The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey [Hardcover]

Ivor Noel Hume (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 1994

For thirty-five years, as writer, lecturer, and chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, Ivor Noel Hume has enlivened for us the material culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. After his warmly praised book Martin's Hundred, he now turns to the two earliest English outposts in Virginia -- Roanoke and James Towne -- and pieces together revelatory information extrapolated from the shards and postholes of excavations at these sites with contemporary accounts found in journals, letters, and official records of the period. He illuminates narratives that have a mythic status in our early history: the exploits of Sir Walter Ralegh, Captain John Smith, and Powhatan; the life and death of Pocahontas; and the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. He recounts a recent important excavation at Roanoke where he and his colleagues found the work site of a metallurgist named Joachim Gans, whose findings about the mineral wealth of Virginia helped to convince London merchants that America was a worthy risk This is an account of high and low adventure, of noble efforts and base impulses, and of the inevitably tragic interactions between Indians and Europeans, marked by greed, treachery, and commonplace savagery on both sides. The astonishment of this history is that despite bad luck, bad management, and bad blood, the English presence in America persisted and the Virginia settlements survived as the birthplace of a country founded on English law and language.

With clarity, authority, and elegant wit, Noel Hume has enhanced our understanding of the historical forces and principal players behind England's first perilous ventures into the New World, and proved again that he is without a doubt one of the great interpreters of our early colonial past.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an elegantly written tour de force of history and archeology, Hume (Martin's Hundred) tells a dark tale of two cities. One, the earliest English colony in North America, Roanoke Island, off North Carolina, was settled briefly in 1584 by a colonizing expedition organized by Sir Walter Raleigh; a subsequent group of colonists disappeared without a trace by 1590. Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in America, founded in 1607, was plagued by greedy, feuding administrators, bad management from London, disease, starvation, the colonists' "self-defeating slothfulness," and their paralyzing fear of Indians and of one another, according to Hume, chief archeologist at Colonial Williamsburg. Enlivened by period engravings, paintings, maps, photographs of sites and artifacts, this saga of Anglo-Native American relations shattered by English arrogance and disdain is peopled with astonishing figures like British captain Samuel Argall, who kidnapped Algonquian chief Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas and held her for ransom, and sinister Spanish diplomat/spymaster Pedro de Zuniga who did his best to scuttle the English adventure. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In his latest book since Martin's Hundred (LJ 3/15/82), Hume, chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg for 35 years, brings his diverse talents to bear on the historical archaeology of the Roanoke and James Fort (later James Towne) settlements. Drawing extensively on firsthand accounts and other textual sources, he conjures up the feel of the Elizabethan experience that gave life to these settlements. His rendering of settlers and Indians is robust, often tragic, and rich in insight based on his own study of the period. Equally enthralling is his ability to move the reader back and forth in time. Hume also includes masterly and generous accounts of the history of the excavation of these sites and offers his well-informed views on where future work needs to be done. Written with wit, compassion, and tremendous attention to detail, this is historical archaeology at its best. It should appeal to a wide audience of lay readers and scholars interested in the beginning of British American culture in the New World.
Joan Gartland, Detroit P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 491 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (September 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394564464
• ISBN-13: 978-0394564463
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,926,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars making history come alive, January 18, 2007

By 

Jfray (Virginia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne (Virginia Bookshelf) (Paperback)

I am not an historian and primarily bought this book because I was confused by my children's elementary school's lessons on Jamestown. Well, this book was a fascinating trip - gives great insight into the whole turn of the 17th century era as well as a "never will be found in elementary school textbooks" look at the beginnings of the US, and true aspirations and difficulties of the English adventurers. With his dry wit and acceptance of human shortcomings, Mr. Hume managed to make the journey, even when macabre and disillusioning, enjoyable. Details and difficulties of the archeology are put into the context of both the original settlers and the archeologists of the past century.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Virginia Adventure, September 13, 2005

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Jim McCall "jhmcsb" (Solana Beach, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne (Virginia Bookshelf) (Paperback)

One of the best resources for preparing for the forthcoming quadricentenary of the founding of Jamestowne. A must-read to learn about the genesis of our American culture and history.

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent treatment of the establishment of Virginia, February 11, 2011

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne: An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey (Hardcover)

Anyone with a serious interest in colonial Virginias knows (or ought to know) about this author. I first encountered him though his earlier work on Tidewater archaeology, Martin's Hundred, which was a marvel of both scholarship and accessible writing. This subsequent work shows that wasn't just a fluke. Roanoke was the project of Sir Walter Raleigh, the first attempt in 1586 to plant an English settlement in "Virginia" (which meant the entire eastern seaboard), and it was a dismal failure for an assortment of reasons. When the supply ship, which was delayed far beyond the intended schedule, finally returned, the settlement on the swampy little island behind the barrier islands of North Carolina was completely empty, thereby creating America's first unsolved mystery. There have been many theories since, but most .likely the English settlers were dispossessed by the local Indians and either killed or carried off and absorbed. (The Indians weren't naïve about the long-range intentions of these light-skinned strangers.) But Noël Hume is an archaeologist and he's less interested in speculating about the fate of the colonists than in uncovering the traces they left behind -- of which there aren't many. However, being the chief archaeologist at Williamsburg, he's also more interested in his own back yard; Roanoke takes up less than a quarter of the book, the rest of which is given over to the establishment and survival struggles of Jamestown, the first (more or less) successful English colony, which was begun in 1607, a generation after Raleigh. It's amazing that Jamestown held on at all, given the lack of organization of those involved, their fixation on discovering gold rather than planting crops, their tendency to strut and argue among themselves, and their general lack of understanding of how to deal with the natives. And then there's Capt. John Smith, one of the greatest self-promoting blowhards America has ever produced. When Jamestown, which was very poorly situated for any purpose, was finally abandoned in favor of Williamsburg, the signs of the first settlement largely faded away, though the land continued to be planted and lived on. Subsequent generations knew where Jamestown's fort and village were, more or less, and amateur historians and plundering treasure hunters made a mess of the site, to the grief of modern archaeologists. Noël Hume leads the reader carefully through the story of the settlement's creation, pinning down his descriptions with the artifacts people have found and their interpretations, and comparing life in Jamestown with other sites in Virginia as well as with contemporary Britain. He tells the stories of Capt. Smith and Pocahontas and John Rolfe, and of all the less well-known early settlers (some of my own forebears among them), citing historical sources and sifting fact from folklore. And he does it all in an elegant, self-deprecating, and slightly cynical style that is a joy to read. The last section of the book deals with the modern rivalries among archaeologists and self-important Virginia patriots, which still continue. And the extended bibliography will keep you busy well into the future.