1. This is the ware wherein consists my wealth;

2. And thus methinks should men of judgment frame

3. Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade,

4. And as their wealth increaseth, so enclose

5. Infinite riches in a little room.

6. Richard Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)

In the year 1616, with England’s first attempts at colonizing the American mainland mired in uncertain infancy, the Elizabethan-Jacobean adventurer Captain John Smith presented to the “Right Honourable and worthy Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen, of his Majesties Councell, for all Plantations and discoveries” and as well to “the Right Worshipfull Adventurers for the Countrey of New England, in the Cities of London, Bristow, Exceter, Plimouth … and in all other Cities and Ports, in the Kingdome of England” what he was pleased to call a “rude discourse,” entitled A Description of New England: Or the Observations, and discoueries, of Captain Iohn Smith (Admirall of that Country) in the North of America, in the year of our Lord 1614. His purpose was to put beyond doubt “the present benefit this Countrey affoords.”

By 1616, Smith had already proven himself an adept chronicler of early English colonizing. His True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate, as hath hapned in Virginia, since the first planting of that Collony, published in 1608, had set down the original narrative of the first chaotic months of the Jamestown expedition. In 1612, he had embellished greatly upon the True Relation in his more extensive A Map of Virginia and his Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia. Later works would gather all Smith’s North American narratives into a Generall Historie (1624), and add an account of his early life and adventures as a soldier of fortune in Europe, Asia, and North Africa – The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain Iohn Smith (1630).