Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation [Hardcover]

David Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2003

A gripping narrative of one of the great survival stories of American history: the opening of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Drawing on period letters and chronicles, and on the papers of the Virginia Company–which financed the settlement of Jamestown–David Price tells a tale of cowardice and courage, stupidity and brilliance, tragedy and costly triumph. He takes us into the day-to-day existence of the English men and women whose charge was to find gold and a route to the Orient, and who found, instead, hardship and wretched misery. Death, in fact, became the settlers’ most faithful companion, and their infighting was ceaseless.

Price offers a rare balanced view of the relationship between the settlers and the natives. He unravels the crucial role of Pocahontas, a young woman whose reality has been obscured by centuries of legend and misinformation (and, more recently, animation). He paints indelible portraits of Chief Powhatan, the aged monarch who came close to ending the colony’s existence, and Captain John Smith, the former mercenary and slave, whose disdain for class distinctions infuriated many around him–even as his resourcefulness made him essential to the colony’s success.

Love and Hate in Jamestown is a superb work of popular history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sparkling book retells a beloved tale in modern terms. Journalist Price's subtitle suggests that the book might be only about John Smith and Pocahontas-who "crossed into one another's cultures more than any other Englishman or native woman had done"-as well as about Pocahontas's eventual husband, John Rolfe. Fortunately, the book ranges more widely than that. Price relates the entire riveting story of the founding of Virginia. Smith is of course at the center of the tale, because rarely did a colonial leader so bountifully combine experience, insight, vision, strength of character and leadership skills to overcome extraordinary odds. But no one will come away from this work without heightened admiration also for the natives, especially Chief Powhatan, and greater knowledge of the introduction of a third people, African slaves, into the Chesapeake. The book's leitmotif is the interaction of differing cultures and men, like the British gentry, whom Smith scorned for refusing to adapt to hard colonial labor, and the wily Indians, who resorted to starving out the colonists and in 1622 massacred many of them. If there's a fault in a work built unobtrusively on the best scholarship, it's Price's insistence that we see Virginia principally as a place that rewarded courage and hard labor-for white men-in the service of self-advancement and personal liberty. Such a place it was. But it was also for all participants a site, at the start of the nation's history, of danger, horror and death. This is a splendid work of serious narrative history. 2 maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School--A richly flavored, fascinating narrative of the first two decades of the Jamestown settlement. Price has drawn on a wealth of primary sources, but details don't interrupt the flow of the story. As a mercenary in the Netherlands and Romania, and a slave in Turkey, Smith learned the importance of communicating in new languages and understanding unfamiliar cultures. He developed the skills that would later enable him to stand between the fragile new colony and disaster. The author describes the establishment of the Virginia Company and provides intriguing portraits of the new colonists. Parts of the tale sound surprisingly modern. Fearful that bad news would spook investors and discourage future colonists, the company censored accounts of hardship in letters coming from Virginia. Despite demands from London to cultivate more corn and less tobacco, tobacco always sold at much higher prices, and so remained the crop of choice, even when the colonists were forced to buy corn from the natives. Although reliable information about Pocahontas is incomplete, Price's depiction of the bright, compassionate princess is warm and admiring. Smith's return to England to recover from an injury resulted in disaster for Jamestown. The inexperienced former courtiers made incredible errors that led to the Starving Time and massacres. The author describes these horrific events in graphic detail. The book concludes with an account of Smith's writings and an analysis of the man's vision of America.--Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375415416
• ISBN-13: 978-0375415418
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #498,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David A. Price has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Inc., Forbes, Business 2.0, and Investor's Business Daily.

His most recent book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (Knopf, 2008), was named a Wall Street Journal "Best Book of the Year" and a Fast Company "Best Business Book of the Year."

His previous book, Love and Hate in Jamestown (Knopf, 2003), a history of the Jamestown colony and the Virginia Company, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year."

He received his bachelor's degree in economics and computer science from the College of William and Mary and graduate degrees from Harvard and Cambridge. He lives in Richmond, Va.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captain Smith and Pocahontas had a very mad affair, November 7, 2005

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation (Hardcover)

With apologies to Peggy Lee and Walt Disney, they didn't -- but the story of the Indian princess saving Captain John Smith's life is true. In fact, she saved his life on several occasions. But, in the end, believing Smith to be dead, she married another Virginia colonist, John Rolfe, who was not a bad sort although a bit of a prig.

This is the story of the British colony in Virginia from its founding in 1607 until its near destruction by the Indians and reconstruction in the 1620s. Captain John Smith was only in Virginia for the first few years of the colony, but he saved it from disaster over and over again. Surrounded by idle aristocrats who wanted to search for gold rather than grow corn, Smith adopted the no-nonsense policy that those who didn't work didn't eat. Many of the numerous "gentlemen" in the company preferred death to work -- and realized their desires.

I was surprised at how humane and idealistic were the aims of the parent company of Jamestown back in Britain. The company advocated peaceful coexistence with the Indians and there was much criticism of Smith's more aggressive -- and practical -- strategy. In retrospect, it is amazing that Jamestown survived as it was reduced to near nothingness on several occasions by starvation, disease, and Indian attacks. One of the chapters tells of the arrival of the first Negro slaves in the colony -- an ominous portent for the future.

For me the most interesting chapter of the book was about Pocahontas in England and her single meeting after a long separation with John Smith. I was especially amused at the author's speculation that Pocahontas was appalled at the unhealthy and squalid living conditions of the British in London at that time. She died soon afterward, a shame because her memoirs would be even more fascinating than those of Smith. "Love and Hate" is a well-researched and well-written book about a couple whose names will forever be linked in folklore and history.

Smallchief

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Price Simplifies the Complex, December 4, 2003

By 

William Brown (Courtland, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation (Hardcover)

The literature of Jamestown exemplifies a history of frustrating complexity. This is partly because the history of Jamestown has become the playing field of propagandists (e.g. post Revolutionary Americans justifying the Revolution, as Tisdale says, by putting down the "gentlemen" of the colony) to Henry Adams, one of the otherwise great minds of America-perhaps its greatest-who admittedly set out to demolish the history of the South in the Civil War era, as Price himself points out. Romanticists have enjoyed a field day inventing a relationship that never existed between a mature John Smith and the child Pocahontas, and Smith himself is so unlikable a hero as to make an unpleasant historical subject. Add the fact that most of the productive research on Jamestown in our century has been archaeological or documentary, and add the fact that during the period concerned Jamestown officials come and go and return again, one is presented with a kaleidascope of confusion. Only with the recent publication of JAMESTOWN NARRATIVES, which arranges the sources in an order comprehensible to the gentle reader and Ivor Noel Hume's outstanding THE VIRGINIA ADVENTURE, has the picture begun to come together for any but the specialists. Bearing in mind that Hume, one of the world's top archaeologists, covers both the Roanoke settlement and Jamestown, this is the first modern book I have seen that embodies the latest research, deals only with Jamestown and does so in a way that is both accurate and readable. This is an excellent starting place for anyone who wants to understand the early colony.

I do have one very small problem with the volume. The gentlmen still come off badly. Contentious, prickly, arrogant and self interested, they undoubtedly were, but their contribution to the colony was considerable, as the adventurers who explored and fought. But this (which I must admit is my own take) is more than overcome by Price's masterful account of how John Smith, one man of rather minor status, brought order out of chaos. It is hard to like Smith, but without him, I think there would have been no Virginia. And it is very easy to like Price, who has done us the inestimable favor of,at last, bringing the threads of the tapestry together.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing account of Jamestown, February 12, 2006

By 

Richard E. Hourula (Berkeley, CA. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation (Paperback)

Author David Price, "Love and Hate in Jamestown" is an excellent telling of America's first successful European colony and the nearly mythic characters of John Smith and Pocahontas who were so instrumental in achieving that success.

Indeed this is popular history as it should be. An entertaining read that illuminates an epoch and sets some misunderstandings straight.

It turns out that John Smith, done hard by popular culture in recent years, was in fact a hero of British aims to settle in North America, providing the type of acumen and leadership that so many who came over were unable or unwilling to provide. Price is masterful in fleshing out the iconic Englishmen as he is with the evidently beautiful and precocious native who came to be known as Pocahontoas. She is a far more complex figure than many of us have been led to believe and her story neither lends itself to portrayals of her as a pawn to the English or as a Smith's nubile young lover. Indeed Price claims that they the two had great affection for one another but not romantic love. Price successfully goes to great lengths to give the two their due in the ultimate success of the english settlement.

"Love and Hate in Jamestown" portrays neither the settlers nor the Powhatans as particularly heroic. In Price's hands they are not symbols to advance political interpretations merely people from vastly different cultures who collided at this particular time and place. Both sides are curious and suspicious, sometimes cruel, oft times duplicitous. We of course now how the story turned out for both groups but this book helps us understand why and how.

In the wake of Terrance Malick's film "The New World" interest in Jamestown and its two most famous figures will doubtless grow. Prices's book will be an excellent place for the curious to get a fuller and more accurate story and enjoy a good read in the bargain.