CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

With reproductions of old prints and maps and many quotations from documentary sources this has the antiquarian aura of Kurtz' life of John and Sebastian Cabot (1973). It also engages readers directly in the longstanding debate about Captain Smith--a man one scholar called ""one of those persons about whom historians are apt to lose their tempers"": was he a great adventurer and leader or merely a great liar? Kurtz leans toward the contemporary view that there must have been a good deal of truth behind Smith's True Travels and sifts fact from legend without snuffing out the romance of a personality who stands out from the often shabby chronicle of Jamestown's early years.