ABSENTEE GOVERNMENT, THE ABSURD FRONTIER, AND THE LAUGHABLE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN IDENTITY; OR, THE TWICE-TOLD FISH TALE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

Thomas J. Haslam

I may be accused of a lack of seriousness in offering Captain John Smith as a writer of American humor. After all, Smith wrote his self-promoting histories roughly a century and a half before the American Revolution. Common sense and William Spengemann almost compel one to admit that these "Histories" simply were not works of humor, and that Smith himself can not legitimately be considered an American author.¹ Further still, one could polemically observe, the Turner-Smith "frontier" approach to American studies has been thoroughly discredited and Studies in American Humor does not exist to serve as a forum and shelter for unreconstructed Americanists much like myself. On that last point at least, I completely agree. But the twice-told fish tale of Captain John Smith deserves a second—or is it third?-hearing on three counts: first, on its own merit as a good and funny story about "The Accidents that hapned in the Discovery of the Bay of Chisapeack"; second, because it employs motifs and tactics that are deemed typical (if not definitive) of an important subgenre of American humor-the humor of the Old Southwest; and third, because Smith’s tale displays an internalized ironic dialogue about colonial identity.² This ironic dialogue writ large, I shall argue, characterized the British colonial mind and condition. Quite simply, the colonists laughed their ways to an American identity and nation-although the jokes were often both tragic and self-referential.³ Smith’s twice-told fish tale provides an early—arguably, the first-illustration of how humor proved not peripheral but essential to the quest and contest for, and yes, the conquest of, America.

I should warn you that the small differences between Smith’s first telling of "The Accidents that hapned in the Discovery of the Bay of Chisapeack," in The Proceedings of the Virginia Company (1608), and his second telling in The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), have provoked scholars like Charles Deane and Henry Adams into fits of rage and glee carefully documented in essays of slanderous intent and sardonic splendor.⁴ Likewise, when Adams objectively noted in a letter to Deane that "Smith’s later works are filled with lies; his earlier

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ones with misrepresentations" (560), he was but articulating what would become the new consensus. The twice-told fish tale would seem to provide adequate grist for Adams’s mill. In the 1608 version, for example, Smith and crew ventured out in "an open barge of two tunnes burthen" (224) and were soon enough thereafter "conducted by two Salvages up a little bayed creek"

to where all the woods were laided with Ambuscadoes to the number of 3 or 400 Salvages, so strangely painted, grimed, and disguised, showting, yelling, and crying, as we supposed them so many divels. (227)

In the 1624 version, we are better informed that Smith and crew ventured out in "an open barge of neare three tuns burthen" (163) and were soon enough thereafter conducted by two Salvages up the same now proverbial creek to

where all the woods were layd with ambuscado’s to the number of three or four thousand Salvages, so strangely paynted, grimed, and disguised, showting, yelling, and crying as so many spirits from hell could not have shewed more terrible. (166)

Details, details. We may question Smith’s veracity—and why not? Doing so seems both a pastime and ritual for American scholars. Henry Adams again, for example, "fleshed his maiden sword" in an attempt to debunk Smith (Letters 521). And although Philip Barbour and a horde of specialists have time and time again affirmed the basic veracity of Smith’s accounts concerning exotic people and places, Smith remains for us a braggart and yarnspinner.⁵ The truth in either case is not my concern. What’s a few thousand Salvages among friends? This fish tale improved with age—and thus the second of the twice told, the account in The Generall Historie of Virginia, is our text of record.

A history of the Virginia Company’s disastrous struggles to colonize and conquer might seem a strange text to turn to for humor. Surely, one may object, the laughs are inadvertent and adventitious; wit must be in an author’s intentions, not a reader’s responses. Yet humor is often founded on incongruity; it requires as well as reveals a breach between expectation and actuality. The fiasco that was Jamestown supplied ghastly incongruities enough. A humorist by necessity of being a realist, Smith recorded the differences between what the Virginia Company intended and what they accomplished, between what they desired and how that desire was consummated. "The idea of America," Michael Kammen observes, "as El Dorado and Paradise, surfaced before the fact of America, prior to colonization, and thereby conditioned the form the ‘facts’ would take, and even what people would make of them" (9). One form the facts would take—one way the truth would be both depicted and displaced—is that America would be made into a joke. Smith, in the upper half of his fish tale, describes a detour up the river "Quiyough" after the rumor of a mountain laden with mines of silver or gold or both. The joke, as we shall see, was on the Virginia Company’s larger misallocation

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of personnel and resources. But in order to get the punch-line, one must first complicitly partake in the set-up.

On 10 April 1608, less than two months before Smith’s 1 June 1608 exploration of the Chesapeake, his former colleague and rival Captain Christopher Newport had left for England on a ship loaded with "gilded dirt" as well as a handful of "fed-up" colonists (Barbour 184). Since the colonists, via the Company Charter, were entitled to "four fifths of the profits on any [gold] that might be found," many chose to neglect such mundane matters as planting crops, digging fortifications, and building houses in order to get rich quick and get out (Barbour 186). But the alleged precious ore turned out to be worthless; it was most likely iron pyrite, or "fool’s gold," a fairly common mineral deposit. Smith, disdaining to quest for his fair share of four fifths of nothing, repeatedly argued that the wealth of Virginia was the quality of life that it might afford an emigrant English people committed to the labor of establishing a permanent settlement.⁶ His detour up the river "Quiyough" serves just such a polemic purpose. Deriding the sight of "claie sand so mingled with yeallow spangles as if it had been halfe-pin dust," and remarking that all the previous presumably precious metals that the colonists discovered "proved of no value" (167), Smith asserts for himself and crew (168):

Of mines we were all ignorant, but a few Beavers, Otters, Beares, Martins and minke [skins] we found, and in divers places that aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads aboue the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving among them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found its bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety of small fish, had any ofus ever seen in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.

Roughly a century a and half later, in his splendidly ironic "Information to those that would remove to America," Benjamin Franklin remarked: "American is the land of labor, and by no means what the English call Lubberland, and the French Pays de Cocagne, where the streets are said to be pav’d with half-peck Loaves, the Houses til’d with Pancakes, and where the fowls fly about ready roasted, crying "Come eat me!" (607). Nor is America El Dorado, the land of gold; nor do the fish leap into the frying pans, fillet themselves, etc.

Yet there is a more subtle and even tragic suggestion to Smith’s observation that a frying pan is "a bad instrument to catch fish with." It proved a bit of prophecy as well as a devastating critique of the Virginia Company. Smith wryly recorded that himself and crew were literally starving in the midst of a proverbial land of plenty. But so were the colonists that remained at Jamestown; and the settlement would continue to do so. Consider Jamestown in the winter of 1609-10, a year after Smith’s exploration of the Chesapeake and months after his departure from the colony. As Edmund Morgan comments:

It is tree planting seasons since the colony began. The settlers have fallen into

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an uneasy truce with the Indians, punctuated by guerilla raids on both sides, but they had plenty of time in which they could have grown crops. They have obtained corn from the Indians and supplies from England. They have firearms. Game abounds in the woods; and Virginia’s rivers are filled with sturgeon in the summer and covered with geese and ducks in the winter. There are five hundred people in the colony now. And they are starving. They scour the woods listlessly for nuts, roots, berries. And they offer the only authentic examples of cannibalism witnessed in Virginia. One provident man chops up his wife and salts down the pieces. Others dig up graves to eat the corpses. By spring only sixty are left alive. (72-3)

In so many ways, the Virginia Company proved horrifically unprepared to meet the demands of maintaining a settlement in America. Worse, however, was their overall failure to adapt and adjust to the new environment: a failure that Smith repeatedly castigated and lamented, and one that was due more to ideological limitations than any other factor.⁷ Indeed and as a result, Smith’s fish tale relates not merely the accidents of discovery but also an account of a deliberate insurgency against a deleterious status quo.

It was because of the ruinous effect that the "prodigalitie of the President ..and his Parasites" was having on the settlement in terms of both material and moral dissipation, that Smith and crew undertook to explore the Chesapeake Bay and refurbish the Company’s supplies (162). And upon their triumphant return, Smith and crew found

the last Supply were all sicke, the rest some lame, some brusied, all unable to do anything but complaine of the pride and unreasonable needlesse crueltie of the silly President, that had riotously consumed the store: and to fulfill his follies about building him an unnecessary building for his pleasures in the woods, had brought them all to that misery. (169)

The upshot was that Smith deposed President Ratcliffe and "substituted Master Scrivener his deare friend in the Presidency" (169); indeed, the fish tale ends with an account of this fortuitous revolution in Virginia. But the moral for Americanists is that adversarial—or at best, absentee—government existed from the very start. As proud, ignorant, and incompetent appointed officials in Virginia maintained their status and privileges at the hazard of their charges, as many of the colonists themselves refused to cooperate with the indigenous people and thus died of needless starvation, as scheme after well-concocted scheme for quick success and reward, for the riches of El Dorado, panned out into a fool’s gold of cruel loss and disillusionment, the fish that were "not to be caught in frying pans" (168) swam safely beyond the reach of such ideological imperatives and imperial fantasies concerning class and custom, power and privilege. But if a frying pan is a poor instrument to catch fish with, one might do better with a sword. After describing how on the homeward part of their journey, the barge chanced to "grownd upon a many sholes lying in the entrances" of the Raphanock river, Smith observes:

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We spyed many fishes lurking in the reeds: our Captaine sporting himselfe by nayling them to the growd with his sword, set us all fishing in that manner: thus we tooke more in owne houre than we could eat in a day. (168)

Please notice that the fish were "lurking in the reeds"; although flounders and the like may seem harmless, this would prove another ambuscado. As Smith records

But it chansed our Captain taking a fish from his sword (not knowing her condition)being much of the fashion of a Thomback, but along tayle like aryding rodde, whereon the middest is a most poysoned sting, of two or three inches long, bearded like a saw on each side, which she strucke into the wrest of his arme neere an inch and a halfe: no bloud nor wound was scene, but a little blew spot, but the torment was so instantly extreame, that in four hours had swolen his hand, arme and shoulder, we all with much sorrow concluded his funerall, and prepared his grave in an Island by, as himselfe directed. (168)

Perhaps Smith was careless. He began fishing rather serendipitously by merely "sporting himselfe"; after a short while, he and the crew already had more fish than they could use. Certainly Smith was ignorant ("not knowing her condition") (168). Either quality, carelessness or ignorance, may prove fatal when combined with the use of force. The "accident" as so related is a neat little parable implying certain limits to imperialism: Smith’s right to possess and wield a sword, an indication of his military status and social rank among the colonists, affirms nothing about his success or failure in the wilderness. The anecdotal "accident" is also a delightful self-satire: Captain John Smith, a self-proclaimed great warrior of Christendom, almost done in by a stuck, gasping fish.

Naturally, Smith did recover a few hours later to "eate of the fish to his supper, which gave no lesse joy and content to us then ease to himselfe, for which we called the Island Stingray Isle after the name of the fish" (168-9). There may be a moral satisfaction in eating the fish that stung you, but the relation of Smith’s recovery (and subsequent retribution) shades into myth: it is a tale of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ on the frontier. Transformed by experience, the old and ignorant Smith gives way to the new and informed Smith. Such a process is brought into relief by the irony common to both fish accidents. Irony conveys a sense of doubleness, and yet a kind of superiority. It results from a detached involvement: the ability to joke about or distance one’s self from one’s circumstances. Smith, of course, knew that fish could not be caught in a frying pan, and the stingray incident must have been embarrassing. What I think we must understand as Smith’s self-reflective irony casts the tritely familiar frontier ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ motif in a new light: to laugh at yourself, you need in an obvious and unproblematic sense to be two people—one to do the laughing, one to be laughed at. The fool being laughed at is the old "English" self; the self doing the laughing, neither quite an English nor an "inferior" colonial. Smith nails the lesson home with a fine poetic touch, naming the island of ‘death and rebirth’ "Stingray Isle": it kept the incident as a

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moral exemplum in circulation among his fellow colonists.

The fishy incidents in this tale, those concerning a frying pan and a sword, are framed in Smith’s narrative by two other comic "accidents." During the voyage out from Jamestown and up the bay, Smith reports that

in crossing over from the maine to the other Isles, we discovered the winde and waters so much increased with thunder, lightning, and raine, that our mast and sayle blew overbord and such mighty waves overracked us in that small barge that with great labour we kept her from sinking by freeing out the water. Two dayes we were inforced to inhabite these uninhabited Isles; which for the extremitie of gusts, thunder, raine, stormes, and ill wetherwe called Limbo. (164)

Smith’s editor, Philip Barbour, suggests that Smith may have wanted Hades or Hell but decorum forbade (164). Perhaps. But Limbo suggests not merely a place or state of unpleasant confinement or neglect; Limbo also implies an intermediate or undeterminable state or place, a time or area of transition. Either way, Hades or Limbo, the allusion lends an epic aspect to Smith’s account of this joumey between two strange worlds—the world of Smith and his fellow Englishmen and the world of the native American people. Occurring during the homeward part of the exploration, the second "accident" that closes the comic frame of Smith’s fish tale describes just such an encounter. It is good to be shifty in a new country; or, as Smith tells it:

The Simple Salvages seeing our Captaine hurt, and an other bloudly by breaking his shinne, our number of bowes, arrowes, swords, mantles, and furrs, would needes imagine we had beene at warres (the truth of these accidents would not satisfie them) but impatiently importuned us to know with whom. Finding their aptnesse to beleeve we fayled not (as a great secret) to tell them any thing that might affright them, what spoyle we had got and made of the Massawomecks. This rumor went faster up the river than our barge. (169)

Smith’s relaxed and pragmatic attitude towards the "truth of these accidents" anticipates literary con men like Simon Suggs and various heroes of both American folk and fake lore. There is a touch of wit, at least, in Smith’s honest admission that he is a good liar.

The rumor that "went faster up the river" than Smith’s barge has had more resonance than he—or anyone else—could possibly have anticipated. I will neither repeat here nor attempt to sum the various—and by now, standard— arguments made by Robert D. Arner, Richard Beale Davis, Thomas M. Inge, J. A. Leo Lemay, and Louis P. Simpson concerning Smith’s affinities with later writing of the South. But I think it worth adding that the humor of Smith’s account reveals that some colonists, even while in the midst of it all, are becoming detached from

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one way of life and engaged to another: they are to some degree being transformed or perhaps reformed by the frontier experience. To be sure, it is a shop-worn truism that the initial survival of a colonial settlement required that its members alter some of their deeply held beliefs, values, and habits. These changes were most often slight and quite readily assimilated back into English ways. Yet the very adherence to English ways created an ironic dialectic between the colonial imitators and their trans-Atlantic models. Attempts to establish ordinary conditions of life in Virginia took place under extraordinary circumstances and were successful—when at all—by extraordinary means. The Virginian imitations necessarily entailed and incorporated innovations; implicitly and explicitly, these colonial institutions often revised or overturned their imported English precedents.

This paradox of Anglicanization, which manifested itself often in the very attempt of colonists to remain citizens in good standing of the British empire, pervaded the colonies as a whole.⁸ Bernard Bailyn has observed

To a Virginia Planter of the early eighteenth century the highest public authority was no longer merely one expression of a general social authority. It had become something abstract, external to his life and society, an ultimate power whose purposes were obscure, whose direction could neither be consistently influenced nor accurately plotted, and whose human embodiments were alien and antagonistic. (229)

To varying degrees, the same could be said for the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies. And yet absentee government began at home; to recall another well-known story, as the rift between the colonial periphery and the British center widened, many appointed authorities were seen as mere opportunists, as arbitrary and ineffective leaders, dislocated from and inadequate to the local needs and opportunities. Smith’s President Rateliffe may serve as an early precedent; Smith’s fishy insurgency, a shadowy type of the antitypical Revolution to come.

I began this essay by asserting that Smith’s twice-told fish tale provides an early—arguably, the first-illustration of how humor proved not peripheral but essential to the quest and contest for, and yes, the conquest of, America as a New World order. The humor of Smith’s history, the internalized, disjunctive, and ironic dialogue between the English servant of empire and the all-too-knowing colonist, shows that questions of identity and loyalty were up for grabs from the very start. In both living and telling his story, Smith participated in and contributed towards an enduring ideal (and perhaps ideology) of America as a promised land, a place where self-creation and social hope were possibilities to be lived and realized. But Smith also offered a critique of the same ideal, in relating both the tragic and absurd incongruities that it could and did produce. Replete with action and adventure, treachery and intrigue, and fish that won’t leap into frying pans but will attack men armed with swords, Smith’s true imperial confession describes the

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exploration of a vast, strange bay charted by islands of transformation like Limbo and Stingray, the wanderings on a land fraught with wars and the delusions of war, and the safe return home by and with strange rumors that travel fast and strong as the rivers themselves, Yet throughout it all: a sense of humor as the old gives way to the new through the grim criticism of experience. We have finally, then, the twice-told fish tale of Captain John Smith: a story that in some sense is our story, the ironic genius and genesis of an American people.

University of Delaware

Notes

   ¹See especially Spengemann’s essays "What is American Literature?" (7-27), "Discovering the Literature of British America" (28-44). and "American Things/Literary Things: The Problem of American Literary History"(143- 165) as collected in his A Mirror for Americanists.
   ²I am in debt here to Lewis P. Simpson’s classic study "The Act of Thought in Virginia, "although I understand the internalized "progressive subjectification of history in the individual consciousness" more as an historically conditioned ironic dialogue than a Hegelian synthesis (256).
   ³I am in complete disagreement with Robert Micklus’s thesis that the lack of critical self-reference was the defining characteristic of colonial humor until the mid-eighteenth century when "sophisticated humorists" like Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin "learned the art of self-humor by reading such British authors as Addison, Fielding, Gay, and Swift" (152). Rather, I am presenting a claim similar to that of Leo Lemay, who finds a critical self-referential humor in "New England’s Annoyances, "a colonial folk song circa 1643, and argues such humor proved essential to the formation of an "American" identity (New England’s Annoyances, passim).
   ⁴For a gloss of Henry Adams’s debt to Charles Deane, and their related attacks on Smith, see Edward Chalfant (218-9).
   ⁵For a start, see the works by Barbour, Laura Polanyi Striker, and Bradford Smith listed in the bibliography.
   ⁶See Leo Lemay, "Captain John Smith: American(?)" (289-294), for Smith’s vision of Virginia’s future.
   ⁷For a terse summary of Smith’s ideological differences with the other officers in the Virginia Company, see Leo Lemay’s "The Voice of Captain John Smith" (116-123).
   ⁸The best single succinct statement of the Anglicanization thesis is John M. Murrin’s essay "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity" (full citation in bib.). The qualification I introduce should not be ascribed to Murrin or any other historians who emphasize understanding the colonies of British America in the context of a North Atlantic Community rather than the traditional American studies approach which begins with Fredrick Jackson Turner and perhaps reaches its apogee in Henry Nash Smith.

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. "Captain John Smith," North American Review CIV (1867): 1-30.
_____. The Letters of Henry Adams. Volume 1: 1858-1868. Eds. J. C. Levenson et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.

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Arner, Robert D. "John Smith, the ‘Starving Time,’ and the Genesis of Southern Humor: Variations on a Theme." Louisiana Studies 12 (1973):  383-90.
Bailyn, Bernard. "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia." Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development. 3rd ed. Eds. Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1983. 207-230.
Barbour, Philip L. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964. Chalfant, Edward, ed. Sketches for the North    American Review by Henry Adams. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986.
Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South. 1585-1763. Vol. 1. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 68-74.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Albert H. Smith. Vol. 8. New York: Macmillan Co., 1907. 607.
Inge, M. Thomas. "Introduction." The Frontier Humorists. Critical Views. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975. 1-14.
Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins ofAmerican Civilization. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Lemay, J. A. Leo. "Captain John Smith: American?" Studies in English MS. 5 (1984-87): 288-296.
_____. "The Voice of Captain John Smith." The Southern Literary Journal. 20.1 (1987): 113-131.
_____. ‘New England ‘s Annoyances’: America ‘s First Folk Song. Newark, DE: University of DelawarePress, 1985.
Micklus, Robert. "Colonial Humor: Beginning with the Butt." Critical Essays on American Humor. Eds. William Clark and W. Craig Turner.            Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986. 139-154.
Murrin, John. "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity." Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and        American National Identity. Eds. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II. Chapell Hill, NC: University of North Carolina           Press, 1987. 333-348.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: Norton, 1975.
Simpson, Lewis P. "The Act of Thought in Virginia." EAL 14.3 (1979): 253-268.
Smith, Bradford. Captain John Smith: His Life and Legend. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953.
Smith, John. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith 3 vols. Ed. Phillip Barbour. Chapell Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Spengemann, William C. A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of  New          England, 1989.
Striker, Laura Polanyi and Bradford Smith. "The Rehabilitation of Captain John Smith." Journal of Southern History. XXVIII (1962): 474-481.

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