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  • A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? by Virginia Bernhard
  • Nicholas G. Faraclas
Virginia Bernhard. 2011. A Tale of Two Colonies: What really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8262-1951-0.0

For anyone interested in the social, economic, ideological, and political factors that gave rise to racialized plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas on the one hand, and to the emergence of the United States of America as well as many of the other nations of the western hemisphere on the other, Virginia Bernhard’s detailed and revealing historical study titled, A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? is essential reading. This insightful and reader-friendly account of the initial English attempts to colonize Virginia and Bermuda between the 1580s and the 1620s provides us with a careful and brutally honest reconstruction of the naked plunder, unbridled greed, festering corruption, unabashed hypocrisy, and systematic disrespect for human life and welfare which not only characterized the founding of the first two permanent English colonies in the Americas, but which in countless ways have also come to define much of the rest of the historical trajectories of the current and former English colonies in the region, especially that of the USA.

Bernhard is not by any means the first historian to have demonstrated that the bulk of existing archival, archaeological, and other evidence roundly contradicts almost every aspect of the grand narratives of valor, enlightened humanity, and moral rectitude that have been promoted by too many other historians who have studied the founding of colonial societies in the Caribbean and the United States. What makes this volume special, however, is the systematic, straightforward and nonpolemical manner in which it configures this evidence. In a disarmingly convincing way, Bernhard effectively unmasks the anti-working class biases and alarming lack of accountability to the facts that typify the army of historians who have lent their legitimizing voices to the construction of the dominant discourses concerning the ‘glorious’ establishment of European Empires, of the ‘enlightened’ development of Virginia and the other Thirteen Colonies which eventually became the USA, and of the ‘heroic’ conquest of the American Frontier, all of which have saturated history textbooks and the popular media worldwide.

It is too often overlooked that during the century that followed [End Page 276] Columbus’ first arrival in the Americas, the entire English colonial enterprise worldwide was a pitiful parody of the prevailing narrative of Anglo-Saxon political and moral superiority projected in the history books. Before the establishment of Virginia and Bermuda in the early 1600s, numerous attempts had been made by the English to found colonies in North and South America as well as in the Caribbean, but each and every one failed miserably, so that their activities were limited to the parasitic and pitiless pilfering of Spanish settlements and shipping in precious metals and slaves.

Although these points could have been made more explicitly and effectively by Bernhard in this volume, her meticulously collected evidence on the life histories of the leaders of the various expeditions to Virginia and Bermuda and of the first administrators of these colonies reveals that virtually all had spent the previous decades mobilized against the Spanish as pirates (‘privateers’) on the high seas and/or as mercenaries in the Netherlands. Bernhard also mentions in passing the disastrously abortive attempt by the English to establish a colony in Roanoke just south of Jamestown in 1587, and demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that at several junctures between 1607 and 1623, Virginia came extremely close to sharing the fate of Roanoke and so many of the other English fiascos, had it not been for what she in her final analysis can only characterize as an amazing series of providential lucky breaks.

What Bernhard does not challenge in this instance, however, is the prevailing mythology concerning the ‘mysterious disappearance’ of the Roanoke settlers by 1590. Linebaugh & Rediker (2000) and other historians have convincingly demonstrated that the colonists in Roanoke actually ran off to live in abundance and freedom with the...

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