John Smith

(c. 1580 - 1631)

After fighting for Austrian forces against the Ottoman Empire in the early 1600s, John Smith at the age of twenty-six set sail for the New World in 1606. He arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in 1607. Becoming president of the Jamestown Colony the next year, he dramatically reduced the settlement’s high death rates, instituting the domestic policy that “He that will not work shall not eat.” He returned to England in 1609, injured after his powder bag caught on fire. His detailed writings and maps of Virginia and New England accompanied the Mayflower’s passengers on their 1620 journey to the New World.