134). Afterward, in Smith's account, Smith says that Powhatan told Smith he was now a 'friend' which would be an unusual way of describing a man Powhatan actually rather than ritually intended to kill.

Powhatan then invited him to return to the English settlement to find suitable presents for this new 'friend.' Besides the most famous and enduring myth attached to Smith, the Hooblers' use of Smith's own diaries, letters, and autobiographical accounts provide illumination of the early colony. Smith was unsparingly critical of his fellow settlers. After "many months had passed," it became clear that the "preponderance of gentlemen would prove disastrous for the colony (85-85).

The chief characteristic of an English "gentleman" was that "he could live without doing manual labor" (85-86). This qualification, although socially desirable in England, was not particularly useful in building a new town literally from scratch. Smith "though he had ranked as a gentleman, was not one by worth or inheritance" and had worked with his hands all of his life, unlike most of the settlers under his command (86).

In short, the reason that Jamestown experienced such difficulties was simple -- the settlers were, except for Smith, too wedded to the ideological system of England, where manual labor was frowned upon and relegated to the lower classes. Smith thus embodied the first virtue of what was later to make America great, the idea that prosperity and hard work were linked, and no labor was demeaning to the worker.

True, the failure of the colonists may not have been entirely due to laziness, it also may have had something to do with their lack of expertise. On a practical level, the absence of women also meant that many of the men had to do hitherto unfamiliar tasks like housekeeping, farming, and cooking.

But later, years after in writing his chronicles, Smith claimed that many of his fellow settlers were idle and useless and had to make a speech that "fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers," which may seem obvious to Americans today, but amounted to nothing less than a "revolutionary change" according to the Hooblers, because such a philosophy of social stratification underlined the whole system of English aristocracy (198). Smith said bluntly that the colonists had to become "more industrious or.