Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletri.rtic .
with good summes for their extraordinary expences; also privileges for
Cities; Charters for corporation, Universities, Free-schools, and Glebeland;
putting all those in practice before there were either people, students,
or schollers to build or use them, or provision or victuall to feed them
were then there.60
In a vivid account of seizing from the natives the food necessary to avoid
starvation, in the Generall Historie he writes with the wry irony he em­
ployed upon occasion to enhance his own heroic actions, and there is
strong satire and bitter irony in the righteous indignation of Smith's already
quoted letter to Company officials back home. In another place he is dev­
astating in his comments on the insatiable seekers after gold, who dug,
washed, and refined all the river bottom soil they could until "one mad
fellow [a wag] desired to bee buried in the sandes, least they should by
their art make gold of his bones." 61
Thus the Captain suggests the tall tale, in the fish-frying pan episode
and other places, and employs several forms of irony and satire in pre­
senting men and events when the relationships between humans and action
are disproportionate or discordant. Smith's humor may be for us wildly
comic in places, as Jones suggests, but in most instances the situation de­
scribed was not comic at all for him. He does tell us that Indians laughed
and made jokes, but there is an underlying assumption that all the mirth
was a sinister cover for evil designs. The scene of Powhatan's regalia
being presented and of the bearing down on the old chieftain or the physi­
cal pressure necessary to make him bow low enough to receive the copper
crown upon his head was meant to be amusing, but Smith never fails to
point out the potential dire consequences to the English of such hollow flat­
tery. Smith's was a real sense of humor, but on the whole from his first to
his final writing it is essentially grim.
The half-educated Henry Spelman, who wrote of his boyhood among the
red men of Smith's time, shows his personal sense of humor in his depiction
of a battle between two tribes. He believed it was principally "Howlinge
and Howbabab," and concludes with the dry "Ther was no greater slawter
of nether side." 62 A decade later, in the Yeardley-Wyatt years of governorship,
there are further evidences of some form of humor in the communications
sent to London. The letter writer and reputed wit John Pory
was not merely promoting colonization when he declared,
Nowe that your lordship may knowe, we are not the veriest beggers in the
worlde, our Cowe-keeper here of James citty on Sundayes goes acowtered
all in freshe flaming silkes and a wife of one that in England had professed
the black arte not of a scholler but of a collier of Croydon, weares
her rough bever hatt with a faire perle hattband, and a silken suit therto
correspondent.
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