Reviewed by Camilla Townsend | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Camilla Townsend | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University

A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. By James Horn. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 349 pages. $26.00 (cloth).
In a grand effort, James Horn brings together the perspectives of recent generations of scholars in this relatively brief and highly readable book. Horn argues that America was born not in a city upon a hill but in grit, both literal and figurative. It was born in the unkempt and sometimes depressing Jamestown settlement and in the stubborn refusal of the settlement to die, even after the Virginia Company fell. He looks for the heroic, the prosaic, and the downright evil elements of the story, arguing that America's genesis came of that complex totality. In these pages readers follow the actions of the colonizers and also come face-to-face with the choices of the indigenous. The English take center stage, but the Spanish are also present. It is not only a profoundly political story but also a social and economic one.	1
In an effort to break away from old molds, Horn opens the prologue and the first chapter with Indians. Don Luís de Velasco (who was kidnapped from the Chesapeake and taken to Spain) and Wahunsonacock (who was later called Powhatan) are, albeit briefly, central characters. Readers are reminded in a meaningful way that the land was theirs before there was a Jamestown. The English colonists are introduced without fanfare: "On a raw December day, three small ships slipped quietly down the Thames on the ebb tide, their departure unnoticed except perhaps by a few friends, relatives, and curious onlookers" (39). John Smith does not appear a moment before he should—after Bartholomew Gosnold and Edward Maria Wingfield have been introduced as the "first movers" (34) of the proposed plantation. And though Horn relies heavily on Smith's writings, as all scholars do, he often takes Smith's assertions with a grain of salt, even acknowledging when his text indicates he suffered from delusions of grandeur, noting, for example, "that Smith should talk up the exploration of the Bay in such grandiose terms is hardly surprising. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Indians had an entirely different view of their encounters with the English. Smith's own account reveals how dependent the expedition was on local peoples for provisions and information" (96).	2
The Englishmen of the day come alive in ways that are rare in the current historiographical milieu. One learns of the colonists' battles with each other in excruciating detail; figurative descendants of the colonists cannot help but be discomfited by their all-too-human mean-spiritedness in their dealings with each other. Horn even asserts that the famous gunpowder accident suffered by Smith certainly was not, after all, an accident. The best chapter of the book is "Virginea Britannia," which crosses the Atlantic to look at events unfolding in London. Horn knows the seventeenth-century city and its men well. Readers can still smell the stink of damp clothes drying in taverns as men come in out of the snow and rain. Real men walk the streets. Horn proposes, for example, that "it is unlikely that Sir Thomas Smythe gave much thought to the plight of the poor as he left his house in Philpot Lane, in the heart of London's commercial district, and walked over to the old Royal Exchange, although he might very well have been pondering the fate of the colonists in Virginia" (132). Later, back in Jamestown, Horn offers an illuminating empathy for the settlers. It has been too easy for many scholars to assume that the English were as cheered as the Indians were devastated by Lord De La Warr's seemingly providential arrival, which prevented the colony from being abandoned and ending its English colonial chapter. Horn, however, sees the matter in a more realistic light, understanding clearly how much the colonists simply wanted to go home by that point. "Gates [who had just started out] was ordered to return to Jamestown forthwith and immediately headed back upriver to the utter dismay of his company, who dearly wished they had burnt the place down" (180). Horn makes the excellent point that the disastrous news coming back to London from the colony may well have been what saved its life. The Spanish, always considering a quick raid to destroy the interlopers, learned what everyone in London learned about events there. It was therefore easy for them to decide not to bother.	. . .

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