In this blog we look at the early colony of Virginia in Jamestown, 1607-1620s, the period of struggle resulting in an English template for future colonial success after a succession of near disasters. “A Tale of Two Colonies” looks at the contemporary English colonization efforts in Virginia and Bermuda of the early 1600s. “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma” explores the life of Pocahontas as a Powhatan diplomat to the English.
“A Land as God Made It” charts the establishment of Jamestown in its first years, and “Jamestown: The Buried Truth” is an archeological report of the actual recovered Jamestown Fort site. “The Jamestown Project” places the Virginia experiment in the context of English imperial colonization efforts around the world.
For more book reviews at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in this historical era addressing other topics, see the webpage for Early and Late Colonial Era (1600-1763). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
A Tale of Two Colonies
Virginia Bernhard wrote A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? in 2011. It is now available from the University of Missouri Press and on Kindle. It is an unhappy tale of the initial English attempts at colonizing Virginia and Bermuda between the 1580s and 1620s. Bernhard includes life histories of the first administrators, the veterans of English mercenary warfare in the Netherlands and privateer raiding of the Spanish in the Caribbean. At several points between 1607 and 1623, Jamestown nearly suffered the fate of Roanoke due to administrative disasters.
In Virginia there developed a maroon culture of European and African runaways with indigenous peoples in subsistence societies removed from official colonization. To enclose the colonial economy, a boom and bust cycle of settlement developed which depended on the racialization of the Virginia colony. It brought forced labor on the African descendants, encroaching small farming by freed indentures on the Indian frontier who policed runaways, and consolidation of their frontier settlement farms by the large slave-holding landholders.
Learn more to buy “A Tale of Two Colonies” at Amazon.com.
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
Camilla Townsend wrote Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: An American Portrait in 2004. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback. Townsend reimagines the encounter between Pocahontas and the settling English in terms of Powhatan marital strategies of diplomacy. The book begins with a survey of Powhatan Algonquin culture, proceeds to English contact and Pocahontas’ engagement with the English, then the Powhatan uprisings of 1622 and 1624, and finally the end of the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom in the mid 1600s.
While Powhatans were curious about the newcomers and willing to trade food, technology and ideas, the English were consumed with self-promotion that made them contentious among themselves and with the natives. They certainly meant to disposes the Powhatan of their lands adjacent to Jamestown to the Fall Line in order to provide enough acreage to make themselves in the image of English lords of the manor.
Learn more to buy “Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma” at Amazon.com.
A Land as God Made It
James Horn wrote A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. This history of England’s first American colony spans the first efforts at imperial competition with Spain in the 1560s through is dissolution of the Virginia Company in the 1620s. First settlers were greedy, conniving and contentious. The effort at colonization was compromised by political intrigues in England and factionalism among financial backers. The clashes between natives and newcomers led to fear, suspicion and violence.
While the focus is on the English and characters such as John Smith and Pocahontas, administrator Thomas Dale and indentured servant Richard Frethorne, Native Americans appear on nearly every page. The story is one of bloodshed and brutality on both sides, as well as disease, starvation and death. In this beginning period the hardships and reversals suffered by the English led both colonists and onlookers to predict Jamestown’s imminent demise.
Learn more to buy “A Land as God Made It” at Amazon.com.
Jamestown: The Buried Truth
William M. Kelso wrote Jamestown: The Buried Truth, 2d ed., rev. in 2017. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press and on Kindle. Author archaeologist William Kelso began unearthing the actual foundations of the 1607 Jamestown fort in 1994; the site was not underwater in the James River as had been so long supposed. Church, barracks, gates and walls all emerged at the hand of exploring shovels.
Not only was there evidence of starving time consumption of dogs, cats, rats and mice, the bones of a Bermudian cahow bird were found. Archeological evidence requires some rethinking about Indian-English relations, because of found Indian tools, fragments of unfinished arrowheads and Indian cooking vessels. Only half of the fort is excavated, and there are half a million artifacts to analyze. Not only the fort is rediscovered, so are outbuildings constructed later in the 1600s.
Learn more to buy “Jamestown” at Amazon.com.
The Jamestown Project
Karen Ordahl Kupperman wrote The Jamestown Project in 2007. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Kupperman’s focus is on what made the Virginia colony work in a way that contemporaneous efforts by the English in Guiana, Ireland, West Indies, Maine and Newfoundland did not. It was Jamestown that provided the model for subsequent English colonization efforts beginning with Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.
The elements of that success following the turbulent beginnings from 1607 to 1618 at the Great Charter authored by Sir Edwin Sandys were based on the insight that colonists would not work for investor’s profit, they required a stake in the colony’s success. The Jamestown Project found a profitable commodity in tobacco, representative government, public taxation and social stability with the introduction of women and families.
Learn more to buy “Jamestown Project” at Amazon.com.
Note: Insights for these reviews are used from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.