Shortly after Capt. John Smith arrived in the Chesapeake he began exploring. Two necessities drove him. The colonists needed to open relationships with the native people and establish trading so they would not starve, and their charter with the Virginia Company charged them to explore the land and find its riches.
Initially, in the spring and summer of 1607, the English explored the James River, going upstream from their settlement on Jamestown Island as far as the rapids and falls at what is now Richmond. That winter, with food running low, Smith went on an expedition to trade with the Chickahominy. He was captured and taken to Werowocomoco, where he met Powhatan, the paramount chief of several tribes in what is now Eastern Virginia.
The next summer, in early June 1608, Smith set out on his main explorations of the bay. He sailed north, and in two rapid voyages explored most of the major rivers. He met many of the peoples who lived around the bay and gathered information for the map that was to become a guide for settlement of the region.
Smith's voyage demonstrated his personal qualities of leadership and values we still think of as "American:" independence, courage, ingenuity, perseverance, and an appreciation of talent above rank. Smith saw in the Chesapeake's rich natural resources the opportunity for any man to come here and through his hard work make a good life. The trade he established with the neighboring tribes helped Jamestown survive and Smith's leadership as President of the struggling colony steadied it and gave it the footing it needed to survive.
He was perhaps the first to enunciate what would become the American Dream.
"Toward the end of his life, Smith was also one of the first, if not the first, to anticipate that America would be the seedbed for a new kind of society," said David A. Price, author of Love and Hate in Jamestown. "He had escaped the obscurity to which he was born," Price noted, and recognized that in America "poor men with ambition could likewise make new destinies for themselves. John Smith's story gives us a new vantage point for looking at the American experiment."