Sagadahoc Stories 124: 3/6/01

3/6/01.. Virgin Snow.

Aside from outdoor entertainments, I've put the season to good use in the Eagles, and have the first real sense of momentum out there I've had in years. It's curious how the work ebbs and flows, even when the air is frozen. I'd like to pretend I have control over it, but I'm more shuttlecock than racquet in this game.

Ever since I began peddling carvings on street corners there have been three motivating factors which drove me. Creative inspiration, promises made, and a desperate need for the legal tender. The latter was pretty consistent, and I managed to attract enough commissions to keep me at it steady, while the inspiration was what made it all worth doing.

So what happens when the mortgage is paid off and you stop hustling commissions? You'd have thought that the lack of external pressure would pop my cork, and the good stuff come effervescing. Instead of which the woodwork went completely flat for me. 'Course I have more than one hat, just in case, and I've kept out of creative trouble by drawing and painting and boatbuilding and writing and webbing and whistling a tune.. but woodcarving is my calling, like it or not. The only thing I'm really good at, and which really eases the aginbite. I've been real busy the last few years avoiding myself.

So what happened this winter? Maybe it was our brush with mortality. The thought that this life is just a moment, and here I am fooling around. I don't know what it is I have to say, but I do know what medium I should be trying to say it in. I have no lack of ideas. I have 30 years worth of ideas backed up. But I've always wanted to work on TODAY'S idea. Ride the wave of new inspiration. And today's flash made the necessary labor more appetizing. I got hooked on enthusiasm as the prime motivation. All those old notions were.. well.. old. Well: maybe I'm getting older, too. And maybe I'm getting used to not being desperate, or over-committed. Maybe I can take my enthusiasm in smaller doses.

Friday week I finished the first wall piece in my AMERICAN ICONS series: the collection of culture heroes and iconic images I've yammered about since Bering crossed the landbridge. I've decided this one's called VIRGINIA. The collision of worlds embodied in Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. She is a shamanic dancer, composed in high relief, slipping through the swamp trees, beckoning. He is in his Elizabethan armor, separate in three dimensions, holding aloft the crossed hilt of his sword to ward off the unknown. The early neolithic meets the late medieval. Their eyes are drawn together.

This isn't the image we remember of Capt. Smith and Pocahontas, of course. In that the teenage girl shields the captive Englishman with her body from savage execution by her father. Smith didn't tell that story until the fourth edition of TRUE RELATION, which came out in 1617, by which time Pocahontas was married to John Rolfe, had traveled to England, was the intimate of Queen Ann, and the darling of King James' court. In fact that episode didn't appear in any of the recorded accounts prior to 1617, or anyone else's journal besides Smith's.

What did appear, in AN ACCOUNT OF THE STARVING TIME IN VIRGINIA, by Master George Percy (a pamphlet published in 1614 to little acclaim), was the account of the capture of the teenage boy Henry Spelman by the Chicahominy, and how HE was saved by the timely intervention of Pocahontas. John Smith knew how to use a good tale, however.

[Modern ethnographers report that a ritual killing, halted at the last minute by intercession of a tribeswoman, was a form of symbolic adoption among the Chicahominy, but it's easy to imagine the misunderstandings it might have caused.]

Apprenticed to a merchant in Lincolnshire, young John Smith (17) used the occasion of his father's death, and his small inheritance, to plea for a sabbatical trip to France with the son of the local lord. There, having been duped out of his funds in an attempt to buy a commission in the Scots Guard, Smith threw up his expected future, and join a ragtag band of mercenaries fighting under the banner of King Henry IV of France, the greatest soldier-prince of his day.

Smith stole his first horse and saddle in a raid, and won his spurs in combat at the siege of Amiens, leading a foolhardy repulse against a Spanish cavalry sortie, which bravery scattered a much larger force. He made sergeant in a desperate harassment of relieving troops breaking through to the beleaguered garrison. But when Henry succeeded in choking off supplies to Amiens, the surrender put Smith out of work.

"The paid horsemen rode in the van, and were inspired by the example of an English sergeant in the the Duxbury company, one Jon Smyt [sic], who laid about him with such rapid strokes that he left a path of Spanish dead in his wake..." Smith was the only mercenary mentioned in dispatches, but John was severely wounded by a pistol shot at the tail end of the engagement.

The 21-year-old veteran was taken in by a grateful Nieuport merchant, and convalesced there for 6 weeks, or until the merchant discovered Smith bedding his eldest daughter (John describes her as "a fair and buxom blond".. he had a thing for blonds), whereupon he was tossed out in his nightshirt. He rejoined Duxbury's company, where he was promoted to ensign and made third in command. He fought cavalry skirmishes with the Spanish before Dunkirk until snow fell in November, at which time the Spanish sued for peace, and the mercenaries were disbanded. Maurice gave Smith a handsome gift of gold coins for his services.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the ship he went aboard was storm-tossed for a week, and had to put into the Channel Islands for repairs. Which gave Smith time to become fast friends with the skipper, one Henry Hudson. I told you the tale was too good to be true. Even so the two dined repeated with Hakluyt, and all were mutually impressed.

Smith bought a fine horse and splendid armor, and went home to Lincolnshire, but he couldn't pick up the threads of that provincial life. So the young hero retreated to a monastic solitude in his lord's forest, where he lived in a cabin he built, and dined on local game. Smith spent six months as a hermit, while he read through the libraries of the local gentry, with particular attention to the geographers and cartographers of the time.

Smith claimed to have debated matters of theology with the Fathers of the Society of Jesus at Rome, which claim amused scholars until an account of these dialogues was uncovered among the Jesuit archives in 1792.

John continued on until he met up with the army of Archduke Ferdinand in the city of Graz, Austria, where they were mustering for an assault on the Turks in Transylvania. Smith parlayed his letter of introduction from the Jesuits, and his past record, into a post as lieutenant on the personal staff of the Earl of Volda-Meldrich, whom Smith called Meldri.

Meldri's artillery-augmented brigade marched into Transylvania and Smith soon found that fighting the Turks was full of unorthodox surprises, with no quarter given. In a close contest, Smith discovered the advantages of the Janissarie's scimitars, and killing an opponent for one, he replaced his sword with the Turkish weapon.

Fifty of these secret weapons were prepared and catapulted at midnight into the quarter where the Turkish troops were most numerous. The infantry followed up on the extensive carnage, and Alba Regalis fell. The young lieutenant became Captain John Smith, and was given a company of 250 men, mixed cavalry and infantry.

Capt. Smith fought his way into Transylvania where, Meldri reported, "The company commanded by Capt. Smith has greater spirit than any other in my corps, and will engage in any feat of daring." John was about to prove the point before the walls of Orastie, which stood in the way of the Christian advance. Unfortunately Meldri was from Orastie, and the city was full of thousands of Transylvania Christians, so it couldn't simply be devastated with the new Greek fire. Worse yet, the Turkish commander was Suleiman, the Sultan's younger brother, who dared not call for reinforcements for political reasons. So the two forces sparred inconsequentially at the walls of Orastie for several weeks, trading insults.

Finally a Turkish nobleman named Turbashaw had had enough, and sent out a challenge under a flag of truce, calling for single combat before the armies, and "the ladies of the city, who are lacking the entertainments due to their station." Captain John Smith demanded the honor of accepting.

An outraged Turk, Gualgo, immediately demanded further satisfaction on the following day, which challenge Smith accepted with condescending disdain. The scene was repeated, this time Smith winning, after breaking lances and trading pistol shots, with a swift decapitation.

The angry Turks resumed the battle, but Sigismund's forces still held back from returning the fire, hoping to starve out the defenders without harming the citizens. When secret messages came out of the city reporting that food was almost gone, the point at which Suleiman would have to send for reinforcements, Capt. Smith proposed a delaying tactic. He would send in another insulting challenge, then postpone the negotiations over details on various quibbles, until the food situation was desperate.

Smith's message was to the Turkish ladies: "he was not so much enamored of their servants' heads, but if any Turk of rank would come to the place of combat to redeem them, he should have his upon the like conditions, if he could win it." A Turkish Colonel named Buenimolgri immediately responded. Smith called him Bonny Mulgro.

The ruse continued for six days as Smith's seconds fussed the details, but eventually had to settle on weapons: pistols, scimitars, and battle-axes. Smith had no experience with the latter, but he was rapidly drilled in its use, and faced his opponent the next day at noon.

The delay had done the trick, the city was out of food, and after two Turkish messengers were captured seeking reinforcements, and sent back into the city, Suleiman surrendered. Smith was the hero of the hour, and Sigismund promoted him to major, gave him a battalion of 700 men. Which troops were constantly in the vanguard as Christian forces stuck deeply toward Bulgaria. Unwisely deep, as it turned out, when Meldri and Smith became separated from Sigismund's main force, and were trapped in the Oltu Valley by Crimean Tartars along with Turkish Janissaries and Dragoons. Their defensive position was over-run and Smith reported "the slaughter was frightful." Meldri's forces were destroyed. Major Smith was knocked unconscious on the field, and taken captive when later discovered to be still alive.

Stripped naked, the Christian captives were marched off into slavery. At Tchernavoda the prisoners were sold in the slave market, where a pasha named Timor bought Smith for three gold coins. The pasha eventually had Smith taken to Constantinople by his eunuchs, where he was given as a present to his mistress, the Lady Charatza Tragabigzanda. Smith expected to experience the fate of other male prisoners, but wasn't emasculated by the pasha's mistress, as it was currently fashionable to be waited on by a real male dressed as a lady's maid.

Apparently John more than waited on the lady, and he also made a secret alliance with another of her waiting women, an English girl named Elizabeth Rondee. The fact that Elizabeth was a beautiful blond, and milady a fair Turk, might have had something to do with it. Even so, Charatza jealously sent Elizabeth away as a gift to a Morrocan relative, and eventually had to part company with Capt. Smith, after her mother got wind of things, and began to make a fuss.

To cover their tracks, Charatza sent Smith to the pasha at his estates in Cambria, on the Black Sea, saying she was bored with him. Timor immediately put a slave ring around Smith's neck, and set him to doing menial labor in the fields. Smith had been a slave for more than a year when Timor happened to catch him asleep in a barn during threshing time. The pasha began slashing him with a riding crop, and Smith revolted, beating Timor to death with a threshing-bat. Luckily the pasha was alone, and Smith stole his his clothes, weapons, and horse, and made off toward the Russian border.

As it happened, Reshdinski had a willowy blond niece, the Lady Camallata. Wouldn't you know it? Who became the (unrequited) love of Smith's life. Well-educated, Camallata could trade witticisms with John in French and Latin, and she taught him Russian to pass the time. In late Spring, 1604, Smith and Camallata joined a trade caravan to Moscow, where Smith was virtually held captive by Gudonov's xenophobia. John asked Camallata to return to England with him as his wife, but she demurred. Capt. Smith set off for the west, alone, only to find a universal peace had been declared.

The wandering adventurer finally caught up with Sigismund in Leipzig, where he was hailed as a hero, wined and dined, presented with a coat of arms, bags of gold, and a passport good throughout Europe. John began a leisurely tour of Christendom which took him through Italy, France and Spain, culminating in Cadiz in the summer of 1605.

It was there that John Smith took ship with eight retainers on a Spanish privateer under a Captain Cordoba. In September the ship arrived in El Araish, where the pasha Mahomet ben Arif, lived in the fortress, along with his family and their slaves, including Elizabeth Rondee. Dressed as a great lord, and surrounded by his attendants, all wrapped in heavy furs, Smith informed the harbormaster that he had brought gifts for the pasha, and wished to pay his respects.

When brought before Mahomet, Smith continued the charade, offering the pasha an expensive ring, and singing his praise in Turkish. After the usual amenities, John turned the talk around to slaves, and remarked that he'd heard the pasha actually had a blond waitingservant, but that he didn't believe such fables. With more encouragement, Mahomet was lured into calling for Elizabeth. John engaged he in conversation in English, and the pasha, guessing something was up, rose to call the guard. Smith immediately dispatched him, and John's entourage threw off their furs, exposing their armor and weapons, and quickly overcame the guards.

After a slapstick chase scene, Smith managed to escape with the loss of only one man, and Elizabeth was carried back to Cadiz in the arms of her savior. The pair eventually found their way to England on a Portuguese bark, creating a sensation upon their arrival. Capt. John was the toast of the town in London, and proceeded to mix with the royals and other who's whos. His gifts of charming and affronting people were on full display, and when the London Company was chartered by King James under the guidance of Hakluyt, Smith was easily enrolled among the gentlemen adventurers who would sail to Virginia. When the SUSAN CONSTANT sighted land, on April 27, 1607, Captain John Smith was all of 26 years old.

If that isn't enough gist for a great movie, what is? By the time of the Virginia experiment Capt. John Smith was a trained leader of men in adversity, used to living rough and fighting against unorthodox foes with any weapons, in addition to being a master linguist and cartographer. The necessary man of the hour. I can thank THE GREAT ROGUE, by Paul Lewis, for much of this tale, and I recommend you to Smith's own writings as the first and foremost examples of American public relations. Not only did Smith invent the name New England, to lure colonists, but he was the first to advertise these shores as the place that anyman could rise to his true estate. A hero for everyman.

Herb has followed his star, without deviation, since 1946, and is now one of this country's foremost portraitists. Considering that portrait painting was the first American art form, and along with abstract expressionism, modern dance, movies, blues and jazz, is still the most American of arts, that puts Herb up there with the Duke and Miles. It was a joy to go give the carving to Herb, one of my masters.