And conquer Smith most certainly did. He would soon add hundreds of Indian heads to his gruesome tally from the Old World. Like the Spanish conquistadors, Smith and countless other Englishmen who arrived to fight in America had already battled, traded with, or otherwise engaged the Ottomans and other Muslims in the Mediterranean. William Strachey, Virginia’s secretary, had spent time in Istanbul a few years before going to Jamestown, and George Sandys, eventually the colony’s treasurer, had traveled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire—to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Egypt—and had written a
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