Virginia Company Research Articles

The Warwick: results of the survey of an early 17th-century Virginia Company ship

The Warwick was wrecked during a hurricane in Castle Harbour, Bermuda, in 1619, whilst en route to Jamestown, Virginia. Operating as a magazine ship for the Virginia Company, the vessel was carrying supplies, settlers and colonial officials. The Warwick represents not only a suspected late 16th-century all-purpose warship, but also a merchantman that played a fundamental role in supplying the English colonies in North America at the beginning of the 17th century. Although only a small test area of the wreck was surveyed, the preserved starboard side of the vessel revealed significant structural features, shedding new light on the development of English shipbuilding.

The Founding of English America: Jamestown

Late in 1609 the Virginia Company of London published a lengthy justification, A True and Sincere Declaration, arguing that investors should continue to support the Company's beleaguered colony at Jamestown. Earlier in the year, the Company had dispatched a fleet of eight ships carrying over five hundred colonists bound for Virginia. Little more than a week from reaching the American coast, the fleet was caught in a hurricane that drove its principal ship, the Sea Venture, far out to sea where she was believed lost. Hearing the grievous news in the fall, the Company rallied to a bold defense of why they and their supporters should persist with plans for Virginia. The “main ends” of the colony, the Company asserted, were to bring the Christian religion to the Indians, take possession of a new land for the English, and produce commodities that would be of value to the...

Prayers for Purses

This essay explores the trope of “compensation” in the sermons which helped promote Virginia Company activities in early seventeenth-century England. Not only were these sermons, in and of themselves, made to compensate for the lack of material gain or for the ill fate of prior English ventures to the same or adjacent areas, but, in their content and tone, they also used the trope of compensation as a means to redress a long series of historical, ideological, and socioeconomic aspects in which England's colonial venture had been, and still was, defective. At the same time, the preachers commissioned to write and deliver these sermons – some of them, like William Crashaw, active participants in the Company's enterprises – also employed rhetoric in order to create a convenient place for themselves in the “new” England they were promoting along with these ventures sent across the Atlantic.

Patronage and Competing Visions of Virginia in George Chapman's The Memorable Masque (1613)

AbstractLike the discourses of the colonial enterprise circulating during the period in which it was commissioned, written, and produced, George Chapman's The Memorable Masque, which was written to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, registers the nation's conflicted and in many ways incoherent vision of the Jacobean Virginia enterprise. Three satellites of patronage, each with its own colonial investments and ideologies, are given voice: the sponsoring Inns of Court, whose organizers were prominent members of the Virginia Company; the court of the recently deceased Prince Henry, Chapman's patron and a Ralegh‐sympathizer who directed the early course of the marriage festivities; and the court of James I, who established the terms under which the Virginia Company of London operated. Each of the major segments of the entertainment—procession, antimasque, masque, and epithalamium—differently articulates the Virginia colonial project by drawing on the peculiar idioms of the s...

The well-ordered commonwealth: Humanism, utopian perfectionism, and the English colonization of the Americas

This article utilizes the earliest English attempts to colonize the Americas as a lens through which to examine the assumptions held by elite Englishmen regarding the role of Indians and non-elites in their colonies. It focuses on the plans for, and experience of, colonizing Roanoke in the 1580s as a way to contextualize the later colonization effort at Jamestown. In these earlier failed attempts at colonization, patrician Englishmen began to espouse their grand plans for incorporating Native Americans into the social structure of England during this period. Specifically, they sought to erect in Virginia a well-ordered commonwealth in accordance with a utopian attitude best expressed by Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century and further refined by English thinkers, writers, and colonial advocates such as Richard Hakluyt, William Shakespeare, and Sir Thomas Smith. According to their own documents, they firmly believed that Indians, once “civilized,” would take their place alongside the majority of Englishmen as members of the plebeian class. The proprietors and officials of the Virginia Company bought into these ideas as well, and they brought them with them to Jamestown. Therefore, the origins of these early notions concerning the Native American place in the colonial English social structure provide valuable clues to the eventual relationships that developed on the Virginia mainland during the seventeenth century.

“A continuall and dayly Table for Gentlemen of fashion”: Humanism, Food, and Authority at Jamestown, 1607–1609

THE STORY OF JAMESTOWN’S FIRST YEARS is often told as a tardy, frail, and fumbling beginning for English settlement in the New World. Undermined by its leaders’ stubborn and often brutal pursuit of unrealistic plans, Jamestown found salvation in the form of tobacco monoculture, which the Virginia Company neither intended nor fully embraced. The logic of tobacco cultivation led to an insatiable desire for land and labor that culminated in the violent expulsion of the Chesapeake’s native population and the establishment of African slavery. The turmoil and violence of Jamestown’s beginning, in this telling, were problems that prefigured their solution in the establishment of a regime of racial exclusion and exploitation. Recent literature has put forward a substantially different interpretation by situating Jamestown in a broad sixteenth-century context. For promoters of English settlement such as the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, the Virginia Company’s project was the culmination of a lifetime’s work collecting, translating, and publishing travel accounts. Hakluyt and others applied the lessons learned from Dutch, Portuguese, French, and especially Spanish efforts to the settlement at Jamestown, drawing also on English experiences in the Mediterranean, in Ireland, and elsewhere in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, what makes Jamestown important is not its singularity as the first permanent English settlement, but the links between the Virginia Company’s effort and those that came before it. Jamestown represents an especially well-planned and well-documented project that offers valuable insights into the political and social ideas that shaped the early English Atlantic world as a whole.1

Simon de Passe's cartographic portrait of Captain John Smith and a new England (1616/7)

The complex image John Smith New England 1 — designed and engraved by Simon de Passe (c.1595–1647) 2 and printed in London by one George Low in 1616/7 — has attracted the attention of many histori...

Dating William Strachey's 'A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates': A Comparative Textual Study

In their article published in the September 2007, Review of English Studies, Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky claim that a letter written by William Strachey drew on several sources published after its putative composition date of 15 July 1610, and was completed at least 2 years later, too late to be used by Shakespeare as a source for The Tempest. But a close textual comparison between the letter, the published sources and other contemporary documents, including a relatively newly discovered draft of the Strachey letter, demonstrate the primacy of Strachey's letter and confirms its use as a source in the Virginia Company tract published in November 1610, therefore preserving its accessibility as a source for Shakespeare.

The English empire in America, 1602-1658: beyond Jamestown

This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century. Roper explores how the early development of the colony was viewed from both sides of the Atlantic, using the documentary record of key figures in the Virginia Company, as well as the colonizers themselves. He paints a vivid picture of a political culture characterized by patronage, the pursuit of personal agendas and fierce grappling for factional advantage, as ‘Old World’ political behaviour was successfully transplanted to the colony. At the same time however, he shows how local concerns and identity competed with the Stuart monarchy’s attempts to centralize state affairs on the other side of the Atlantic.Roper rejects the prevailing view of the early colonisers, the Virginia Company and Crown ministers as bumbling incompetents whose mismanagement nearly caused the failure of the Jamestown project. Rather, he argues, they had a clear sense of purpose for the colony, and successfully adapted and crafted inherited political systems to a very new situation.

The Migration of the Muses: Translation and the Origins of American Poetry

The Migration of the MusesTranslation and the Origins of American Poetry Joanne van der Woude (bio) In a 1626 poem to George Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company and resident of Jamestown colony, Michael Drayton envisions the American future of poetry: And (worthy GEORGE) by industry and use, Let’s see what lines Virginia will produce; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intice the Muses thither to repair, Intreat them gently, trayne them to that ayre, For they from hence may thither hap to fly. (3: 207–08, lines 37–45) Praising Sandys’s translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1621), Drayton imagines the Muses may follow Sandys to Virginia, where, once trained and entreated, they will supply the artistic inspiration that is lacking in England. The image of the migration of the Muses was popular: two years later, it would be repeated by George Wither in Robert Hayman’s Quodlibets, Lately Come Over from . . . Newfound-land: Despaire not therefore, you that love the Muses If any Tyrant you, or yours abuses: For these will follow you, and make you mirth Ev’n at the furthest Angles of the Earth. (A4r) These poems suggest that the Muses are geographically flexible and willingly make their way to the New World, where they redeem and civilize its “uninhabited wastes.”1 This article takes the idea of the migration of the Muses (semi)seriously and considers the use of classical machinery in verse on Virginia, Newfoundland, and the New World holdings of the Netherlands, which was [End Page 499] the other major Protestant player in early modern imperialism. It argues that antiquity served as the primary literary paradigm for understanding and rendering American territories and peoples. Classicism constitutes a crucial, and largely overlooked, strategy of colonial representation, particularly in poetry. The migration of the Muses is a particularly apt image as many of these texts predate Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse (1650) and the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun and poet who is known in the Spanish world as the tenth Muse. These well-known and often-taught “muses” form part of the larger body of devotional texts that is traditionally taken as the starting point for American literary history. This article puts forth a different kind of canon: one that thoughtfully addresses the linguistic and cultural multiplicity of settler colonialisms, while building on the comparative perspectives pioneered by Ralph Bauer (Cultural Geography) and Anna Brickhouse. Given that poetry appears to be more frequently inspired by Hellenic and Roman materials than by religious fervor in the early Atlantic world, one wonders how such classical sources change when applied to the colonial context. Does the modernity of settlement and intercultural encounter, for instance, demand new modes of representation even from old texts? I argue that uncertainty, variability, and a search for verifiable truth in the colonial contact zone prompted a consistent turn to and reworking of classical sources in an attempt to systematically confer value upon New World experience.2 New World poetry was not an entirely novel phenomenon in the early seventeenth century. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyages to America were celebrated in verse by Thomas Churchyard and Stephen Parmenius in 1578 and 1582; George Chapman’s 1596 epic on Guiana repeated Raleigh’s image of the area as a virgin land; and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1599) included nonfictional narrative verse on travels for trade and exploration. Meanwhile, in Dutch, major poets including Joost van den Vondel and Caspar Barlaeus, as well as colonial administrators such as Pieter Stuyvesant, took to writing classically inspired verse on America. Many of these poems were acutely engaged in economies of print and colonial investment. Although Mary Fuller has argued that colonial poetry “seeks to promise and even enact a kind of conceptual domestication or cultivation” (47), lots of promotional verse actually featured rude, unlearned speakers, seemingly in keeping with Drayton’s idea that the cast-out figure of Poesie “must wander in the wildernesse” (3: 208, 56). The repeated use of purportedly [End Page 500] lay speakers—even Indians—points to an aesthetic of plainness and accessibility in these poems that exists in tension with their poetic...

The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America

The loss of the Sea Venture is among the most famous shipwrecks in history, for it inspired William Shakespeare to write his valedictory play The Tempest. Its contribution to history, however, is all but forgotten in the shadow cast by Captain John Smith's self-serving foundational account of saving the early Virginia colony. Lorri Glover and Daniel Smith have collaborated in a vivid, dramatic retelling of an alternative story of the rescue of the Jamestown settlers. The authors, who teach early American history at the Universities of Tennessee and Kentucky, respectively, have published books on social structure and family life in the early South. Drawing on long-neglected contemporary published sources and perhaps influenced by Shakespeare, in their turn, they have fashioned an exciting tale of a journey into fear, danger, loss, and recovery. At the center of their tale are the Sea Venture—a nearly new vessel of 300 tons burden—and its 150 passengers and crew dispatched by London investors of the Virginia Company in June 1609 as part of a large expedition to rescue the starving settlers at Jamestown. Instead of reaching America, the ship ran smack into a terrible hurricane that cast it and those on board on to St. George's Island in the Bahamas. Seduced by the island's pleasures, the castaways remained there for nearly a year and were riven by mutinies when their leaders ordered them to prepare to resume their journey to Virginia. The survivors built two small ships and sailed to devastated Jamestown where they began to rebuild America's first permanent colony, hence, the book's title.

The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company

The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne's Sermon to the Virginia Company Thomas Festa The record of John Donne's employment is not usually the first consideration of readers of his poetry. Still, in the background of the most influential twentieth-century criticism of the poet, the rakish wit of the Satyres, Elegies, and Songs and Sonets, now rightly placed in the historical context of his coterie, malingers about the edges of the Inns of Court, the Egerton and Drury households, Parliament—even the Virginia Company—eventually seeking preferment as a royal polemicist, a charismatic preacher, and then, finally, as the dean of St. Paul's. At the same time, it has become something of a critical commonplace to discuss Donne's "apostasy" in relation to his quest for patronage in the Jacobean court—a trend that makes especially clear the inextricable link between his religious conversion and his sense of worldly work1. Yet for critics who do not concede to the secularizing depreciation of his faith, Donne offers in his sermons a long and complex record of literary thought and performance that belies any simple biographical or Whiggish reading. Revaluations of the sermon as a central genre during [End Page 76] the reign of King James I have opened up this relatively neglected body of literature and discovered a virtual anatomy of early modern political life2. Donne's rhetorical mastery allows his various ambitions, whether professional or spiritual, to appear with great subtlety and effect in his sermons as in his poems. Moreover, the genre brings out his attitudes toward labor, with critical implications for understanding his politics3. One of the most revealing places in Donne's writings to appraise these attitudes is his sermon to the Virginia Company, preached on 13 November 1622, which throws Donne's theoretical abstractions about the redemptive value of work into stark contrast with the realities of the labor required to run the joint-stock operation—the Company's investors', the plantation's settlers', and the Native Americans', in addition to his own. In the context of New World speculation, the contradictions between Donne's humane admonition to charity toward the Indians and his legal justification for colonization cause him to formulate increasingly complex metaphorical relationships among trade, travel, and religious conversion. Donne's ongoing investment in these metaphoric "conversions" returns its richest and most complex figural dividend in the Virginia Company sermon, where the argument for redeeming the failed colonial venture centers on labor as a metaphysical conceit. When he publishes the sermon, Donne gives material form to the exchange of the homily for his honorarium of forty shillings, as he tells the members of the Virginia Company in the dedication: "after it was preach'd, it was not mine, but yours."4 As he put it in a letter to Sir [End Page 77] Thomas Roe, "I preached, by invitation of the Virginian Company, to an honorable auditory, and they recompenced me with a new commandment, in their Service, to printe that."5 The dedication calls attention to the sermon's underlying analogies between spiritual travail, publication, and mercantile travel: "now I am an Adventurer; if not to Virginia, yet for Virginia; for, every man, that Prints, Adventures" (Sermons, 4:264). According to early modern usage, an "adventurer" is not merely a traveler but also "one who undertakes, or shares in, commercial adventures or enterprises; a speculator." Like those who lay down the capital to fund the plantation, Donne risks vulnerability in consenting to print. To allow the sermon to be published is to make an investment of self that reads as self-effacement on behalf of the corporate entity and marks his labor "in their Service." Even as it openly advertises the patronage of the Company, which of course occasioned the writing, the rhetorical gesture of disavowal speaks loudly of Donne's unease at appearing in print7. Donne's labor and his time figure prominently: "For the Preaching of this Sermon, I was but under your Invitation; my Time was mine owne"; whereas "for the Printing of this Sermon, I am not onely under your Invitation, but under your Commandement" (Sermons, 4:264). Powerful members...

The End of the Gamble: The Termination of the Virginia Lotteries in March 1621*

The sudden cancellation of the Virginia lotteries during the first sitting of the parliament of 1621 was not part of a general parliamentary attack on monopolies but a calculated political act intended to pressure the Virginia Company of London to pay more taxes than required by its charter of 1612. The appropriate context for considering the cancellation is the financial difficulties of James I and the search for funds by Sir Lionel Cranfield. The cancellation coincided with a rejection of a new charter for the company, possibly incited by Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador in England. The cancellation of the lotteries was the most important turning point in the history of Jamestown and started the company on its downward spiral.

Knowledge and Experience in the Founding of Jamestown

Knowledge and Experience in the Founding of Jamestown Ken MacMillan (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007. x + 380 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $29.95. The year of Virginia's quadricentenary, long anticipated and planned for, has come and gone. Its celebration was witnessed by the development of specialized websites and marketing campaigns, the opening of an impressive reconstruction of Jamestown Fort, the organization of academic conferences and collected volumes derived from them, and the production of numerous histories for audiences ranging from young children to academic specialists.1 Within this embarrassment of riches, a familiar story emerges. Tales of John Smith, John Rolfe and Pocahontas, the Tsenacomoco Indians, an unsympathetic and avaricious Virginia Company in London, a disastrous first few years, a swampy landscape, an aggressive strain of tobacco, and elating and tragic stories of love, loss, cannibalism, and massacre all get healthy retellings. In The Jamestown Project, Karen Ordahl Kupperman covers the same ground, but does much more besides. Kupperman observes that although its "colonists planted the tiny seeds from which would grow a powerful nation . . . Jamestown makes us uncomfortable" (p. 1). Viewed in opposition to the Plymouth colony in New England, a Godly society that experienced friendly relations with neighboring Indians while creating self-sufficient family farms in emulation of English village life, Jamestown has been seen as a story of "greedy, grasping colonists in America and their arrogant backers in England" (p. 1). Kupperman challenges this false dichotomy by examining, first, a century's worth of plans and experiences leading up to the founding of Jamestown, and, second, a decade and a half's worth of "trial and error" that taught "Jamestown's ordinary settlers and their backers in England" how to make an English colony work (p. 2). The successful recipe included private ownership of land, the development of a sustainable economy through agricultural production, the establishment of a representative assembly, and the re-creation of normal English family life. By the time Plymouth was planted in 1620, all of these ingredients had been combined and tested in Virginia, which meant that the Pilgrims—who [End Page 15] had knowledge of the Jamestown experiences—did not have to go through the growing pains of their predecessors. Thus, while Jamestown's early history was as muddled and torpid as we have always been led to believe, "its true priority lies in its inventing the archetype of English colonization. All other successful colonies followed the Jamestown model" (p. 3). Kupperman presents her argument in nine chapters. The first five examine the knowledge and experience that ultimately led to the beginnings and survival of Jamestown. In chapters one and two, Kupperman argues that two major European events led to insular England's interest in new lands and trading opportunities. One event was the historical westward movement of Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, and, in the English perception, the belief that God revealed the New World in the sixteenth century so that reformed Christianity could be preached to its peoples. The other event was the exceptional spread and strength of the Ottoman Empire, which was seen both as a threat to Christian Europe and as an opportunity for adventurous young English men to gain advancement. These included future Roanoke and Virginia leaders such as Ralph Lane, William Strachey, George Sandys, and John Smith, whose harrowing tale of land and sea battles throughout Europe and Turkish captivity is, when recounted by such a fine writer as Kupperman, both exciting and instructive. These various events encouraged England to attain the financial resources necessary to resist Ottoman and Catholic threats, the latter of which were fought out during the Anglo-Spanish War between 1585 and 1604. In this context, England's early forays into West Africa (including Guinea, where a teenaged Martin Frobisher became a captive of the Portuguese), Muscovy, and the East Indies were attempts at achieving wealth and international prestige. By century's end, however, the English had found the south and east trades too difficult to break into and looked more favorably toward America, despite the fact that the disastrous Roanoke experiment had already taken place. In the next two chapters, Kupperman...

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: At one level I feel it might be more appropriate to allow John Grenier to defend his argument about the nature of the Virginian “feed fight.” Professor Fausz raises some interesting points of great interest to me, however, and so I will respond. Professor Fausz is surely right that Virginian expeditions against the Powhatans did on occasion take corn, or perhaps even harvest and keep the Indians' corn, rather than merely burn it. As he says, the poem “Good Newes from Virginia” undeniably states that corn was part of the pillage of Indian towns (“Good Newes from Virginia, 1623,” William and Mary Quarterly, July 1948, pp. 351–58). I might point out, though, that any poem from 1623 purporting to tell of “good” news surely had a propagandistic intent and was clearly seeking to reassure investors or potential immigrants that they would not starve. That said, I must disagree with the absolutist quality of his statements. Among other problems, standing corn can only be harvested (or even burned) at certain times of the year. While the Virginians recognized late summer as the season in which they could most easily harm the Indians through attacks on food supplies, that was also the season in which militiamen resisted serving (William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century, 1983, pp. 40–41). In short, not all expeditions were timed so as to catch Indian corn in the fields, ready for harvest. One letter suffices not only to indicate this problem, but also to show how frequently Indian food stores were actually burned and not just “cut down.” A letter from January 1623/4 noted that a Virginia force had “Cut downe theire Corne in all places,” but immediately followed up that comment with the intimation that they would have done even more except that the troops had run out of food, explaining that it was the “tyme of our gretest scarcitie, & noe reliefe to be founde amongste the Enemyes.” Furthermore, in the same letter, a later expedition claimed to have “burnt theire Howses, with a marvelous quantetie of Corne carryed by them into the woodes” (Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols., 1906–1935, IV, p. 451). They admitted that they could not carry it to their boats, but that proves yet another logistical truth: not all plunder could always be carried away and that which could not be carried was destroyed. (For an instance of some corn being destroyed and some carried away, see ibid., IV, pp.9–10.)

Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire

EARLY 1704: QUEEN ANNE'S WAR RAGES ON THE FRONTIERS OF EASTERN North America. Indian and European allies advance southward through forest on unsuspecting enemy villages. A surprise raid--defenders are quickly overpowered. Homes and churches are torched, captives are burned at stake while reciting religious verse, hundreds more file northward into slavery, and those who cannot keep up are butchered on trail. A fellowship of godly is decimated. This scene might well describe famous raids by French and Iroquois attackers on Deerfield and other towns in colonial Massachusetts, immortalized in contemporary survivors' accounts and revisited in dramatic detail by modern scholars. But, in fact, it more accurately depicts attacks eleven hundred miles to south by Carolina colonists and their Creek allies on Spanish mission villages of northern Florida. By August 1704 more than one thousand Apalachee and Timucuan Catholics had been killed or enslaved, many to be sold to West Indies. Thousands more fled to Louisiana or, disgusted by mission system and by Spaniards' inability to protect them, left voluntarily to relocate in Carolina. Slaughter, captivity, and flight hastened their virtual extinction as peoples; mission system, linchpin of Spanish colonialism in American Southeast since 1560s, was essentially destroyed. By any measure assault was far more destructive than its New England counterpart, forever changing face of Southeast with eradication of great majority of region's Catholics. But because of enduring grip of Puritans on public and scholarly imagination, Deerfield raid lives on in working vernacular of historians of early America, while annihilation of Florida missions is mostly known to a few specialists, remaining a largely obscure episode in southern geopolitical history and in growing literature on Indian slave trade. In fact, it was a turning point in both early American history and in religious history of South. (1) In a rare gaze southward, Perry Miller reminded us long ago that founding of Virginia was as much a religious enterprise as a commercial one and that English religion was present in earlier than in New England. (2) Still, in this four-hundredth anniversary year of Jamestown, we do well to remember that Catholicism was dominant form of Christianity in American long before Virginia Company's New World gambit. In 1570 Spanish Jesuits had begun a mission on a Chesapeake peninsula they called Ajacan, between two rivers English later named James and York. A year later, Indians destroyed mission and killed friars, but by early seventeenth century Spanish chain of missions stretched from coast of Georgia as far west as present-day Tallahassee, claiming many thousands of native converts. Just outside Gainesville, Florida, archaeologists recently uncovered remains of San Francisco de Potano, largest Timucuan mission, founded in 1606 and abandoned under duress a century later. Potano's four-hundredth anniversary passed in 2006 with little notice. Just as Spanish borderlands history has remained on margins of southern history, historians still have not widely assimilated Spanish missions or a strong sense of Protestant-Catholic antagonism into a general understanding of early southern religious history. While historians as venerable as Verner W. Crane and as recent as Alan Gallay, Kathleen DuVal, and Juliana Barr have depicted early South--particularly region south of Virginia--as a vast zone of demographic complexity and territorial dispute between Britain, France, Spain, and multiple Indian peoples, scholars have seldom applied this approach to study of religion. That study has been shaped by an assumption that the South equated to Britain's southern colonies and that very often Virginia was representative of those colonies. …

Jamestown Redivivus: An Interview with James Horn

6 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 Jamestown Redivivus: An Interview with James Horn Conducted by RandallJ. Stephens JAMES HORN IS O'NEILL DIRECTOR OF THE JOHN D. ROCKefellerjr . Library at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation andlectureratthe College of William andMary. He is the author of numerous books and articles on colonialAmerica, includingAdapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeendi-Centary Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). A social historian, Horn has analysed colonialsociety within the broader context of the 17th-century Anglophone world. He is abo the editor of thejust-published Library of America's edition ofJohn Smith's works. His most recentwork is A Land As God Made It:Jamestown and die Birth of America (BasicBooks, 2005). Historian Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University, describes this study as a "grandeffort . "Horn "brings togethertheperspectives of recentgenerations of scholars in this relatively brief andhighly readable book. " (William and Mary Quarterly 63 [2006]: 597). Horn is currently workingon a history of the lostRoanoke colony. Historically Speaking assonate editorRandallStephens spoke with Horn in October2006. Randall Stephens: How prominent is Jamestown in the American popular imagination? James Horn: The history of Jamestown has been almost completely overshadowed by die history of Plymouth. If you took a straw poll, I bet you'd probably find that whereas most Americans have heard of die Mayflower and die Pilgrims , far fewer would know much, if anytiiing, aboutJamestown. Stephens: Did 19th-century American historians have something to do with this? Horn: I trace it back to the late 18th century. Sectional rivalries, particularly between Virginia and Massachusetts , existed already in the 1780s. But, of course, the Civil War was what really clinched it for New England. As a consequence of die Soudi losing die war, die New England founding myth became established as die nation's beginning, taught to millions of school children in dieir textbooks and celebrated annually at Thanksgiving. The victors tend to write the dominant version of history, and so Jamestown was largely forgotten. Stephens: Yet the story ofPocahontas and John Smith seems to occupy an important place in the American imagination. Horn: Absolutely. But it seems to me that die story of Smith and Pocahontas is somewhat divorced fromJamestown. The location is early Virginia, but the theme is a romance that has litde to do widi reality . Pocahontas was only 11 or 12 when they first met. Smith was not in love widi her and she was not in love with him. The true story of Pocahontas, at least as far as die English were concerned, is one of redemption. The fact that she converted to Christianity and joined die Anglican Church was evidence "John Smith Takes the King Of Paspaheg Prisoner," in John Smith, The Generali Historie of Virginia , New-England, and the Summer lies (London, 1624). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (the English believed) diat Indians could be redeemed and brought to the true faith as well as, in time, to English ways. An overlooked aspect of early Virginia was the genuine effort on the part of the English to convert Indians to Christianity. It is a misconception to see Massachusetts as the "religious" colony and Virginia as die "greedy" colony. Stephens: What are some other misconceptions about Jamestown? Horn: It is a mistake to see Jamestown as a failure. Jamestown did not fail; it survived and was ultimately successful. Jamestown's survival was pardy a result of the determined efforts of the settlers and die support of the Virginia Company of London, die colony's sponsor, and pardy a matter of luck. But the fact diat it didsurvive had consequences for die rest of the colonial period and ultimately, Fd say, for die later development of the United States. Stephens: What kinds of consequences ? Horn: Think about what might have happened hadJamestown collapsed . If the English had abandoned the Chesapeake region, would Plymouth have been settled? (Prior to their arrival in North America, the Pilgrims were involved in negotiations widi die Virginia Company, from whom they received permission to settle in die northern part of the colony, near the Hudson River). Similarly, would the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gone to New England if there hadn...

:Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites

Introduction 1. The Millennial Border between Tradition and Innovation: Foxe, Milton and the Idea of Historical Progress, Andrew Escobedo 2. The Virginia Company, 1606-1624: Anglicanism's Millennial Adventure, Beth Quitslund 3. "The Promised Day of the Lord": American Millennialism and Apocalypticism, 1735-1783, John Howard Smith 4. Uncertain Dawn: Millennialism and Political Theology in Revolutionary America, Stephen A. Marini 5. Millennial Invasion: Millerism in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, J.I. Little Notes on Contributors Index

‘Unfitt for any moderne service’? Arms and armour from James Fort

Following a devastating Indian attack in 1622 that killed a quarter of the Virginia colonists, King James I bestowed a 'princely and free guift' of weaponry on the Virginia Company of London for the colony's use. The gift included calivers, pistols, jacks of plate, brigandines, shirts of mail, and other arms and armour that were deemed 'unfitt for any moderne service' in England. At first glance, this shipment of obsolete arms appears to substantiate the traditional historical view that the English colonists were too ill equipped in both materials and skills to settle Virginia successfully. Recent excavations at James Fort, Jamestown, the site of the colony's initial settlement and its seat of government, have unearthed a wealth of arms and armour that attests the character of early military life at Jamestown. The evidence suggests that the Virginia experience led to adaptation of traditional military practices and equipment, rendering the 'unfit' arms and armour effective and useful for the context.

Leviathan ed. by A. P. Martinich, and: Aspects of Hobbes by Noel Malcolm

94 Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich. Peterborough , Ontario: Broadview, 2002. Pp. xxii ⫹ 629. $10.95 (paper). NOEL MALCOLM.AspectsofHobbes.Oxford : Clarendon, 2002. Pp. xii ⫹ 644. $49.95. Another edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan ? Curious teachers will want to have Mr. Martinich’s. It contains seven contemporaneousattacksonHobbes (Filmer, Lawson, Bramhall, Lucy, Tenison, Pufendorf , and Clarendon) that will open some eyes. Condemning Hobbes’s dashing view of human nature as unfavorable to human political freedom, Puritan and Anglican clerics defend the liberty of the subject. The edition explicates seventeenth -century syntactic oddities for bemused undergraduates (‘‘Some tips on understanding Hobbes’s grammar’’), annotates usefully, and crams an Introduction bereft of historical consciousness with ‘‘important issues’’ of the kinds undergraduates like. The Introduction may strike the literary scholar as simplistic, but in it a teacher makesacaseforHobbes as someone with whom to think through enduring political questions. In the last class, discuss the cover photograph: a huge modern ship (the S.S. Majestic, in 1922) dwarfing the little men who seem to be launching it. For historical consciousness, there is Mr. Malcolm with fourteen essays on Hobbes—and Spinoza, the Virginia Company (John Donne sermonizes justifying conquest in Virginia), Payne and the ‘‘short tract,’’ theories of science and politics, Roberval, the title page of Leviathan (no more excuses not to recognize the bishop’s crozier), Charles Cotton , Pierre de Cardonnel, exclusion from the Royal Society, the second edition of Leviathan, Ezra and the Bible, international relations, and the European Republic of Letters. An astute, even inspirational ‘‘summary biography’’shouldbe assigned reading for Mr. Martinich’s students . The second son ofa defrockedclergyman who absconded after committing physical violence against another clergyman , Hobbes fled England in 1640 after defending absolute sovereignty in the monarchy, offending parliament, then fled France in 1651 after defending sovereignty as absolute, offending the monarch . Author of several autobiographies, one in Latin verse, another in prose, Hobbes, like Dryden, models old age for thefearfulyoung:hepublishedLeviathan at 63 and continued writinguntilhisdeath at 91, in spite of a dreadful ‘‘shaking palsy ,’’ probably Parkinson’s disease, that forced him to dictate his works after 1656. Why was Hobbes never admittedtothe Royal Society? The Royal Societyshrank from controversy, but Mr. Malcolm also reminds us that the Latitudinarians, replacing sin with vice and doctrine with morality, were a controversial, ‘‘campaigning minority,’’ who opposed Hobbes but also resembled him. Where did the view come from, still shocking to some, that Ezra, not Moses, wrote the Pentateuch? Dialecticsin action:theview emerges from orthodoxy, stimulates heterodox responses, which are then attacked by an altered orthodoxy, generating a new fundamentalism as well as modified accommodation. So a twentyyear -old hanged at Edinburgh in 1697 for calling the Pentateuch ‘‘atrickofEzra’s.’’ The altered title-page illustration for Leviathan makes a subtle ideological argument . Initially, multiple heads within a body stared out at the reader, under the sovereign’s head. Changing headstobodies facing the sovereign within the body 95 meant there was only one head or face, the sovereign’s. Those many heads, looking out from the body, away from the sovereign , each having a view of its own, are potential insurgents. Especially valuable are Mr. Malcolm’s accounts of Hobbes’s reception in Europe, how Hobbes was read, and Hobbes’s view of international relations. He opposes the simplified realist view in favor of a more complexone, suggesting that Hobbes indeed envisages the possibility of an international system. Questions that Mr. Malcolm tantalizes the reader by not raising include how Hobbes’s contemporaries failed to address the analogy between original sin and Hobbesian human nature; why Behemoth was refused publication; whether Hobbes’s view of the corporeality of the soul and his antipathy toviolenceareconnected . It is disconcerting to find that Hobbes’s student William Cavendish is ‘‘only a few years younger than Hobbes,’’ but dies in 1628 ‘‘attheageof 43,’’having somehow become at the time of his death three years older than Hobbes, aged forty in 1628. Illustrations are not listed in the front matter or keyed in the text, so the reader may finish the essay on Leviathan ’s title-pages before seeing them, since the illustrations end the essay. Mr. Malcolm seems to have taken seriously Diderot’s stirring preference...