56 Singing Valleys 



shallop and nine men. He would add to the party two Indians 

 who were disposed to be friendly, and go up the Chicka- 

 hominey where there were large villages with presumably well- 

 stocked granaries, and barter for corn to keep the settlers alive. 



So began the well-known adventure of the bearded Captain 

 and the twelve-year-old daughter of the Powhatan. In being 

 captured and threatened with execution, Smith was only being 

 made to pay for the kidnapping of Indians by every ship's 

 captain who touched the Americas. When Verrazano landed 

 on the Carolina shore he stole away a child and tried to carry 

 off a young woman. Only her screams and the savage re- 

 sistance she put up made the Breton sailors desist. Again and 

 again Smith made the point in his arguments with the Council 

 that honest and cordial relations with the natives were neces- 

 sary if the English were to remain in Virginia. For as long as 

 hunger stalked them, they would have need of the corn of 

 the country. Englishmen could count on having bread to eat 

 only as long as they could count on the Indians' breaking 

 bread with them. 



Wingfield, the first President, was deposed from office on 

 the charge of appropriating to himself too many of the stores. 

 He went back to England and there published a pamphlet in 

 his defense. It was another apologia, to follow de Landa's, and 

 to add another chapter to the history of the corn-planters. 



Wingfield was no friend to John Smith; it was he who had 

 ordered the irons put about the Captain's wrists. But Wing- 

 field states frankly that the survival of the English cause in 

 Virginia was due to Smith's canniness in trading with the 

 Indians for corn, and to his shrewd recognition of the impor- 

 tance of the natives' grain as a crop for the settlers to grow for 

 themselves. 



Again and again, in the two years before he was forced by 

 serious injuries which lay beyond the skill of the colony's 

 barber to cure, to return to England, John Smith went corn- 

 trading. In the course of those expeditions he spied out the 

 land and gathered the facts he put into his maps. He sailed up 



