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The Jamestown Project
by Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Harvard University Press
March 2007, 360 pages, $29.95

Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of
America
by Benjamin Woolley
HarperCollins
April 2007, 469 pages, $27.50

by Carlin Romano
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)

After 400 years, it's time to see Jamestown clearly

All nations need foundation tales. If they don’t exist, it’s necessary to
invent them. And if the real story doesn’t play well, foundation myths come
in handy. At least until the real story comes back to bite.

Israel in its early days liked to recycle the stirring slogan of “a land
without people for a people without land.” Zionists or not, Israelis today
don’t buy the first part of that line. Taiwan for decades presented itself
as the legitimate government of mainland China, sentenced to a kind of
enforced sabbatical across the water. No more.

And France? It still can’t look at itself in the mirror. As its new
president Nicolas Sarkozy declared, France remains an egalitarian republic
“at the side of the world’s oppressed,” ushered in by the French
Revolution. Pay no attention to those smashed boutique windows in the Place
de la Bastille the other night or the roll-call way back at the same Place
during France’s post-revolution Reign of Terror.

Philadelphians know better than most that the United States also trades in
foundation myths, because the nation’s birth continues as a prominent part
of our present. For a long time, slavery’s spot in the triumphalism of the
American Revolution received hardly a nod, a distortion now receding even
on Independence Mall.

NYU historian Karen Kupperman expertly articulates another traditional
foundation tale in The Jamestown Project, a superb, clear-eyed history
timed to the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Va., by 104
colonists. As the first permanent English settlement in America, Jamestown
became a project marked by starvation, mass death, abuse of American
Indians and despondency before the enterprise finally righted itself.

“Americans prefer to think of Plymouth colony in New England as our true
foundation,” Kupperman writes at the outset of her brisk study. In our
“agreed-upon national story,” she explains, we portray the Pilgrims, who
arrived 13 years after Jamestown’s start, as “the direct opposite of the
Jamestown group. They were humble people who wanted only a place to worship
God as they saw fit, and they lived on terms of amity with one another and
with the neighboring Indians. ... They occupied family farms and were
content with self-sufficiency. They are the forbears we prefer to
acknowledge.”

In contrast, Jamestown appeared a collection of “greedy, grasping colonists
in America and their arrogant backers in England,” a “shambles of death and
despair” in which half of the original colonists died within four months,
along with 75 percent of the 6,000 who came between 1607 and 1624. Killed
by typhoid, dysentery and salt poisoning, and often at each other’s
throats, they also paid a price for their “belligerent intrusions” on the
local Indians. That slowly turned the latter against them, culminating in a
1622 massacre of more than 300 Jamestown colonists. To make matters worse,
Jamestown’s legacy included the first North American use of African slaves
in its scramble for tobacco profits to keep the colony alive.

Kupperman’s accurate, balanced take on the relative roles of Jamestown and
Plymouth in our collective memory acknowledges Jamestown’s sins, yet
credits the earlier colony with painfully forging the business and
political model—capitalist, representative democracy—that permitted English
civilization to endure in the New World. The Pilgrims, she notes, “studied
Jamestown’s record.”

One result of our historical favoring of Plymouth is that most Americans
remain ignorant of basic Jamestown facts, a lacuna that Kupperman fills, as
does prizewinning British author and broadcaster Benjamin Woolley in his
jazzier Savage Kingdom. The story of the Pilgrims comes back to us when we
eat turkey at Thanksgiving. Since we don’t annually eat rats or a salted,
murdered, pregnant wife—both part of Jamestown’s “creation story from
hell,” in Kupperman’s phrase—we’re foggy on details. For every American
familiar with Capt. John Smith’s supposed romance with the 10-year-old
Indian princess Pocahontas—by all accounts apocryphal, though she did marry
Smith’s fellow colonist John Rolfe and die at 21—few know the miseries of
Jamestown’s “Starving Time.”

The historical minutiae Kupperman and Woolley provide tell us much about
America’s ethos, then and now. Like almost all European ventures in the New
World, Jamestown started as a business project by venture capitalists,
meant to return quick profit to investors. It succeeded because the people
involved in it—the “rank and file,” according to Kupperman, rather than the
elites—wouldn’t let it fail. Yet an ugly part of Jamestown’s survival is
that it came only after colonists, following the 1622 massacre, dropped the
Virginia Company’s “policy of appeasing the Indians” (in Woolley’s
language) and decided to wreak whatever violence on them that they
considered necessary, largely destroying them through superior numbers and
arms.

Savage Kingdom narrates a popular, breathless, frequently shoot-’em-up
version of this whole story right to what Woolley calls the “brutal autumn”
of 1623, when Jamestown colonists attacked the Indians, and one young
leader, Henry Spelman, had his severed head thrown back at his 26 men by
the local Pawtuxunt tribe.

Savage Kingdom—note that title—offers a summer-blockbuster version of
Jamestown, full of action tempo, and a tilt against Kupperman’s credo that
Jamestown remains best understood as a corporate project that evolved.
Woolley’s rhetoric booms as he writes of “flawed, dispossessed, desperate
people trying to reinvent themselves ... caught in a dirty struggle to
survive, haunted by failure, hungering for escape, dreaming of riches and
hoping for redemption.”

While both authors recognize that 17th-century claims of spreading
Christianity west often camouflaged greed, Woolley more strongly interprets
Jamestown as a patrician project usurped by ordinary colonists. That’s
symbolized most enduringly by John Smith, whose belief in an “abounding
America” open for the taking ultimately overran every other force. Read
Woolley for fun, Kupperman for sure-handed scholarly context.

Both, by the way, should be faulted for paying no attention to “a greene
Country Towne” founded in 1681 to “always be wholsome,” a place for the
persecuted, a site of peace with the Indians, a city of brotherly love.
That city also helps explain what the United States became.

One of America’s many glories as the world’s foremost free-expression
society is that real stories eclipse foundation myths century by century,
however tortuously. Proud of the beautiful ideals enshrined in our birth
documents, well-educated Americans today nonetheless also understand the
shameful elements of our history, from the assault on the Indians to the
slavery that survived a Constitution aimed at ensuring individual freedom.

Anniversaries help in that regard—they focus the nation’s attention and
galvanize authors and publishers to take stock. Queen Elizabeth and
President Bush dropped by Jamestown.

And truth, not truthiness, is on the way.
— 18 May 2007