Besides these qualities Smith had others which marked him out as a natural leader of men. His impulsiveness and plain speaking, as well as his rigid enforcement of discipline, made him some bitter enemies, but his comrades in general spoke of him in terms of strong admiration and devotion. His nature was essentially noble, and his own words bear witness to it, as in the following exhortation: "Seeing we are not born for ourselves, but each to help other, and our abilities are much alike at the hour of our birth and the minute of our death; seeing our good deeds and our bad, by faith in Christ's merits, is all we have to carry our souls to heaven or to hell; seeing honour is our lives' ambition, and our ambition after death to have an honourable memory of our life; and seeing by no means we would be abated of the dignities and glories of our predecessors, let us imitate their virtues to be worthily their successors." So wrote the man of whom Thomas Fuller quaintly said that he had "a prince's heart in a beggar's purse," and to whom one of his comrades, a survivor of the Starving Time, afterward paid this touching tribute: "Thus we lost him that in all our proceedings made justice his first guide, ... ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers; that never allowed more for himself than his soldiers with him; that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead them himself; that would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us; that would rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay; that loved action more than words, and hated falsehood and covetousness worse than death; whose adventures were our lives and whose loss our deaths."[81]
[Sidenote: But for Smith the colony would probably have perished.]
It is, indeed, in all probability true that losing Smith was the chief cause of the horrors of the Starving Time. The colony was not ill supplied when he left it, in October, 1609, for the stock of hogs had increased to about 600, and the Third Supply had brought sheep and goats as well as horses. All this advantage had been destroyed by the active hostility of the Indians, which was due to the outrageous conduct of white ruffians whom Smith would have restrained or punished. But for this man's superb courage and resourcefulness, one can hardly believe that the colony would have lasted until 1609. More likely it would have perished in one of the earlier seasons of sore trial. It would have succumbed like Lane's colony, and White's, and Popham's; one more would have been added to the sickening list of failures, and the hopes built upon Virginia in England would have been sadly dashed. The utmost ingenuity on the part of Smith's detractors can never do away with the fact that his personal qualities did more than anything else to prevent such a direful calamity; and for this reason he will always remain a great and commanding figure in American history.
