Secondary Post Juet 64-67 Smith 81-99

During the reading of Smith, I noticed that Smith's personality really showed in his writing. I think this is even more interesting because most (not all) writings form the time were mostly documentation, and some can be fairly dry and hard to understand due to the dialect. That being said, Smith's attention to the native's names made the reading more difficult to understand at times, but weather he put the names in to make himself look better or because genuinely cared, it put some flavor into the writing. 

I really enjoyed reading Smith's writing because of his personality in the way he writes. I thought it was somewhat astounding that there are people that we know of today that are just as adventure and confident as he was during his time. Throughout the writing you can see him writing to an audience as opposed to Juet who seemed to be writing more to himself in a sort of log or journal fashion. Smith is very clearly trying to make his mark on history, which he did. He really tries to paint himself in the best light, which I think most of us might do to some extent if there was a possibility of it being read throughout history. He paints himself as this noble, fearless, and amazing adventurer. He doesn't write too much about the other men on the voyage and if he does he didn't try to make them any better than himself.  

Once I was finished reading, I had to think about how much of history has been altered for these reasons. The reason we read these writings from so long ago are because they preserve history in a personal fashion. It's as close as you can get to jumping into the mind of Smith for a moment to see what his experience was. But I think it's important to note that much of history, no matter how well documented is up for interpretation. The people writing, translating, and publishing these works have free will to take out and put in whatever they please so when reading historical literature, we should be mindful of the possible distortions in history.