Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation by David A. Price probably wouldn't hold up by the standards of scholarly historians; Price is a little too likely to lapse into "Smith must have felt... Pocahontas certainly felt her heart leap into her throat..." whenever there are no actual sources to tell him what his characters were thinking. But I found the book intriguing, nonetheless.
I kept thinking it would make a great movie. Here is John Smith, a strong and capable leader with common sense and a pragmatic but generally respectful view of the natives, being kept out of leadership by quislings and toadies and weak men who are intimidated by him. So, for instance, the colony at Jamestown nearly starves because most of the original colonists are "gentlemen" and they consider it beneath them to do any manual labor; besides, isn't a resupply ship expected from England practically any day? And they nearly go bankrupt because the president of the colony, wanting to appear rich and generous, overpays the natives for food to such an extent that the colony can no longer afford to trade with them. It's a great story: the lone strong man trying to do good amidst the weak and foolish.
It's a terrible story, though, because the lone strong man eventually fails, of course. Smith is sent back to England against his will, and Powhatan, also a strong and visionary leader, ages, and their replacements are...unfortunate. On both sides. For years, both populations struggled along from near-crisis to near-crisis, managing to recover--just barely--from a mistake on this side, an isolated act of aggression on that side. But eventually the colony gets large enough that the natives figure out that not only are the English not going away, but they're going to sprawl all over and start serious territorial encroachments. And there's a massacre of colonists, a sudden, organized, colony-wide attack from the inside. A third of the colonists, men, women, and children, are killed. Price calls this the day the sky fell, and it does seem to be the day that things turned irrevocably toward failure.
Prior to this, there were still voices urging respect for the natives, and co-existence. That this co-existence would always be imperfect is beside the point (the English habit of seeing land in active use by the natives as "uninhabited" because it did not look like their idea of inhabited land is one example of an unfortunate but not exactly blameworthy cultural error). The English, some of them at least, really were trying.
But after the massacre, the rhetoric changes. For the first time, natives are called "beasts" in English writing; for the first time, their extermination is called for. And history as we know it was set in motion.
What I found intriguing about the book was the idea that this outcome was not inevitable, that something different might have happened, if only different decisions had been made, on both sides, at a number of points in the colony's history. Or even if chance had, or had not, intervened. At one point, for instance, the colony was actually abandoned; the survivors were on their way back to England and by chance they met a ship carrying new colonists and supplies. And they went back. I'm sure the broad sweep of American history would have ended up much the same, but its early story would have been much different if the colony had actually been abandoned. Things like this make for a great tale.
Posted by Su Penn at December 14, 2003 03:56 PM | TrackBack