Creation Myths

Historically Speaking March/April 2007 Creation Myths* Karen Ordahl Kupperman In May 1607 a party of just over a hundred men and boys landed on theJames River in Virginia and planted die colony they namedJamestown in honor of the English king. The litde colony struggled through a horrible first decade in which it barely held on before the settlers began to find their footing on the path diat would lead to stability and, eventually , success. Jamestown has always occupied an equivocal position in American history. It is celebrated as the first permanent English settlement in the territory that would become die United States. These colonists planted the tiny seed from which would grow a powerful nation where all the world's people would mingle. And yet Jamestown makes us uncomfortable . The portrait of it that has come down to us depicts greedy, grasping colonists in America and dieir arrogant backers in England. The settlement's first years were marked by belligerent intrusions on the Chesapeake Algonquians, which manifested mainly the ignorance of the English. Within Jamestown, life degenerated into a shambles of death and despair. When John Rolfe finally developed a marketable crop—tobacco—the colonists exploited the land and one another in the scramble for profits. Ultimately they would institute slavery for imported Africans in their insatiable search for profits. This is the creation story from hell. Americans prefer to think of Plymouth colony in New England as our true foundation. This 1620 setdement, also composed of just over a hundred people, was a Puritan foundation; about half of the settlers were separatists, that is, Puritans who considered the Church of England so hopelessly corrupt that they separated themselves from it completely. By contrast, the Puritans who setded Massachusetts Bay a decade later remained nominally within the established church. The Pilgrims at Plymouth, in our agreed-upon national story, are portrayed as the direct opposites of the Jamestown group. They were humble people who wanted only a place to worship God as diey saw fit, and they lived * Excerpted from TheJamestown Project by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, published in March 2007 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2007 by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Used by Permission . All rights reserved. Jamestown makes us uncomfortable . Theportrait of it that has come down to us depicts greedy, grasping colonists in America and their arrogant backers in England. on terms of amity with one another and with the neighboring Indians, relationships memorialized in die First Thanksgiving. They occupied family farms and were content with self-sufficiency. These are the forebears we prefer to acknowledge. But by examining the maelstrom of previous plans and experiences that converged on die James, we can see the genuine accomplishment that emerged from the apparentwreckage wrought by the planters, and the efforts of the rank and file who largely brought it about. In fact, through a decade's trial and error, Jamestown's ordinary setders and their backers in England figured out what it would take to make an English colony work. This was an enormous accomplishment achieved in a very short period of time, a breakthrough that none of the other contemporaneous ventures was able to make. The ingredients for success —widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assembly, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy—were beginning to be put in place by 1618 and were in full operation by 1620, when the next successful colony, Plymouth, was planted. Thus the Pilgrims were able to be relatively successful (after a disastrous first year) because they had studied Jamestown's record and had learned its lessons . Jamestown was not just the earliest English colony to survive; its true priority lies in its inventing the archetype of English colonization. All other successful English colonies followed the Jamestown model. England was a laggard in overseas ventures. By 1606, when the Virginia Company was organized and plans for the colony were laid, English merchants in collaboration with political leaders had begun to establish a role for their nation in the newly opening trades around the...