John Smith Escapes Again! By Rosalyn Schanzer is a great introduction for the elementary and middle school crowd to one of the most astonishing figures from early American history. Most Americans have only read his name in a line or two about the founding of Jamestown, or because he’s been a figure in a Disney movie which featured Pocahontas. A few of us can tell you of his miraculous escape from being executed by the Indians when the Indian princess intervened to deflect the wrath of her father, Chief Powhatan. But that story is only one of a dozen escapes from the colorful life of John Smith. He escaped from a dull life as a clerk in England by running away to sea. He escaped kidnapping, robbery, & shipwreck on his way to fight the Spanish in the Netherlands. He escaped drowning and death a second time by joining pirates while on his way to fight the Turks. He escaped capture and slavery when he was captured in battle and sold to a Tartar chieftain in central Asia. Facing Powhatan and the Indians in Virginia was easy compared to what he’d already been through! The story of John Smith & Pocahontas is retold in great detail and constitutes the bulk of the book (24 out of 64 pages), but it’s all the more enjoyable and we are able to appreciate the resourcefulness of Captain John Smith knowing of all his earlier adventures.
Why don’t we know more of John Smith’s story? The author gives the answer in a lengthy note at the end. During the Civil War, Henry Adams wrote a piece of war propaganda attacking Smith and branding him a liar and a braggart. It’s taken a hundred and forty years for his reputation to recover, but over the past few decades scholars have re-examined the record and confirmed almost all the details of Smith’s miraculous chain of escapes (most of which we know about only from Smith’s autobiography). Schantzer has done 14 books for young people, including another recent Greenleaf pick, George vs. George. This is an excellent introduction to colonial history for young people. John Smith Escapes Again!
Is a 64 page hardback, available directly from Greenleaf Press for $16.95.
Daniel Boone’s Great Escape by Michael P. Spradlin is an equally delightful tale of one of the great heroes of American Colonial history. 170 years after Captain John Smith, another explorer had an equally hair-raising adventure involving capture by the Indians, the threat of execution, and a daring escape. In 1778, during the American Revolutionary War, Boone was leading a group of hunters and settlers over the mountains, in the wilds of Kentucky. Taken captive by the Indians and carried off hundreds of miles, north of the Ohio river, he bides his time and prepares for a daring escape attempt. When he hears the Indians planning an attack on the settlement where his wife, children and grandchildren were living, he knows he must act. Swimming the Ohio River, and covering 160 miles in four days, he is able to elude the Indian braves pursuing him and reach the settlement of Boonesborough in time to warn them – saving them from being killed. The whole adventure is reported in his autobiography in only one sentence: “On the 16th, before sunrise, I departed in the most secret manner and arrived at Boonesborough on the 20th, after a journey of one hundred and sixty miles, during which I had but one meal.”
Spradlin’s simple text tells a vivid and exciting story. The illustrations by Ard Hoyt catch the movement, tension, and danger of the four-day chase through the woods and the joyful reunion at the end. Daniel Boone’s Great Escape
is a 32 pages hardback, available directly from Greenleaf Press for $16.95.
– Rob Shearer, Publisher
Greenleaf Press