The Jamestown Project
Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth. Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.
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Contents
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Creation Myths
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1 |
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1 Elizabethan England Engages the World
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12 |
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2 Adventurers Opportunities and Improvisation
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43 |
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3 Indian Experience of the Atlantic
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73 |
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4 English Hunger for the New
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109 |
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5 Grasping Americas Contours
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145 |
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6 A Welter of Colonial Projects
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183 |
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African Algonquians Argall argued arrived Atlantic attack Barbour Bermuda brought called Captain John Smith captives Carter Brown Library chap Chesapeake Christian coast colonists Colony in Virginia council Dale David David Beers Quinn Discovery Early Modern Elizabeth England English Europe Europeans expedition experience fleet Florida Francis French Frobisher Generall Historie George Percy George Sandys ginia gold governor Guiana Hakluyt ibid Indians investors Ireland Irish James John Carter Brown John Pory John Rolfe king land leaders letter Library at Brown Little Ice Age lived London merchants Muslim North America Opechancanough Ottoman Empire Philip plant plantations Pocahontas Pory Powhatan print version Queen Quinn quote Ralegh reports returned rich Richard Hakluyt River Roanoke Roanoke colony Samuel Purchas sent settlement settlers seventeenth century ships Sir Thomas sixteenth century Spain Spanish Stukeley Thomas Harriot tion trade traveled Turkes ventures view this image Virginia Company Records vols William Strachey wrote