Evening Star Newspaper, May 21, 1933, Page 65

cartaN JOHN SMITH termed [ ”*HRN o 4 AMERICA Al « CT hefe. are shr Linies that fhew vhy Face;hat thefe % ew thy GTact aad 51;%. brighter m‘f: Fuatre-Difeourics and Fowle - Overthrowes Salvagesmuch Civillidd by she & Beft fhew shy Spirit;end w i& Glor) oichou are Brajfe widkowt, but Go Capt. John Smith, the imaginative . . . from a portrait engraved in 1616 and printed with Smith’s “Generall His- toric of Virginia.” BY EMILY C. DAVIS. OUR old friend Capt. John Smith has a brand-new titlee He has been named the original Trader Horn of America. In fact, the debunkers are after Capt. John Smith just now. Like some other public heroes who have been put through the debunking process, Capt. Jchn Smith is shown to be no perfect hero, but a flesh-and-blood person, who had shortcomings and foibles and still won his pedestal in the hall of fame. The captain is accused of what might be called dramatizing himself, and embroidering his adventures. § Pirst, a professor in Califbrnia takes a fling at the old school book classic about Pocahontas. He doubts that the Indian girl ever threw her- self over John Smith's body to save him f~ ™ the headsman’s club. It was just the captain’s way of trimming .» his adventures with heart interest that thiust the Indian chiid so very dramatically into the middle of the reseue story. On the heels of this comes a report to the Bcientific Monthly from Dr. Elsie Murray, psy- chologist of Cornell University, Naming yhe oaptain the original Trader Horn of America, Dr. Murray gives reasons she has unearthed for believing Capt. John Smith was really the romancer who launched the ‘“noble savage” myth. You have read about the noble savage craze which swept Europe in the eighteenth century. Civilized Prench and English folk, cooped up in their stuffy houses, sighed for the carefree Mfe of savages in the forests. Philosophers— potably Jean Racques Rousseau—wrote about “patural man.” Poets grew lyrical over the de- lUghts of the simple life. VERYWHERE people talked equality and freedom of living. That noble savage idea] weas one spark that heiped light the fires of the PFrench Revolution. Dr. Murray writes: “The naive faith in the patural man which ran lke wildfire through the eighteenth century has baffled the curious of more than one generation. The strange ob- @ession that, unccrrupled by kings, clothes, perliaments, printing or ceramics, man was or would be a wholly admirable creature must somewhere have had a nucleus of fact.” That nucleus of fact she has traced to the words of Capt. John Smith, It was the custom even in John Smith’s day for European visitors to America to write their impressions. Columbus began . Smith car- ried on. Columbus had briefly praised some of the MNew World natives he met. But Smith set forth a full-length pen portrait of the noble red men with their fine, strong bodies and strange ts and their general superiority. It was by chance that Dr. Murray got her solution of the noble savage mystery. She was thumbing the stained and tattered pages of a calf-bound copy of Smith’s “True Travels” when, she sayvs. “a sudden light broke in on the enigma.” The captain’s literary style she found dis- oouragingly hard reading. He piled up phrases in a fashion reminding her of that famous word-jungle, *Ulysses,” by James Joyce. But struggling through the wordy welter, she glis- ocovered one clear fact: In this little oid travel book of 1609 is buried the first really alluring plcture of the American redskin, living his happy and enviable life. The Indians whom Smith saw through bright rose-colored glasses were the Sasquesahanoughs. A simpler spelling would be Susquebannock. They lived along the Susquehanna River, north of the land where Smith met Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontass All that region Was Virginia then. To the captain’s eye, the Susquehannocks were very different from Powhatan’s tribe, and decidedly superior. So, with his roqj?nt.lc pen, THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, MAY 21 The Debunkers After the Doughty Old Adventurer Now, Accusing Him of Romancing and of Starting the “Noble Savage” Myth Which Helped Light Fires of the French Revolution. he glorified these Indiags as supermen of the primitive world. “Such great and well-proportioned men' are seldom seen,” wrote Smith. “They seemed like giants to the English, yea and to the neighbors,” he added, thinking of shorter Indians in nearby tribes. These big Indians talked big. Smith de- acribed their voices as “sounding from them as it were a great voice in a vault, or cave, as an You can get an idea of this echoing speech from the numeral for 90. Smith gave it as kekataoughtassapooesksku. Try it aloud, and you will agree with traveler Smith that strong lungs and chest development are needed to roll out syllables like that. The captain liked the character of these na- tives a8 much as he admired their physique. They were of hounest and simpie disposition, he declared. 8 for their clothes, the capiain was fasci- nated. He tried to describe them get- ting well tangled up in the hard labor of writ- ing & set of fashion notes. ‘*Their attire,” he explained carefully, “is the skinnes of beares and woolves, some have cas- sacks made of beares heades and skinnes that a man’s necke goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the beare fastened to his shoulders behind, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, and at the end of the nose hung a beares pawe: the halfe sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of beares and the armes through the mouth, with pawes hang- ing at their noses.” After this breath-taking sentence, the cap- tain added as a postscript that one Indian had the head of a wolf hanging on & chain for a jewel. Others wore a green and yellow snake dangling from a perforated ear, These impressive men of the Indian world carried tobacco pipes fully three-quarters of a yard long. TIhe pipes Smith described as “prettily carved with a birde, a beare, a deare or some such devise at the great end, sufficient to beat out the brains of a man.” Altogether, Dr. Murray sees in this scene the first effort to glorify the savages of America. After Smith came others to America. Mis- sionaries and settlers and explorers came, saw, and wrote their impressions. Checking up on their writings, Dr. Murray finds evidence that a number of them followed Smith’s lead and echoed his admiration for the noble Susque- hannocks, often in Smith’s own phrases. ‘The line-up of these writers who played fol- low-the-leader includes America’s first real press agent, George Alsop, who was sent over to compose a blurb on Maryland. Young Alsop was the first super-salesman of America, Dr. Murray declares. His job was to sell prospective colonists and laborers on the idea that Maryland was a great place. One not-too-easy task was to reassure reluctant eol- onists that they would not be scalped in Mary- land by whooping savages. Alsop was a good preas agent. He described the Susquehannock Indians as “the most noble and heroick nation of Indians in the confines of America.” He added more reassuring phrases, some of them sounding as if he had been reading Capt. John Smith’s travels and had borrowed from them. The captain and those who echoed his writ- ings were right enough in describing the Sus- quehannocks as fine Indian types and superior to many tribes. ‘The Susquehannocks were members of the Iroquois League of Nations, and the Iroquois League had advanced ideas. Some scientists today believe that the Iro- quois system of grouping independent Indian nations into a strong league was the inspira- tion for the plan of a United States. There was oertainly nothing like that in Europe when the Revolutionary fathers drew up the Con- stitution. The Iroquois League is now being memorialized in a beautiful sculptured panel for the new post office at Wellesville, N. Y. FINI Indian types the Susquehannocks were, as & matier of sober fact. Neither they nor any other tribe, however, led the happy and idyllic }life that Europeans fondly imagined in their beautiful ideal of the noble savage. Life was just as real and earnest in the American forest as in the streets of London. Capt. Smith's romantic pen did not stop with idealizing the Susquehannock Indians., In his travels, he moves as the hero through a series of romantic and exciting scenes—the sort of thing tHat inspired Dr. Murray to label him America’s original Trader Horn. Once, when a number of Smith’s band were Pocohontas saved him just as Ris brains were about to be dashed out, said Smith ., . . but he forgot to tell the story until eight years later. ill, Indians attacked Capt. Smith’s boat. The resourceful captain ordered the sick men’s hats mounted on sticks among the well men on board, and so he set up a formidable line-up of armed soldiers to scare off the savages. Another time, when Smith was exp,oring with an Indian boy for a guide, redskin: attacked. Resourceful Smith, guessing that he¢ had been bertrayed, bound the guide’s arm .£> his hand with a garter and used the Indian as a shield, Luck failed eventually, and Smith found hime self a prisoner in the hands of tie Indians, Well aware of the ghastly fate that befell white prisoners, Smith had the presence of mind to divert an Indian chief by pulling et a pocket mp.nlndpruentlncubthemprhedm- ‘Then, cleverly following up amased interest in acience, tured to the Redskins abou about the roundness of the course of the sun, moon and It was during this captivity exhibited from tribe to tribe, the great Chief Powhatan, reached its climax. Smith’s firsst account these happenings, a letter to England, nothing of a narrow escape from execution og a rescue by an Indian princess. Eight years later the Princess Pocahontas story of the rescue is told, dramatically, to the Queen, and is repeated in Smith’s history of Virginia. 4 Critics have clashed among ihemselves more than once over this historic mystery, Was the Pocahontas rescue left out of the early reports because it would frighten off prospective colon- ists? Or did the gallant Capt. John embroider the true facts with romance - when he at last sat down to write the story? ' TUDENTS of "ndian cust<ms say that there is no reason why Pocalontas should not have requested her father to spare the captain’s life. Indian women often claimed prisoners, and usually a prisoner became the slave of the