A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda?

Introduction

1 ears before the Mayflower set sail, English colonists in the New World confronted Native peoples and set the stage for savagery and slavery. In the early 1600s a series of disasters, miscalculations , and intrigues—each with unintended consequences and unanswered questions—changed the history of the New World and left a legacy that shaped attitudes toward race and culture in America for four hundred years. This book explores seventeenth-century narratives, letters , public records, and the recent work of historians and archaeologists to compel us to look again at what we know—and what we may never know—about America’s beginnings. In the past few years, colonial historians have begun to widen the focus of their studies to a larger perspective: the transatlantic world. It is no longer enough to examine the history of a particular colony, or, indeed, the history of the United States, within its narrow boundaries on the map. As the globe shrinks due to modern technology and communications, its history enlarges. Earlier generations were content to know America’s history as the narrative of European (mostly English) settlers who came to the New World in search of freedom and a better life. Often omitted from this narrative were the histories of Native Americans who were forced off their lands and of Africans who were brought to the new land against their will. Overlooked as well were the histories of other nations whose aims and actions were inextricably bound up—and sometimes in conflict —with those of the English. The history of colonial America is not as simple as it used to be. Besides learning to paint on a larger canvas, colonialists must deal with a perennial problem: evidence. Whereas historians of later periods are faced with the task of selecting from a wealth of evidence—documents, newspapers, journals, photographs, films, and audio recordings—colonial historians have the opposite problem: too little material. They must seize upon every scrap of evidence they can find, constructing their histories Introduction Y A Tale of two colonies 2 from shards and shreds, pieces of a vast jigsaw puzzle whose borders are missing and whose images are unclear.Often a single source—the writings of Capt. John Smith, for instance—must be parsed and stretched to fill in gaps in what happened, or what may have happened, in the past. The same is true for William Strachey’s narrative of the Sea Venture’s shipwreck on Bermuda. Smith’s 1608 pamphlet, A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened in Virginia, was the first published account about England’s newest colony.How truthful was he? Scholars disagree . But Smith’s writings, especially his monumental Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), are the basis of what we know about early Virginia. There are a handful of accounts by Smith’s contemporaries, some of whom were his enemies. The earliest records of the Virginia Company have been lost. Existing documents must be compared and analyzed, their writers’ circumstances studied and set against those of other writers. For example, George Percy, who wrote a narrative of the 1610 “Starving Time” in Virginia, intensely disliked John Smith and hoped to discredit his leadership as well as his writings. In making sense of what happened four hundred years ago, documents and their authors are only parts of the puzzle. Audiences must be considered : in an age of widespread illiteracy (about one-third of the people in England in the early 1600s could read), how was information spread? As we shall see, hearsay and rumors about early Virginia and Bermuda flew like arrows, and sometimes inflicted wounds. Historians face other problems: maps have damaged edges or faded lines; journals and letters are partly illegible or have missing pages. And there are the absent voices: Indians and Africans. Their histories must be extracted from the traces they left on the land and from the writings of Europeans who observed them. In the end, some sort of narrative emerges—but how close is it to what really happened? This history of early Virginia and Bermuda is a tale of events and actions that produced unintended consequences. A hurricane struck the largest fleet that England ever sent to Virginia and wrecked the flagship Sea Venture on Bermuda. In Virginia a mysterious, near-fatal accident incapacitated John Smith, and he had to return to England. In London the joint-stock enterprise known as the Virginia Company, mistakenly assuming that...