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John Smith (baptized January 6, 1580, Willoughby, Lincolnshire, England—died June 21, 1631, London) was an English explorer and early leader of the Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America. Smith played an equally important role as a cartographer and a prolific writer who vividly depicted the natural abundance of the New World, whetting the colonizing appetite of prospective English settlers. Smith grew up on his family’s farm and was apprenticed in his...