Stray into the New World in the Elizabethan age and you are certain to encounter Captain John Smith, soldier, adventurer and coloniser. Smith is best known for his deliverance from execution by Pocahontas, the Indian princess who was later to sail to England as wife of another frontiersman. Smith does not need the legend of an affair to enhance his status as the resourceful leader of the Jamestown settlement.

R.F. Pritchard unravels his tremendous background as a fearless fighter (and slave) of the Ottoman Turks in Captain John Smith and His Brave Adventurers (Haus, £10.99) and goes on to show the extent of his leadership in a dangerous confrontation with the Algonquian Indians as the British sought a foothold in Virginia. Faced with a massive Indian threat, he offered himself in single combat with a chief - an offer that was prudently rejected.

Smith was a man of stirring words, threatening ultimately to load his boat with "dead carcasses". It is a long time since I have read Philip Barbour's great book on Smith and Pritchard pays tribute to it. Where the retelling of this story has value is in Pritchard's narrative of a man who had a coat of arms featuring three severed heads, and in the many quotes attributed directly to him. Overall, it offers a splendid exploration of the challenges that faced those who would venture into unknown lands.

Not everyone wanted to spend their lives across the water after they had emigrated. As the vastly accomplished scholarship of Susan Hardman Moore shows in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (Yale, £25), as many as a quarter of the colonists who had made their new life in New England risked the voyage home with the 1640s the heyday of their return.

Moore's account is highly detailed - she has an appendix of many ordinary folk as well as ministers who originally inspired their disciples to emigrate and then, homeward bound, left them "in mourning" in the New World - and impressive after the countless books about the Puritans who settled in America, their great faith and religious ideals.

It was not just the tough conditions that persuaded them to sail back across the Atlantic but mercantile profit, nostalgia for hearth and home and, for patriots, the civil war, which itself is exquisitely recounted in God's Fury, England's Fire (Allen Lane, £30) by Michael Braddick. The title is taken from a pamphlet published after the king's surrender, which claimed the war was God's vengeance on a sinful nation.

Braddick's book may be read as an excellent companion to Pilgrims. Maybe those in the New World, in harmony with friends who sailed away, would provide the foundation for that enduring special relationship, while back at home violence under Cromwell would tear apart the fabric of England's society. Braddick tells the story with the freedom of the poet and the creative power of the historian.