Lost in Jamestown

David A. Price. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003. 305 pp. Maps and index. $25.95.

To David Price, sex and violence lay at the center of the encounter between the English and the Powhatans in the formative years of Jamestown. Though Price is not an academic historian, his examination of these human emotions is based on the same kinds of documents and secondary sources that scholars have been reading for years. With the 400^th anniversary of Jamestown's founding soon upon us, this book will no doubt reach a wide audience. While it is too soon to know if 2007 will feature the kinds of public spectacles that have greeted other commemorations, notably the bicentennials of 1976 and 1987, it seems a safe bet that Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and the other denizens of that marsh on the shores of the James River will soon become even more prominent fixtures in American culture. Maybe an enterprising company will even persuade some major Hollywood figure like Mel Gibson to voice the part of Smith in a cartoon version of this history.

To those who know the early history of Jamestown already, Price's version has little to add, at least to our understanding of what happened in the Chesapeake region almost four centuries ago. He begins with the voyage of the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, essentially the English version of the trio of legendary ships that Columbus led westward over a century earlier. Those who had funded the venture stayed behind, no doubt sensible that the risks were too high. As Price notes, the "colony's ultimate success would come at a fearsome price: disease, hunger, and hostile natives left behind a toll of misery and death" (p. 4). But those troubles lay in the future for the men and women who boarded the three ships, "most of them with pure hearts and empty heads, expecting to find riches, welcoming natives, and an easy life on the other shore"—most of them, that is, apparently ignorant of earlier English experiences in the Americas and elsewhere (p. 13).

Much of Price's tale pivots around the storied relationship between Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas, who was perhaps fourteen years old when the English arrived in 1607. Price uses the documents to recreate a crucial series of moments between these three protagonists, but recognizes too the crucial role of others—the domineering John Ratcliffe, whose arrogance contributed to his own execution at the hands of the Powhatans; the settler George Percy, whose description of what the colonists experienced has provided perhaps the greatest insight into the horrors of being English on the shores of the Chesapeake in these years; and Powhatan's brother Opechancanough, headman of the Pamunkeys, who studied Smith's compass after the English captain was captured in late 1607 searching for a river that he hoped would lead deep into the continent's interior. Throughout, the narrative emphasizes Smith's actions, which is hardly a surprising tactic since Smith himself eventually provided so much evidence about these early years. Price has a keen eye for the telling anecdote and a journalist's ability to recognize the dramatic value of certain moments. He spins out Pocahontas's famed rescue of Smith, one of those moments that, as he claims, "is, in all probability, the most often told tale in American history, inspiring drama, novels, paintings, statuary, and films" (pp. 67-8). Price knows that tragedy stalked early Jamestown, evident (by the end of the book) in the first appearance of Africans in the community and then the violence of 1622-1624. He tells a rich story, based primarily on modern editions of well-known documents.

Price has found in these remarkable accounts details that bring this corner of the seventeenth-century world to life. The smallest of those three ships that arrived in 1607 had a deck that was about...