The Jamestown Project (Paperback)

by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Author)
Key Phrases: successe thereof, transatlantic migrants, privateering war, Virginia Company, Captain John Smith, North America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The Jamestown story needs retelling, says NYU historian Kupperman (Providence Island) not just because 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of its settlement. It also needs retelling because Americans tend to locate our origins in Plymouth and distance ourselves from Jamestown, which we associate with "greedy, grasping colonists" backed by "arrogant" English patrons. The first decade of Jamestown's history was messy, admits Kupperman, but through that mess, settlers figured out how to make colonization work. Plymouth, in fact, benefited from the lessons learned at Jamestown. What is remarkable is that a colonial outpost on the edge of Virginia, in a not very hospitable location, survived at all. Kupperman, of course, shows how the colonists negotiated relationships with Indians. But her more innovative chapters focus on labor. Colonists began experimenting with tobacco, and colonial elites gradually realized that people were more willing to work when they were laboring for themselves. Backers in England began to think more flexibly about how to create colonial profits. But the dark side of this success story is the institution of indentured servitude, which proved key to Jamestown's success. Kupperman, marrying vivid narration with trenchant analysis, has done the history of Jamestown, and of early America, a great service. 41 b&w illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Tony Horwitz

All memory is selective, for nations as for individuals. The year 1620 is etched into Plymouth Rock and the minds of most Americans as the birth date of this country. We hallow austere Pilgrims with a day of national gluttony. The Mayflower is iconic -- the name of a moving company, a luxury Washington hotel, and a recent best-seller.

But can you name the three ships that landed English colonists 13 years before the Pilgrims? Identify one person aboard, other than John Smith? Explain why they came and what happened to them?

Jamestown's 400th birthday arrives this year with a fleet of books to stir Americans from their historical amnesia. This awakening should be a snap. The saga of early Virginia has knights, knaves, shipwrecks, naked Indian dancers (cooing to sex-starved Englishmen, "Love you not me?" ),and plenty of smoking and drinking. It's pulp nonfiction compared to the family-friendly tale of pious Pilgrims dining with gentle Indians.

But the tawdry side of Jamestown also helps explain why its founding has rarely been enshrined as the nativity of English America. As Karen Ordahl Kupperman observes in The Jamestown Project, "This is the creation story from hell." Instead of Thanksgiving, there's the spectacle of starved colonists eating rats, shoes, excrement and each other. One man even killed, carved up and salted his pregnant wife. He was promptly tortured and executed, like many others at Jamestown, a settlement plagued by crime, mutiny and indolence. Rather than grow food, colonists extorted it from Indians. The English ultimately thrived by exporting tobacco and importing Africans. Small wonder that Americans have traditionally abridged Jamestown's story to a single scene: Pocahontas's romantic rescue of John Smith.

Several new Jamestown books provide a much fuller and less sanitized picture. Together, they tell an epic of suffering -- by English, Indians and Africans -- that was fateful not only to the survival of a colonial fort but to the character of a future nation. Unfortunately, none of these books is likely to excite interest in Jamestown to match that aroused for Plymouth by Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. The Pilgrims, for now, appear safe atop their undeserved perch.

Kupperman, a historian at New York University and author of several fine books on early America, looks across centuries and continents to set Virginia in context as just one among dozens of colonial ventures. Her wide-angle approach illuminates the roots of European expansion and shows how colonization was understood by both the intruders and the intruded-upon. But it drains Jamestown's story of color and tension. Two hundred pages elapse before Kupperman starts narrating the events that followed the colonists' arrival in Virginia in 1607. Her retelling is tepid, as is her conclusion: "The key to building English societies abroad, however messy and incomplete, was discovered in Virginia and all successful colonies henceforth followed its model."

As its title suggests, Benjamin Woolley's Savage Kingdom (forthcoming in April) wants to grab the general reader by the throat. If Kupperman's book suffers from too little drama, Woolley's has too much. "On a cold January day in 1606, a messenger walked inconspicuously across the cobbles of London's Strand," a typical chapter opens. The short walk, we're told, was a journey that "crossed from one era of history to another." Only later do we learn the messenger's mission: delivering a dry document about the financing of colonization.

Woolley, a London-based journalist, has done prodigious research. But too often he improves on it, not only by injecting doubtful atmospherics but also by papering over critical historical questions. John Smith wrote several different versions of his capture by Indians and rescue by Pocahontas, casting doubt on the story's veracity and on Smith as a narrator generally. Woolley blends Smith's various accounts to give us the legendary tale, as if told by the captain around a campfire. He doesn't disclose this cut-and-paste job, except in an oblique footnote. Nor does he examine the meaning of the rescue or analyze almost any aspect of Jamestown's history -- a messy chronicle that cries out for authorial guidance.

Tim Hashaw provides plenty of direction in The Birth of Black America, which tells of the "Black Mayflower" that brought Africans to Jamestown in 1619. Shipped from Angola, then pirated from a Portuguese slaver, the Africans faced a mixed future in Virginia, which hadn't yet codified slavery. Some were enslaved for life; others became indentured servants, like poor whites, laboring for a term of years before winning back their freedom. A few eventually prospered; one family founded a large property called Angola.

Hashaw, an investigative journalist, makes the most of the scant material on Virginia's first Africans. But he dilutes this neglected story by chasing after a big-time scoop, alleging a conspiracy tying the Africans' arrival to the Pilgrims' departure. His detective work is hard to follow and detracts from the tragedy and import of the Black Mayflower. Just a month before the Africans were sold near Jamestown, colonists gathered to form the first representative assembly in English America. Already, in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed, America's founding flaw was evident. A society built on the contrary pillars of freedom and bondage was destined to fracture.

Jamestown was also seminal to the future nation because it unleashed one of the most exceptional and prophetic figures in American history. John Smith claimed that he "loved actions more then wordes," but 800 pages of the latter are collected in a mammoth volume from the Library of America that includes his writings, as well as other early narratives of English settlements.

Here you can read not only about Pocahontas -- whom Smith, contrary to Disney's Barbie-doll animation, described as "a child of tenne yeares olde" -- but also about the captain's incredible adventures on four continents. By the time he sailed for America, at the age of 27, Smith had roamed Europe, Asia and Africa as a mercenary, hermit, slave, pirate, fireworks expert and gladiator.

Smith was also a vivid writer, hurling invective at the English gentry ("Gluttonous Loyterers," "Tuftaffaty humorists," "tender educats") and delivering proto-American aphorisms ("who would not work must not eat"). But Smith's greatest contribution was his vision of "abounding America" as a land of opportunity for striving immigrants. "Here every man may be master of his owne labour and land," Smith wrote, so long as settlers were willing to work patiently at humble tasks such as farming and fishing. The first to heed his advice were the Pilgrims, who settled a region Smith had scouted six years before the Mayflower's landing and had christened "New England."

Extracting the gems from Smith's writing requires patient labor, too. His prose is disorganized, his elliptical sentences impossible to parse, and his spelling and syntax so erratic that English can seem a foreign language. The Library of America doesn't help; like its other compilations, this one has no introduction, and the textual notes are stuck at the back. For readers with access to a good library, Philip Barbour's well-annotated, three-volume The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1986) remains the gold standard. Alternatively, there are short anthologies, including The Journals of Captain John Smith (new this year and edited by John Thompson) and Kupperman's Captain John Smith (1988), which is excellently edited and introduced.

Still, it's handy to have Smith's complete writing in one volume, and the Library of America edition also includes the best dispatches by other early English settlers in Virginia. These accounts, like Smith's, convey the rich and under-appreciated story of pre-Mayflower America. But the captain deserves the last word. "I would yet begin againe with as small meanes as I did at first," he wrote in 1624, as others followed the path he'd pioneered. "For all their discoveries," he observed, "are but Pigs of my owne Sow."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (February 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674030567
• ISBN-13: 978-0674030565
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #325,223 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good "Atlantic" Reworking of the Jamestown Story, March 27, 2007

By	pj (Lagrangeville, ny USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Jamestown Project (Hardcover)

Karen Ordahl Kupperman revisits territory she knows well with this latest history of Jamestown. What distinguishes Kupperman's history from the slew of other books which have come before is the very self conscious effort to put the founding of Jamestown within an Atlantic history context.

For people who are looking for a detailed history of Jamestown itself this is not the book. Instead you should perhaps try one of Dr Kupperman's other books. She only gets to the actual founding of the colony in the last two chapters of the book. Instead she discusses the world which brought about the colonization. That is the true purpose of this book and why it is called the Jamestown PROJECT. By placing the story of the colony within the larger background of financial expansion, political maneuvering, and geopolitics, Kupperman makes us very conscious of the contingency of Jamestown. This was not an inevitable event, the precursor to American history. Rather, it was the END of a long series of events and trends which contributed to the settlement there and the way it developed.

Along the way Kupperman takes us on a sweeping journey of the Early Modern world. Her topics range from the waxing and waning of Islamic powers, to the routes of Spanish expansion, to the creation of Caribbean colonies, the continental wars of 16th century Europe, and the life of Native Americans both in America and Europe. All of this is, while at times disjointed, a welcome background to the colonization of Jamestown and reframes the familiar story in illuminating ways. The background explains why the colony was founded the way it was: why did the colonists refuse to grow food? Why did they interact with the Natives the way they did? Kupperman's book is a useful one for anyone interested in the early history of America or the Atlantic world.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History done right, June 24, 2007

By	Bookphile (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Jamestown Project (Hardcover)

Kupperman does an excellent job of establishing the cultural, religious, and political atmosphere at the time of the colony's origins. I found it fascinating to immersive myself in the whys of the colony: why was it started, why were people interested in investing in it, etc. I also felt there were a lot of interesting parallels to the story of the colony and to that today--of how government and corporations often place financial interests far above humanitarian interests. The book also gave me a much more accurate idea of what it must have meant to be a colonist and helped dispel the myth that in fleeing England these people found a land of freedom and opportunity. It also gave me a very deep appreciation for the first settlers as without them, I surely would never be here. This excellent work does a wonderful job of providing an intelligent, in-depth examination of our origins as a country and it does so in an engaging manner so that it reads more like a novel and nothing like a dry textbook.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jamestown in Context, January 12, 2009

By	Jack P. Hailman (Florida) - See all my reviews

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in the colonization of North America. If school history left you with the impression that nothing relevant had happened in the world until the two ill-fated attempts to colonize Roanoke Island, let Professor Kupperman straighten out your mind. She goes through in great but readable detail the world situation prior to 1607: the European powers and their interactions, the extensive contact with the Muslim world, explorations, and the English attempts to colonize wild and wooly places such as Ireland. In fact, the book is more about this complicated context than about Jamestown. Jamestown doesn't get settled until the reader is already two-thirds through the book's text.

Two minor things caught my eye. The author seems to have swallowed John Smith's concocted story about being on death's row when Pocahontas rushed in and saved him. That fairy tale didn't appear in the first edition of his Generall Historie. Subsequently, a real such happening transpired in Florida to a Spaniard, the report of which became widely known in Europe. Smith had a better eye for a good story than for the truth.

The other trivial complaint is the assertion early on that the Plymouth Colony owed its success to the trials and errors of Jamestown, but the point is never developed in the book. Indeed, the author seems to think that the Pilgrim colony is revered because people believe it wrongly to be the earliest successful colonization attempt. But that's not why Plymouth is gets more press than Jamestown. For one thing, the Pilgrims left detailed genealogical records so these are the earliest settlers anyone can prove to be descended from. And because of the Mayflower Compact and the conduct of the colony, the seeds of what America later became were sewn and partly reared. Yes, the Jamestown story is a fascinating one, but for entirely different reasons.

The illustrations in the book are engaging, and I had seen previously only a relatively few of them. Be charmed by the sly expression of the Moroccan ambassador presented to Queen Elizabeth (p. 40), or the pipe-smoking man from a 1595 book (p. 279). This book is good history and good fun.