A Man Most Driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America

He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smiths life.

Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smiths 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. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, Englands arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.