Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America [Hardcover]

Benjamin Woolley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2007

Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men—led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric and a government spy—left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America.

Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey into a beautiful landscape and a sophisticated culture that they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to possess but threatened to destroy. They called their new home a "savage kingdom," but it was the savagery they had experienced in Europe that had driven them across the ocean and which they hoped to escape by building in America "one of the most glorious nations under the sun."

An intimate story in an epic setting, Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This highly readable account of the founding of Jamestown moves from the English throne to the daily struggles of the colony's first settlers and the experience of Virginia's Indians as their relations with colonists became increasingly strained. Here are the famous tales from early Virginia, like Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe. But well-known explorers sit cheek by jowl with fascinating, lesser-known people, such as the colonists' wives, who consulted an astrologer to reassure themselves about their husbands' fate on the open seas. Woolley emphasizes both the financial and religious aims of colonization: English backers expected to get rich on the bounty the settlers would uncover and produce (though the first ships of wood and iron ore sent back disappointed the London Company). But Englishmen also saw Virginia as a "religious mission," an opportunity to spread Protestantism abroad. Woolley persuasively argues that the settlers' aggressive response to a 1623 Indian attack became the "defining moment" in the history of English settlement of Virginia—it was through this event, more than any other, that the colonists articulated their connection to their new land and "crafted and honed their American identity." Woolley blends nuanced analysis with fast-paced narrative. 16 pages of color illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The 400th anniversary of the first American colony has stimulated renewed interest in the Jamestown settlement. Woolley tackles his subject with the same type of narrative gusto displayed by Nathaniel Philbrick in his best-selling Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (2006). Like Philbrick, his treatment of a legendary event and era in American history is comprehensive and myth shattering. In addition to analyzing the economic, social, and cultural roots of the fledgling colony, all the major historical players--and quite a few of the minor ones--are given their due. Approaching his subject from a number of angles, Woolley presents a revisionist portrait of the Jamestown colony. Without resorting to pedestrian platitudes, he evokes a stirring epic in American history in all its greed, gore, and glory. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harper (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060090561
• ISBN-13: 978-0060090562
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #224,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great stories about our first steps..., August 12, 2007

By 

Todd E. Babcock (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America (Hardcover)

I came across this book after hearing the author interviewed on NPR on the anniversary of the Jamestown colony. From just the few minutes I managed to catch from that conversation the author had me rethinking my vague and mostly uninvestigated thoughts on that early settlement.
Wooley has a great ability to take well researched and documented accounts and weave a compelling narrative without overly indulging in fantasy or sketches compiled of heresay or assumptions.
What took me in about this book was just how much Byzantine politics and motives the early administrators of the colony had coming over from England. (i.e aliases, spies, traitors, defectors, etc.)
If you are interested in what the first steps were in The New World before Declarations and Revolutions and why they were made, I would check this out. It's an essential foundation if you are, like me, consuming our countries earliest intentions and ambitions that led us to where we are now.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, with good and sometimes distracting details, August 2, 2007

By 

Jason A. Greer (the Carolinas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America (Hardcover)

With the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first colonists and founding of the first permanent British settlement in present day America, there have been a slew of books and reexaminations of the settlement. Wooley, a popular writer and broadcaster in Great Britain has contributed to this review of the Jamestown by presenting a popular history from the British viewpoint, that examines the founding of Jamestown from the perspective that tries to place Jamestown in the perspective of the new House of Stuart monarchy, a Britain with a shaken economy, and the race to make a claim in North America to compete with the Spanish Empire. Along the way, the Powhatan native tribe Chesapeake Bay have their motivations and civilization examined as this strongest of the east coast tribes.

The strongest parts of this book involve the examination of the relationship between the first settlers and the Powhatan Indians, the exploration of the Chesapeake for the first time by Europeans by Captain John Smith and why Jamestown was so important to the British government. The relationship between the founding of Virginia and the discovery of Bermuda, and why, for a time the Bermuda part of the Virginia colony was much more important economically to Britain is a nice find within a book, and Wooley does his best work of showing human drama with Bermuda.

The book is weak by dragging details of the British government out many pages past necessary for the popular reader, especially the American reader who, from the standpoint of 400 years of time will take some effort to dig into the bureaucracy of the that government for a popular history read.
If the general reader is willing to go through the 400 pages of details, at the end, he should find a great explanation for the place of Jamestown in the American, Indian and British story. The book hits its high point with its description of the first Jamestown Assembly, the first such representative government in modern times that was founded as much out of corporate business interests and a leveling out of previous British hierarchies in the American jungle.

For a popular history, Savage Kingdom shows why the British way of colonization - joint stock companies, authorized but not led by the government with a grass roots organization of the Christian church succeeded in the long run over the government/ military colonization of Latin America.

This is a fine book, but again, the general reader should be warned that it has heavy details of the details of British government among personalities that are often hard to follow.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good companion read with Mayflower, October 30, 2007

By 

Ed Crumley "The Host — A novel of life ... - See all my reviews

This review is from: Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America (Hardcover)

For anyone interested in the tenuous, fragile, and embryonic beginnings of the United States of America, Savage Kingdom is a must-read. And to add further clarity and dimension to one's understanding, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick should be read as a companion.

Although, over the centuries, the Mayflower happenings got greater press in the American story, the settlement of Jamestown occurred three years earlier and was at least as and probably more important. The Jamestown pioneers had the first major encounters with the native peoples and one of the Englishmen, the tough and abrasive Captain John Smith, gained
knowledge and experience there which enabled him to exert leadership in the later exploration.