"Much
they blamed us [he writes] for not converting the Salvages, when
those they sent us were little better, if not worse, nor did they all
convert any of those we sent them to England for that purpose."
Captain John Smith died unmarried, nor is there any record that he
ever had wife or children. This disposes of the claim of subsequent
John Smiths to be descended from him. He was the last of that race;
the others are imitations. He was wedded to glory. That he was not
insensible to the charms of female beauty, and to the heavenly pity
in their hearts, which is their chief grace, his writings abundantly
evince; but to taste the pleasures of dangerous adventure, to learn
war and to pick up his living with his sword, and to fight wherever
piety showed recompense would follow, was the passion of his youth,
while his manhood was given to the arduous ambition of enlarging the
domains of England and enrolling his name among those heroes who make
an ineffaceable impression upon their age. There was no time in his
life when he had leisure to marry, or when it would have been
consistent with his schemes to have tied himself to a home.
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