Captain John Smith
Was John Smith a writer that scholars and researchers today can rely on for an accurate recounting of history? Can his account of events be trusted? What were his strengths and weaknesses as a writer? What is the reason that he writes in the third person? These are questions that will be addressed in this paper.
According to scholarly research that has been published about Smith and about his writing, he was not a very good writer and indeed he plagiarized in many of his writings, although it is also true that in some instances he mentioned the name of the author that he had "borrowed" from at the end of the piece. He would sometimes mention the author he was copying from at the end of the writing, but readers cannot know exactly what text he stole from whom because he did not footnote or otherwise make clear through quotes that it was another person's work.
The late Everett H. Emerson, who was a leading member of the Society of Early Americanists, and a respected editor and historian, writes that it is "difficult not to have strong feelings about Captain John Smith" (Emerson, 1971, p. 7). In his book Captain John Smith,...
But while Emerson admits that in one sense Smith "wrote well," Emerson adds, "nearly everything is flawed" (p. 7). Smith "very much needed an editor," Emerson asserts; in fact Smith did have an editor and that helped produce what Emerson describes as Smith's "most consistently good piece, 'The Description of Virginia'" (p. 7). Emerson writes (p. 7) that Smith's literary weaknesses are only too apparent: obscurity resulting from omission of necessary words, lack of sense of form, bad grammar, an inability to present reports objectively."
On page 98, Emerson places Smith's descriptions of his travels to Tartary (a region in eastern Europe occupied by Mongols in the 13th & 14th centuries) side-by-side with copy written by Friar William of Rubruck four hundred years earlier. Clearly Smith stole descriptions word-for-word from Friar William. Moreover, Smith "lost immediacy" in his writing because he used the third person, Emerson asserts (p. 100). Why did he use the third person? Emerson believes that Smith was…
