He fought and beheaded three Turkish commanders in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He was captured by pirates?twice?and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved seconds before the noose dropped over his head. And all this happened before he was 30 years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas and how she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown Colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest?and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too, so reputed for his truculence that the pilgrims of the Mayflower snubbed him when he offered them his services, though his 1614 map of New England (which he named) made him the unrivaled expert on America. Now, in the first major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook traces the adventurer’s astonishing exploits across three continents, testing Smith’s claimed biography against the historical and geographical reality on the ground. A Man Most Driven delivers an enlightening dissection of this mythology-making man and the invention of America.
