SeacoastNH.com Presents
Historic Portsmouth #329  

In four years New England will be celebrating the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of Capt. John Smith. It should be a really big deal since it was Smith who gave this region its name, and rid us of our previous designation as “Northern Virginia.” For that alone we Yankees owe him big time. (Continued below)

Smith toured this region in 1614 and named the Isles of Shoals “Smith Isles” after himself. That name didn’t stick. Smith then made a number of failed attempts to launch a colony right here. His famous map of New England helped launch a new wave of colonization beginning in 1620. He died in 1631 just as Strawberry Bank was fully established as NH’s first permanent settlement. So technically, if you believe Smith’s own account of Jamestown, Virginia, we owe much of our own history to Pocahontas. The teenaged Indian, legend says, prevented her father from crushing Smith’s head with a rock in 1607. Historians hotly debate the authenticity of the Pocahontas story, along with much of Smith’s writing. But the fact remains that John Smith was a key promoter of English colonization in America. Had his colony succeeded, we might be living in Smithsonia. (Image courtesy of SeacoastNH.com collection)  

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