Note 1 — Chapter VIII · ST. KITTS AND THE GORGEOUS ISLE

From all of which it will be gathered that our hero of Pocahontas fame was an adventurer of many parts in divers lands, and that his activities in Virginia were but minor incidents in his romantic career. In fact, for a space, Smith was something of a pirate himself, judged by our standards at least, and his accounts of sea battles and prizes taken are fascinatingly quaint. Of St. Kitts, too, he has much to say, and he gives us more of an insight into the troubles and tribulations of the first settlers on this “fayre islant” than any other writer. Aside from raids by the man-eating Caribs, being harassed by pirates, and constant quarrels with the French, the early English settlers seem to have had a most unfortunate experience with hurricanes, which Smith naïvely explains are “overgrowne and most monstrous stormes.” Indeed, the very year of its settlement by the English, 1623, a hurricane swept the island and wiped out the settlers’ gardens, their tobacco-fields, their houses, and their fort. Hardly had they recovered from this when, in September, 1625, another hurricane hurled itself upon the island. This was even worse than its predecessor of two years before, and Smith states that, in addition to blowing down all the houses, the tobacco, and “two drums into the air we know not wither,” it also “drove two ships on shore, that were both split.” He adds: “All our provisions thus lost we were very miserable, living only on what we could get in the wild woods.… Thus we continued till near June that the Tortels came in, 1627.” Six months later the colonists were once more made homeless through a hurricane, and until the end of the narrative hurricane followed hurricane.1