Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America

by Benjamin Woolley Narrated by David Drummond

Overview

Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first American colony, Savage Kingdom presents a bold, even reckless, political adventure driven by a sense of imperial destiny and dogged by official hostility.



Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men-led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric, and a government spy-left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America.



Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources, and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey into a beautiful landscape and a sophisticated culture that they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to possess but threatened to destroy. They called their new home a "savage kingdom," but it was the savagery they had experienced in Europe that had driven them across the ocean and which they hoped to escape by building in America "one of the most glorious nations under the sun."



An intimate story in an epic setting, Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

This highly readable account of the founding of Jamestown moves from the English throne to the daily struggles of the colony's first settlers and the experience of Virginia's Indians as their relations with colonists became increasingly strained. Here are the famous tales from early Virginia, like Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe. But well-known explorers sit cheek by jowl with fascinating, lesser-known people, such as the colonists' wives, who consulted an astrologer to reassure themselves about their husbands' fate on the open seas. Woolley emphasizes both the financial and religious aims of colonization: English backers expected to get rich on the bounty the settlers would uncover and produce (though the first ships of wood and iron ore sent back disappointed the London Company). But Englishmen also saw Virginia as a "religious mission," an opportunity to spread Protestantism abroad. Woolley persuasively argues that the settlers' aggressive response to a 1623 Indian attack became the "defining moment" in the history of English settlement of Virginia-it was through this event, more than any other, that the colonists articulated their connection to their new land and "crafted and honed their American identity." Woolley blends nuanced analysis with fast-paced narrative. 16 pages of color illus. (Apr.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Comprehensive account of the first permanent English colony in North America. Perhaps because its purpose was forthrightly monetary, perhaps because it had the dubious distinction of robustly introducing tobacco and slavery to the country, Jamestown, Va., has never held a place in the nation's collective consciousness comparable to that of the Plymouth colony. Woolley (The Queen's Conjurer, 2001, etc.) meticulously gathers and documents all the forgotten details, and while his brilliantly framed narrative remains devoid of any warm, fuzzy uplift, it emerges as fascinating. It's a wonder the colony survived at all, given its criminal mismanagement, the mutinies and betrayals, famine, disease, withering Indian attacks and the consequent bloody reprisals. Luck surely played a part: Settlers were loaded into ships and just about to abandon Jamestown in 1609, when a longboat rowed up with news of a fleet carrying supplies just arrived in Chesapeake Bay. Certainly, the leadership of tireless explorer, self-promoter and propagandist John Smith was important. Also crucial was the Trinidad tobacco seed planted by John Rolfe, later husband to Christian convert Pocahontas, who made a PR mission with him to England to talk up the colony's prospects. But the canvas was larger than this tiny beachhead in the New World. Playing a huge, underappreciated role in propping up the beleaguered colony were the reputations and fortunes of the noblemen who established the Virginia Charter and funded the expedition, not to mention the pride of England and the awful prospect of the government abandoning North America to Spain's Catholic dominion. Woolley effectively establishes this broader context; one of themost engrossing passages here recounts the journey of the Sea Venture, whose ill-fated voyage to Jamestown resulted in the accidental discovery and claim of Bermuda. He illuminates the Virginia colony as part of a larger international game, the stakes of which simultaneously explain and dwarf the sufferings of a few adventurers in a southern swamp. A well-told story of discovery, conquest, business and politics.

From the Publisher

An engrossing bit of elegant social history.” — Los Angeles Times

“A lucid narrative.” — Financial Times

“Comprehensive account of the first permanent English colony in North America.... A well-told story of discovery, conquest, business and politics.” — Kirkus Reviews

“This highly readable account of the founding of Jamestown moves from the English throne to the daily struggles of the colony’s first settlers and the experience of Virginia’s Indians as their relations with colonists became increasingly strained….Woolley blends nuanced analysis with fast-paced narrative.” — Publishers Weekly

“To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, historian and journalist Benjamin Woolley has constructed a far-ranging account of the political machinations and human suffering that went into creating and preserving this tormented English outpost.” — BookPage

“[H]ighly readable . . . Woolley blends nuanced analysis with fast-paced narrative.” — Publishers Weekly

A swashbuckling saga of political maneuvering, storms at sea, hostile indigenes, violence and starvation....his book is sprightly and vivid. — Los Angeles Times

Benjamin Woolley presents an engaging, well-researched take on the basics....Woolley’s prose bounces along, equally cheerful in the face of a comprehensive flaying and the founding of what became Washington, D.C. — Entertainment Weekly

Financial Times

A lucid narrative.

BookPage

To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, historian and journalist Benjamin Woolley has constructed a far-ranging account of the political machinations and human suffering that went into creating and preserving this tormented English outpost.

|Los Angeles Times

A swashbuckling saga of political maneuvering, storms at sea, hostile indigenes, violence and starvation....his book is sprightly and vivid.

Entertainment Weekly

Benjamin Woolley presents an engaging, well-researched take on the basics....Woolley’s prose bounces along, equally cheerful in the face of a comprehensive flaying and the founding of what became Washington, D.C.

Financial Times

A lucid narrative.

Los Angeles Times

An engrossing bit of elegant social history.

FEB/MAR 08 - AudioFile

The Jamestown settlement of 1607, like so many other events surrounding the birth of America, is shrouded in myth. Woolley's history of early Virginia—released to celebrate the colony's 400th anniversary—seeks to set the historical record straight with respect to John Smith, Pocahontas, and the lesser known settlers. David Drummond's narration is straightforward and easy to listen to, and he does his best to liven up the material. He clearly adjusts his delivery to indicate when he’s reading a historical quote rather than Woolley's own words. Ultimately, however, the text is simply not engaging, and the production sounds like a long lecture rather than a narrative of an exciting and adventurous period in American history. D.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171269005
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/15/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Savage Kingdom
The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America

Chapter One

A Feast of Flowers and Blood

On the morning of 20 September 1565, the sixty-year-old carpenter Nicolas le Challeux awoke to the sound of rain pelting down on the palm-leaf thatch overhead. It had not stopped for days, and a muddy morass awaited him outside.

When he had arrived in Florida the previous month, a sunnier prospect had beckoned. He had left the terrors of his native France far behind, and come to a place where he could practise his craft and religion in peace. Its very name suggested renewal, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León calling it Florida after the season in which he first sighted its shores: Easter Week, or Pascua Florida, 'the feast of flowers'.

Florida could furnish all that a man could wish on earth, Challeux had been told. It had received a particular favour from heaven, suffering neither the snow nor raw frost of the North, nor the drying, burning heat of the South. The soil was so fertile, the forest so full of wild animals, the honest and gentle natives could live off the land without having to cultivate it. There were even reports of unicorns, and of veins of gold in a great mountain range to the north called the 'Appalatcy'. It was 'impossible that a man could not find there great pleasure and delight,' Challeux was assured.¹

The contrast with the state of his homeland was stark. Europe was in turmoil. To the south, the Catholic Spanish and Holy Roman empires, offshoots of a single dynasty, domineered. In the north, Queen Elizabeth reigned over Europe'supstart Protestant monarchy England, while her subjects egged on their co-religionists in the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium), who were fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords. To the east stretched the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent resting an elbow upon the Balkans, a heel upon Basra. And in the middle lay France, a Catholic country penetrated by a powerful Protestant or 'Huguenot' minority. Exposed to so many religious and political tensions, it threatened to disintegrate, and in 1562, a series of civil wars erupted across the kingdom that were so brutal, they gave the word massacre, French for a butcher's block, its modern meaning.

It was from the midst of this maelstrom that Gaspard de Coligny, leader of the Huguenots, had dispatched a fleet under the command of his kinsman René de Laudonnière to found a Protestant refuge in Florida. To the eyes of Coligny's Catholic enemies, this was a provocative move. Though its coastline was still only hazily charted, and some even doubted it was a single land mass, all of North America was claimed by the Spanish under a famous 'bull' or edict issued by Pope Alexander VI shortly after Christopher Columbus's historic expedition of 1492. This had donated all the 'remote and unknown mainlands and islands' in the Atlantic to the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, so they could bring the native populations 'to the worship of our Redeemer and profession of the Catholic faith'. By sending his men to Florida, which was within convenient reach of Spanish possessions in Cuba and Mexico, Coligny was clearly challenging not only the Spanish claim, but the religious authority underpinning it.²

However, Coligny's exiles had found Florida untouched by the Spanish, and settled themselves on the banks of the River of May (now called St John's River, near modern Jacksonville), on a 'pleasant open space covered with various kinds of grasses and plants'. They called their new home Fort Caroline, after France's Catholic King Charles IX, in the hope of forestalling reprisals. Old Challeux had arrived the following year with another consignment of refugees, on a supply ship captained by Jean Ribault, a prominent Huguenot, as well as one of France's most accomplished seamen.³

Conditions for the newcomers turned out to be less Elysian than advertised. The hundred or so settlers who had been there a year had run out of supplies, and were living off wild fruits, berries, the occasional crocodile, and goods stolen from the local Indians. There were also reports that the Spanish had been tipped off about Coligny's project, and had sent a fleet which was even now roving the coast.

Over the coming weeks, Challeux joined a team of workmen who, under the direction of John de Hais, master carpenter, tried to reinforce La Caroline's fragile palisade. The state of the fort's defences was pitiful. The triangular layout was breached in two places, along the western side, and the long southerly wall facing the river, where the foundations for a 'grange' to store the settlement's artillery and munitions lay partially built.

The weather hampered the workmen's efforts. Daily deluges washed away the embankment supporting the palisade wall, and intervals of baking sunshine were too fleeting to allow the damage to be repaired. Meanwhile, the surrounding landscape became more and more saturated. Rivers burst their banks, meadows became marshland.

And so, on this September morning, Challeux faced another day of hard labour in the remorseless rain. Nevertheless, he managed to rouse himself, put on a damp and rotting cloak, and gather his tools.

A few hundred yards away, beyond the curtain of incessant rain, Don Pedro de Menéndez de Avilés lay in wait at the head of a column of five hundred soaking, disgruntled but well-armed Spanish troops. Menéndez was a Spanish noble and naval commander. He had arrived in Florida with a fleet of Spanish galleons a few days before Ribault, with orders to exterminate the 'Lutherans' and establish himself as Adelantado or governor of Florida, which King Philip II of Spain declared extended all the way from the keys on the southernmost tip of the Florida peninsula to Newfoundland.⁴

Menéndez had anchored his ships in the River of Dolphins (modern Matanzas River), about thirty-five miles south of Fort Caroline. There, on 28 August, he had set about building a military base, which he called St Augustine, in honour of the feast day upon which construction work had begun. After several weeks gathering intelligence about Fort Caroline from local Indians, and harrying Ribault's fleet, he decided to mount a land attack on the French settlement.

Savage Kingdom
The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America. Copyright © by Benjamin Woolley. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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