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Introduction Sea Changes John Wood Sweet One of the stranger exports of early Virginia was a new English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published in London in 1626.1 It was the work of the colony’s erstwhile treasurer, George Sandys, who insisted in his preface that he did it in his spare time, presumably by candlelight.2 Sandys had come to Virginia with an ambitious vision of the colony’s future: he was to oversee its transformation from a disorderly, tobacco-crazed outpost into a stable, populous, and productive extension of the mother country. Perhaps his time was better spent in this work of scholarship and poetry: it is a fine translation, still in print almost four hundred years later. In any case, during his tenure the affairs of the Virginia colony were transformed by a series of disasters that he could probably have done little to control. Early in the morning of March 22, 1622, only six months after he arrived, the colony was nearly wiped out by a well-coordinated attack of an alliance of local natives that simultaneously slaughtered settlers at their outposts along Chesapeake Bay and the James River. In the months to come, many of the survivors who regrouped at Jamestown—and hundreds of new settlers sent to fortify the colony—died of disease and starvation. The Virginia Company of London, the joint-stock company that sponsored the colossally expensive venture, already weakened by disputes over the colony’s future, faced bankruptcy. And Parliament launched an investigation that threatened the company with the loss of its royal charter. So perhaps we should not blame Sandys, thousands of miles from home, in this crude, beleaguered colony, for being a bit obsessed with Ovid and the heritage of classical civility he represented—looking back to the celebrated legacy of the Roman empire, which had reshaped the world around the Mediterranean, as the English ventured into a dangerous, enticing New World that was then taking shape around the shores of the Atlantic. Perhaps he identified with Ovid, who had been sent by Augustus away from Rome and into exile in a remote province. And perhaps, in his enthusiasm for the English venture in Virginia, Sandys missed some of Ovid’s ironic tone and his running critique of Roman imperialism.3 In any case, it would 2 John Wood Sweet be wrong to dismiss Sandys’s interest in the legacy of the Roman empire as an escapist fantasy. For many English political leaders and promoters of overseas colonization, an idealized view of ancient Rome helped them envision —and justify—what they wanted to do in America. Nowadays, we often imagine that the Virginia settlers were motivated almost exclusively by a drive for profit, but—as we are reminded by Sandys’s obsession with Ovid, by conflicts within the company, and by crucial role played by the region’s natives—the visions of those involved in the Virginia venture were actually much more complicated, ambitious, and contested. The purpose of this volume is to better understand the various visions that shaped early Virginia—and, more broadly, to rethink our basic assumptions about the relationships between ideas and actions, between ideology and interests, between events and the contexts that gave them meaning. The idea for this collaboration grew out of a set of discussions at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Jamestown in the Atlantic World sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and directed by Karen Ordahl Kupperman.4 Robert Appelbaum and I emerged from those discussions convinced that we need to redraw the ‘‘map’’ of the early Atlantic world in two basic ways. In recent years, scholars have begun to recognize that European colonies in North America can be better understood in terms of an emerging Atlantic world; but we felt that Anglo-American historians need to remember that this world included Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as Africa and the Americas. Consequently, we sought out experts in who could help us understand the networks, alliances , and rivalries that encompassed not only England and the Powhatan chiefdom, but also Spain, France, the West Indies, Ireland, Morocco, and Turkey. In addition, we were convinced that Jamestown should be understood not simply as a historical event in the customary sense, but also as a literary phenomenon. For it was largely by way of the written word that participants defined their positions in this emerging world. Bringing together the perspectives of both historians and literary scholars, this collection...

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