John Smith

Captain John Smith (1580–1631) was an English soldier, explorer and writer, a founder of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. A Lincolnshire farmer's son, he fought as a mercenary in Hungary, was enslaved by the Turks and escaped before sailing with the Virginia Company in 1606. In Virginia he explored the Chesapeake, traded and fought with the Powhatan, was taken prisoner and, by his own account, saved by Pocahontas, and as president held the colony together through its hardest winter. Badly burned, he returned to England in 1609, mapped the coast he named New England in 1614 and spent his last years writing, chiefly The Generall Historie of Virginia.