The Jamestown Project

About this book

Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman Host: Chris Gondek Producer: Heron & Crane Captain John Smiths 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe been sold as a war captive in Turkey escaped and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Companys colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants merchants and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire Africa and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kuppermans breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestowns failure she shows how the settlements distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies including Plymouth. Capturing Englands intoxication with a wider world through ballads plays and paintings and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.