To the living Memory of his deceased Friend, Captaine John Smith, who departed this mortall life on the 21 day of June, 1631, with his Armes, and this Motto,Accordamus, vincere est vivere.
Here lies one conquer'd that hath conquer'd Kings, Subdu'd large Territories, and done things Which to the World impossible would seeme, But that the truth is held in more esteeme, Shall I report His former service done In honour of his God and Christendome:
How that he did divide from Pagans three, Their heads and Lives, types of his chivalry:
For which great service in that Climate done, Brave Sigismundus (King of Hungarion)Did give him as a Coat of Armes to weare, Those conquer'd heads got by his Sword and Speare?
Or shall I tell of his adventures since, Done in Firginia, that large Continence:
I-low that he subdu'd Kings unto his yoke, And made those heathen flie, as wind doth smoke:
And made their Land, being of so large a Station, A hab;tation for our Christian Nation:
Where God is glorifi'd, their wants suppli'd, Which else for necessaries might have di'd?
But what avails his Conquest now he lyes Inter'd in earth a prey for Wormes & Flies?
O may his soule in sweet Mizium sleepe, Untill the Keeper that all soules doth keepe, Returne to judgement and that after thence, With Angels he may have his recompence.
Captaine John Smith, sometime Governour of Firginia, and Admirall of New England.
This remarkable epitaph is such an autobiographical record as Smith might have written himself.That it was engraved upon a tablet and set up in this church rests entirely upon the authority of Stow.The present pilgrim to the old church will find no memorial that Smith was buried there, and will encounter besides incredulity of the tradition that he ever rested there.
The old church of St.Sepulcher's, formerly at the confluence of Snow Hill and the Old Bailey, now lifts its head far above the pompous viaduct which spans the valley along which the Fleet Ditch once flowed.All the registers of burial in the church were destroyed by the great fire of 1666, which burnt down the edifice from floor to roof, leaving only the walls and tower standing.Mr.Charles Deane, whose lively interest in Smith led him recently to pay a visit to St.
Sepulcher's, speaks of it as the church "under the pavement of which the remains of our hero were buried; but he was not able to see the stone placed over those remains, as the floor of the church at that time was covered with a carpet....The epitaph to his memory, however, it is understood, cannot now be deciphered upon the tablet,"--which he supposes to be the one in Stow.
The existing tablet is a slab of bluish-black marble, which formerly was in the chancel.That it in no way relates to Captain Smith a near examination of it shows.This slab has an escutcheon which indicates three heads, which a lively imagination may conceive to be those of Moors, on a line in the upper left corner on the husband's side of a shield, which is divided by a perpendicular line.As Smith had no wife, this could not have been his cognizance.Nor are these his arms, which were three Turks' heads borne over and beneath a chevron.The cognizance of "Moors' heads," as we have said, was not singular in the Middle Ages, and there existed recently in this very church another tomb which bore a Moor's head as a family badge.The inscription itself is in a style of lettering unlike that used in the time of James I., and the letters are believed not to belong to an earlier period than that of the Georges.This bluish-black stone has been recently gazed at by many pilgrims from this side of the ocean, with something of the feeling with which the Moslems regard the Kaaba at Mecca.This veneration is misplaced, for upon the stone are distinctly visible these words:
"Departed this life September....
....sixty-six....years....
....months...."
As John Smith died in June, 1631, in his fifty-second year, this stone is clearly not in his honor: and if his dust rests in this church, the fire of 1666 made it probably a labor of wasted love to look hereabouts for any monument of him.
A few years ago some American antiquarians desired to place some monument to the "Admiral of New England" in this church, and a memorial window, commemorating the "Baptism of Pocahontas," was suggested.We have been told, however, that a custom of St.
Sepulcher's requires a handsome bonus to the rector for any memorial set up in the church) which the kindly incumbent had no power to set aside (in his own case) for a foreign gift and act of international courtesy of this sort; and the project was abandoned.
Nearly every trace of this insatiable explorer of the earth has disappeared from it except in his own writings.The only monument to his memory existing is a shabby little marble shaft erected on the southerly summit of Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals.By a kind of irony of fortune, which Smith would have grimly appreciated, the only stone to perpetuate his fame stands upon a little heap of rocks in the sea; upon which it is only an inference that he ever set foot, and we can almost hear him say again, looking round upon this roomy earth, so much of which he possessed in his mind, "No lot for me but Smith's Isles, which are an array of barren rocks, the most overgrowne with shrubs and sharpe whins you can hardly passe them:
without either grasse or wood but three or foure short shrubby old cedars."Nearly all of Smith's biographers and the historians of Virginia have, with great respect, woven his romances about his career into their narratives, imparting to their paraphrases of his story such an elevation as his own opinion of himself seemed to demand.Of contemporary estimate of him there is little to quote except the panegyrics in verse he has preserved for us, and the inference from his own writings that he was the object of calumny and detraction.
