A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.

A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. By James Horn. (New York: Basic Books, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 337. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-465-03095-8; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 978-0-465-03094-1.)

On April 26, 1607, the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed arrived in Virginia to plant an English settlement that was, as James Horn puts it, "the birth of America." Forget about the pilgrims and the Mayflower. The Jamestown narrative, full of contentious, conniving, greedy newcomers and hostile natives, is where one must begin.

In time for the four hundreth anniversary of Jamestown, Horn has crafted a work of impressive scholarship and graceful prose that traces the history of England's first permanent colony in the New World from the machinations of the Spanish in the 1560s through the dissolution of the Virginia Company in the 1620s.

Writing early Virginia's history is not for the fainthearted. It is a chronicle of bloodshed and brutality on both sides--Indian and English--as well as disease, starvation, and deaths too many to count. Moreover, the sources are thin: the Virginia Company's records from 1606 to 1619 are lost, the accounts written by the earliest settlers are few and fragmentary (John Smith's General History of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles was not published until 1624), and the Indians, who far outnumbered the English at first, left no written records at all.

But the scholars who have been at work for the past three centuries have left a wealth of secondary materials on colonial Virginia, and Horn has woven the standards and the more recent works into a compelling history. There is a careful balance between the Indians and the English, with attention paid to the two vastly different cultures that collided in the Chesapeake. Moreover, there are the requisite period illustrations from Theodore De Bry and John White and clear, modern maps.

Much of the story unfolds as John Smith recollected it in his General History. But the doughty farmer's son turned soldier-adventurer makes a fine guide, with Horn along to insert a careful parenthesis as needed, as on page 64: "Because the Indians had no knowledge of written language (according to Smith)," they believed that the note Smith sent to Jamestown was magic. But Smith and his companions may not have been the first Europeans these Indians had ever seen, and that may not have been the first piece of paper they had ever seen, either.

To this day no one knows if the Indian Opechancanough was carried to Spain in his youth, exactly when and how the lost Roanoke colonists were killed, or whether Pocahontas saved John Smith's life. But the fascination of such tales cannot be denied, and Horn handles them judiciously. Pocahontas's "rescue" of Smith has taken on "mythic importance as the transcendent power of love over racial hatred" (p. 68). But, alas, as Horn says, the scene did not happen as Smith described it or, perhaps, as Pocahontas perceived it. Adoption, not execution, was most likely what her father, the great Powhatan chief, Wahunsonacock, had in mind.

Abandonment of their colony was what the pitiful remnant of Jamestown residents had in mind after the terrible "starving time" in the winter of 1609-1610. John Smith, caught in a struggle for power and forced to leave Virginia after attempts on his life, was gone, and so was Pocahontas. But then the miraculous, the unbelievable occurred. As the hapless Jamestown colonists sailed downriver, they met a new governor and ships laden with new settlers and fresh supplies. But their troubles were far from over.

Treachery and brutality continued to rule, as Indians, now openly hostile, and English, determined to prevail, fought over possession of the land. English burned Indian villages and killed women and children; Indians lured English soldiers into their houses and killed them; English attacked Indian towns and destroyed crops.

Then the English kidnapped Pocahontas and made an uneasy truce with her father, and both sides agreed to live in peace. John Rolfe fell in love with Pocahontas and declared his feelings for her in a now-famous letter. The couple's marriage on April 5, 1614, began a new but short-lived period of amity between English and Indians in Virginia.

On a triumphal visit to England, Pocahontas died in March 1617, and with her death died the fragile hopes for a blending of Virginia's two cultures. Pocahontas's father died not long afterward, and thus began the downward spiral of Indian-English relations that led to the uprising of March 1622, which led to the dissolution of the Virginia Company by 1624. But, as Horn reminds us, "The Virginia Company had collapsed, not the colony" (p. 279). England's first permanent foothold in the New World endured. As the old saying goes, history is written by the winners, and Virginia's story is no exception. Indians and Africans would have a very different version.

Virginia became a white man's country, and one where there were few English women for many decades. In fact, they are almost invisible in Horn's narrative. The first two arrived in September 1608 and are only briefly mentioned (p. 118). But a considerable number of unmentioned others followed. Some of these women survived both the starving time and the uprising. Their stories, too, are part of Virginia's history.

So is the brief but poignant life of Richard Frethorne, the unhappy indentured servant whose three letters to his parents are often excerpted, as they are in the present work. We meet young Frethorne in a letter of 1623, and his death that same year is matter-of-factly noted (p. 248). Only in the next chapter do we learn that he had lived through, and vividly described, the uprising of 1622 (pp. 258, 261). A bit of careful editing and attention to chronology could have made Frethorne more than a disembodied voice.

As governors, colonists, and natives appear and disappear in this complex narrative, a timeline would have been a welcome feature, especially for the general reader. A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America is nonetheless a solid work for specialists and non-specialists alike, a timely addition to the literature of early Virginia.

VIRGINIA BERNHARD

University of St. Thomas