Reviewed by Natalie Zacek | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Natalie Zacek | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Natalie Zacek, University of Manchester

The Jamestown Project. By Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. 390 pages. $29.95 (cloth). Jamestown: The Buried Truth. By William M. Kelso. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. 252 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
As the quadricentennial has approached, monographs about the early years of the Jamestown settlement have poured forth from academic and popular presses alike; the last years have seen the release of James Horn's A Land As God Made It and Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet's edited collection, Envisioning an English Empire. A cynic might wonder what, if anything, remains to be said about the founding of Virginia. But Karen Ordahl Kupperman's and William M. Kelso's new books would confound such a cynic. These two authors are uniquely qualified to comment on Jamestown: Kupperman is widely known for her many books and essays on early English ventures in the Atlantic and the contact of cultures therein, and Kelso is the lead archaeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery site. In their different projects, both authors have found new and important things to tell readers about what Kupperman calls "the Jamestown project," have placed the endeavor within its early modern English and Atlantic context, and have presented a sharp and convincing challenge to the long-held view that the infant colony was nothing more than, in the words of John Smith, "a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell," a shameful misstep best glossed over by triumphalist narratives of Puritan virtue and American exceptionalism.¹	1
Kupperman confronts this stereotype at the beginning of The Jamestown Project, asserting that the perceived dichotomy between the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements is a false one. Rather Jamestown "invent[ed] the archetype of English colonization" (3) and the Puritan settlers drew positive as well as negative lessons from their Virginia predecessors, just as the Jamestown settlers had learned from personal experience, from networks of kin and friends, or from widely circulated texts and images about colonial endeavors, voyages, and captivities throughout the early modern Mediterranean and Atlantic. In some cases English projectors drew the wrong lessons from their and others' experiences, yet Jamestown not just survived its grim early years but within a decade the settlers had begun to experiment with growing tobacco, the weed that would make their and the colony's fortunes, and had established the first representative government in English America.	2
In the book's first half, Kupperman emphasizes that the first meeting of Jamestown settlers and the Indians they referred to as the Powhatan was not a virgin encounter. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, English investors and voyagers were already veterans of a half century of Atlantic ventures, most notably in Newfoundland and the lost colony of Roanoke as well as in the sustained attempts at plantation in Ireland, and had experienced more than a century of sustained contact with Islamic states in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire. Though early modern English people often struggled to conceptualize new lands and seas and were not always quick to understand the physical reality of the North American climate, they demonstrated a tremendous "hunger for the new" (109) and a keen curiosity about other peoples and cultures (as expressed by the gentry's fascination with curiosity cabinets and middling people's love of travelers' tales and plays on picaresque themes). For their part, by 1607 the Native Americans of the Chesapeake had already had a long history of contact with Europeans, particularly within the context of Spanish attempts to found a colony on the Jamestown peninsula in the mid-sixteenth century.	. . .

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