John Smith's Discovery Fantastic Voyage • In August 1608, Capt. John Smith sailed up the Rappahannock on a quest to help launch a nation. Timeline • Timeline of early American events Online extras • Hear passages from Capt. John Smith's diary • Sources & Web links

APT. JOHN SMITH was a risk-taker, outrageous, sometimes cantankerous, ruthless, curious, and by many accounts largely responsible for the ultimate success of the English colony known as Jamestown.

Most Americans know him from grade-school history books as the explorer saved by Pocahontas, the young daughter of Powhatan. But few know the details that make his story larger than life—particularly his exploits on two voyages of discovery from Jamestown during the summer of 1608—even as the state prepares to celebrate Jamestown’s 400th anniversary in 2007.

“He was a pretty amazing person, actually,” said Diane Stallings, district supervisor at Jamestown. “The guy was a self-made man who had a spirit of adventure,” she said, noting that he ran away from home at age 16 to be a soldier of fortune.

“His exploits are remarkable, when you see the places he traveled to.” Because of the Pocahontas story, “people look at him almost as a cartoon character, and he’s not. My feeling is that he had a knack for languages. He kept wonderful notes. And he was his best PR man.”

She added, “He had the ability to take charge, and he was the kind of guy that you really liked, or you really hated him. His background was middling, but he had a knack for finding benefactors, mentors. I think the guy would have done well in Wild Bill Hickok’s Wild West Show.”

Visitors to Jamestown quickly get a feel for what the colonists were seeking in the New World: God, glory and gold.

CAPT. JOHN SMITH:A formal portrait of the explorer shows a man who was at once dashing and ruthless.

As Stallings notes, “They were getting into the exploration and settlement game a heck of a lot later than the rest of the world,” namely France and Spain.

Smith was credited with keeping the first Jamestown colonists alive with the edict “no work, no food.” And he took charge of the quest to explore the bay, and to look for anything valuable the country might offer in the way of timber, plants and minerals, and another Holy Grail of the day that proved to be a fantasy: a quick passage to the Pacific.

“First of all, there was some serious internal strife at Jamestown and by removing himself from that” Stallings said, Smith was able to stay above the infighting and to return at just the right moment, like a white knight in September 1608, to take over leadership of the colony.

Jamestown historians like to point out that the settlement of Jamestown, in May 1607, came 13 years before the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Mass., in 1620.

Smith was born in 1580 in Willoughby, England. He left home at 16 to join volunteers in France who were fighting with the Dutch for independence from Spain.

He served on a merchant ship and in 1600 joined Austrian forces fighting the Turks. He became a captain while fighting in Hungary.

His exploits became known after he was wounded in Transylvania, captured, and sold into slavery to a Turk. The Turk sent Smith as a gift to his paramour in Istanbul and Smith, according to his accounts, escaped by murdering his captor. He returned to England in 1604.

Smith signed on with the Virginia Company and landed in Virginia in April 1607.

In December of that year he was captured by an Indian hunting party and taken before Powhatan, who spared his life at the bequest of Pocahontas.

Smith survived to return to the fort, explore the bay, only to be injured by a gunpowder explosion in 1609 after which he returned to England. In 1614, he returned to the New World in a voyage to New England. At age 51, he was back in England, where he died.

Edward Wright Haile, author of “Jamestown Narratives” (RoundHouse), says Smith had an uncanny ability to go where he wanted, and to get what he wanted.

IN THE NICK OF TIME:A scene from an engraving in the Library of Congress shows Capt. John Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas.

“I would like to make this point: In politically correct times, when he went up a river, he met hostility and when he came back down river, he was friends with everybody. That’s exactly what happened.” Haile, who lives on Occupacia Creek, a tributary of the Rappahannock River in Essex County where Smith’s exploration party passed, adds that Smith didn’t hesitate to use firearms against Indians’ bows when necessary, but that Smith also befriended Indians—Mosco, for example, who guided his party up the Rappahannock, and Amoraleck, who was shot at the falls and then patched up after an encounter with the Mannahoacks.

Smith’s legacy was more than exploration, Haile said.

The Virginia Company, which funded the Jamestown expedition, got plenty of volunteers yearning for a new life in a new land.

“The concept that got planted here in Virginia early was that this was a place for the common man. It was going to be an extension of England, and the common man was going to have rights.

“And it was going to be even more than that because the liberals of the early 17th Century were scheming like a bunch of Marxists to set up a republican form of government. And they succeeded.

In Smith’s case, “It was not that he believed in a democratic form of government. He believed in a popular form of government. He was shoved ahead right out of the common class to do what was right and chosen by acclamation. I think he was one of our first democratic leaders.”

—Rusty Dennen