by Tony Horwitz
For a groundbreaking study of the trauma experienced by early English colonists at Roanoke, as well as at Jamestown and Plymouth, see “Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America,” a 2006 Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University by Kathleen M. Donegan.
CHAPTER 12
John Smith, as I’ve indicated in the text, is the best and most vexing source on early Jamestown. His hundreds of pages of writing about the colony are disorganized, his sentences impossible to parse, and his spelling and syntax so idiosyncratic that English can seem a foreign language. It therefore helps to have a strong editorial hand, which Philip Barbour provides in his well-annotated three-volume study, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, the gold standard for scholarship on the captain.
A recent compilation from the Library of America is Captain John Smith: Writings, with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America. Edited by James Horn, it has the merit of collecting Smith and many other writers in one volume. For a short sample of Smith’s work, see Karen Ordhal Kupperman’s Captain John Smith: A Selected Edition of His Writings, which is very well chosen, edited, and introduced. On Jamestown’s first decade, the handiest collection of primary sources is Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, edited by Edward Wright Haile.
Of the many secondary works on Jamestown, one of the best is David A. Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation, a concise, readable, and excellently researched look at the very tangled and hard-to-tell story of Virginia’s early years. For the general reader, there is no better introduction to the subject. Among the best analyses of John Smith and his legacy is J. A. Leo Lemay’s The American Dream of Captain John Smith. For an incisive look at the historiography of Jamestown, see Jill Lepore’s essay in The New Yorker, “Our Town,” April 12, 2007.
On Powhatan and the tribes he ruled, no one has written more than Helen Rountree, whose works include Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries and The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. For Powhatan’s famous daughter, see Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative, by Robert S. Tilton, and Pocahontas: The Life and the Legend, by Frances Mossiker.
The recent Jamestown quadricentennial brought a flood of new books on the colony. The one that adds freshest insight is William Kelso’s Jamestown: The Buried Truth, in which the archaeologist expands on many of the points he made in my interview with him, which took place a year before the book’s publication. Also new is Tim Hashaw’s The Birth of Black America, which tells of the “Black Mayflower” that brought Africans to Jamestown in 1619. For more on Virginia’s first Africans, see two articles published in the William and Mary Quarterly: “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619” by John Thornton (1998) and “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ ” by Engel Sluiter (1997).
Walter Plecker’s article “Racial Improvement” was published in the Virginia Medical Monthly in November 1925. An equally shocking tract is Mongrel Virginians, published the next year by two of his colleagues, Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougle. For an excellent study of Plecker and eugenics, see J. David Smith, The Eugenic Assault on America: Scenes in Red, White, and Black. Historical background on the divide between blacks and Chickahominy Indians can be found in Charles City County, Virginia: An Official History, edited by James P. Whittenburg and John Coski.
CHAPTER 13
An account of Bartholomew Gosnold’s 1602 voyage, by one of its participants, John Brereton, can be found on the American Journeys Web site, along with accounts by other early English travelers to New England. I also drew on my interviews with archaeologist Jeffrey P. Brain, of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, who has searched for the site of Gosnold’s outpost on Cuttyhunk.
The starting point for any research on Pilgrim Plymouth is William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, and a journal of the colony’s first year he co-authored with Edward Winslow, published as Mourt’s Relation. Scholarly classics on the Pilgrims and later Puritan settlers include John Demos’s A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony and Edmund Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. For the general reader, two recent books of note are Nathaniel Philbrick’s bestselling Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War and Godfrey Hodgson’s A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving.
On Plymouth Rock, see Memory’s Nation, by John Seelye, and a Pilgrim Society booklet, “Plymouth Rock: History and Significance,” by Rose Briggs. My material on the Old Colony Club is mostly drawn from the work of the Plymouth historian Jim Baker, who was very generous with his time and research on the town and its history. Some of his work can be found at http://www.oldcolonyclub.org.
Finally, a few suggestions for further reading about some of the people and places I mentioned only in passing, or not at all. For Samuel de Champlain, see Morison’s biography Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France, and the work of the Champlain Society in Canada; its Web site is at www.champlainsociety.ca. Samples of Champlain’s wonderful writing can also be found at the American Journeys Web site, as can that of Jacques Cartier, the sixteenth-century French explorer I refer to in the Newfoundland chapter.
For other early explorers of Canada, and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage, see Morison, Northern Voyages, and the accounts excerpted in The Discovery of North America. One of the most extraordinary of these northern voyagers was Martin Frobisher, whose story is wonderfully told in Robert Ruby’s Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England’s Arctic Colony.
Little is known about Henry Hudson, the English navigator in service to the Dutch who searched for the Northwest Passage and, in 1609, sailed up the New York river named for him. The only surviving account of this voyage, by crewman Robert Juet, is available on the American Journeys Web site. For more on the Dutch, see Jonathan Israel’s Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. The American Journeys site also includes an account of Sir Francis Drake’s visit to the California coast in 1579. An excellent recent biography is Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, by Harry Kelsey.
Two places I visited in New England, but was unable to include, deserve special mention. Jeffrey Brain, the archaeologist referred to above in relation to Cuttyhunk, has also led the excavation of Fort St. George, in Popham, Maine, the forgotten English colony that predated Plymouth by thirteen years. For historical background on the Popham colony, and information on the continuing archaeological work, see www.maine.gov/museum/anthropology/pophamcolony.
Dighton Rock is a site of a very different sort, a boulder by the Taunton River in Massachusetts that is covered in ancient etchings. These inscriptions have been attributed, variously, to Phoenicians, to the Norse, to sixteenth-century Portuguese, and to Wampanoag Indians. Dighton Rock and the small museum enclosing it are an entertaining introduction to the many mysteries and myths surrounding America’s early exploration. I visited the site with its modern champion, Dr. Manuel Luciano da Silva, who has written a lively study, Portuguese Pilgrims and Dighton Rock.
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