In recent decades, study of Jamestown became stuck in a narrow focus on the events of the early colony. Conflict between its larger-than-life leaders and the fate of its less-than-worthy rank and file took center stage and the questions of which leader was right or whether anyone was telling the truth loomed large. But a larger context is needed now. The history of Jamestown and the beginnings of English settlement in America is better served when we view it in an Atlantic frame. It is better served, too, when we take advantage of the renewed focus on the early colonial period current among many disciplines, and bring together literary specialists, historians, and archaeologists to pool knowledge and perspectives.
Rather than isolating Jamestown's founding as the beginning of American history, the Atlantic perspective provides a more realistic context for English thinking about overseas ventures. It aims to understand the place of colonies as contemporaries did. The first question then becomes “Why 1607?” American enterprises must be set first within European history, and for the English they began within the great opposition to Roman Catholic Spain as the ultimate other. Pacification of Roman Catholic Ireland through colonization was an old theme, and England's safety was the principal concern there. Richard Hakluyt, the great Elizabethan promoter of American ventures, spread the Black Legend of Spanish rapaciousness supported and excused by Rome. Ralegh's failed colony of Roanoke, first conceptualized as part of that resistance to Spain, preceded Jamestown, as did the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in Florida, whose settlement in the 1560s was the true beginning of permanent European settlement within the future United States.
The Old Atlantic World contained many others, and many English in America had had previous experience in Europe and the Mediterranean. The earliest plantations in all regions were led and to a great extent populated by men who had served in the armies of the religious wars in Europe; Virginia colony secretary John Pory praised “that university of warre, the low Countries.”1 Others, like the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth colony, had lived in exile there.
In the wake of the founding of the Levant Company and the entrance of English merchants into eastern trades, many American venturers had traveled in the rich east and some, like George Sandys, who later became the Virginia Company's treasurer in Virginia, had published books about their experiences. Sandys's best-selling account appeared as A Relation of a Journey Begun An: Dom: 1610. Foure Bookes Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Ægypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote parts of Italy and Ilands adjoyning (London, 1615), and it went through many editions; facing the title page was a portrait of the author identifying him as “George Sandes Poet & Traveller.” John Smith was one who had not only lived within the Ottoman Empire, but had been by his own account enslaved there as a war captive. Others had been captured by and ransomed from the feared Barbary pirates of North Africa. So bold had these pirates become that a few English were even seized from villages on the west coast of England. What this means is that when English writers compared American Indian clothing or rituals to Irish habits or Muslim worship and beliefs, they were both showing their own sophistication and conveying an understanding that their readers would recognize.
Some transatlantic voyagers had also had experience or knowledge of African regions south of the area they called Barbary. John Pory, who reported on the first meeting of the Virginia Assembly in 1619 as colony secretary, had earlier published his translation and adaptation of the history of Africa written by the man we know as Leo Africanus with Pory's additions from other sources. Pory wrote on his title page that the main part of the book was “written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie.”2 A few English ships had ventured to the coast of West Africa and seen the early shape of the trade in enslaved Africans.
All this prior experience shaped the mental context of colonization; the texts from American experience were often written by people who had known other societies and cultural contexts in the Old World, and had in many cases been exposed to more advanced and opulent societies than their own. The date 1607 grew out of English history, in policy changes in the aftermath of the end of the Tudor regime at the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of the Stuarts with James I in 1603. It also signaled a new level of both competence and economic organization that made it possible for England to compete for the first time on the Atlantic stage. Expertise came in part from experience abroad. Competence was not complete, however, and the English colonies all imported experts from continental Europe—mineralogists, glassmakers, textile specialists. Every colony was also dependent on American Indian knowledge and largess. By 1619 and possibly before, Virginia had residents who had come directly from Africa.3 Thus every venture was Atlantic in both background and personnel.
The Indian polities that allowed English settlement also had an Atlantic context. Although their trade networks centered on the great internal waterways in the American continent, the coastal Algonquians had repeated experience of European ships throughout the sixteenth century. They also had direct knowledge of Europe through voyagers such as Squanto from New England and Paquiquineo, the Virginia Pamunkey man usually known to us by his Spanish name Don Luís de Velasco, who had lived in Europe. Some American groups actively sought roles in the Atlantic trades and initiated Europeans into the possibilities they saw. Before such crops as tobacco were established, most of the trades were conducted in Indian-produced commodities.
Considering Jamestown in an Atlantic frame allows us to transcend particular issues and to examine the colony's course in something like the way contemporaries would have done. Instead of viewing Jamestown as an isolated point in history, an Atlantic approach also leads us to acknowledge the virtually simultaneous foundation of Quebec and Santa Fe and to understand the widespread renewed commitment in Europe to an American presence as the seventeenth century opened. Jamestown's Atlantic context involved contact and exchange between and among colonies all along the coast, and national differences in Europe did not dictate relationships in America.
The enterprise of viewing Jamestown in an Atlantic frame is immeasurably enhanced by new interest in American enterprises possessed by literary scholars, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians. For historians the application of the techniques of textual analysis employed by students of literature to the texts of encounter and colonization has been wholly beneficial. The range of questions we ask of those texts, and how we contextualize them, has been extended immeasurably.
Changing views of Captain John Smith's story of his own life offer a good example of the transformative effect of new techniques from a variety of disciplines. Earlier models of textual analysis, applied by historians in the nineteenth century, had led to the charge that Smith lied when he wrote of his captivity and rescue by Pocahontas, seeking to cash in on her celebrity when she was in London. Scholars focused on internal consistency between Smith's various works, and he failed that test. More recently, work emanating from a whole host of disciplines has led to reconsideration of Smith's story. The earliest and most surprising of these reconsiderations came from students of early modern Transylvania and Hungary, who found Smith's description of his service there before he went to Virginia, told in his autobiographical The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (London, 1630), to be a valuable and accurate resource for their studies in a source-poor field.4 Having participated in the fight of Protestant Dutch seeking freedom from the Roman Catholic Spanish Hapsburgs, Smith had gone on to serve in the Hapsburg armies resisting Ottoman encroachment on eastern Europe. He wrote that he “was desirous to see more of the world, and trie his fortune against the Turkes, both lamenting and repenting to have seene so many Christians slaughter one another.”5
Ethnohistorians and archaeologists have also contributed perspectives that make us understand Smith and other writers in a new light, one that appreciates their achievement. For example, all early English observers wrote that American Indian polities were hierarchically organized with a hereditary elite and strong chiefs. Such reports have often been dismissed as the myopic reports of culture-bound English who were unable to understand societies very different from their own. But archaeologists are now finding burials and other remains that confirm the accuracy of those early observations; hereditary elites apparently did exist broadly across indigenous American polities.6 And ethnohistorians have argued that the event in which Smith believed Pocahontas had saved his life may have been an induction or adoption into Powhatan society, a symbolic death and rebirth such as young men went through as they reached adulthood. Shortly after the ceremony Powhatan told Smith that he would henceforth regard him as a son, and Pocahontas called him father when they met in England, perhaps indicating their understanding of his new status.7
Archaeologists working with environmental scientists have also given us a new understanding of the most fundamental context of the creation of the Atlantic world. The extreme cold of the Little Ice Age, including the very cold winter of 1607–8, conditioned the experience of all colonization and sea-borne ventures. Evidence of a period of sustained cold throughout the northern hemisphere from reports, pictures, and other “proxy evidence” has now been confirmed by detailed analysis of ocean and lake bed cores.8 Very recent work in dendrochronology has also demonstrated that the Chesapeake region was in the throes of unprecedented drought conditions when the English arrived. All this new evidence makes us see the developing relationship between newcomers and Americans, especially the effect of the colonists' insistent demands for food, very differently. Historians have admired the cleverness of Powhatan and his ability to outwit the English in bargaining. Powhatan, “this subtil Salvage,” exasperated Smith, “valuing a basket of corne more pretious then a basket of copper, saying he could eate his corne, but not his copper.” Smith also wrote that “Men maie thinke it strange there should be this stir for a little corne, but had it been gold with more ease we might have got it.” Our new knowledge of the extreme drought conditions places these statements in a completely different light; Powhatan was not merely sparring with colonial leaders but protecting his people's meager food supplies in a time of great stress.9
At the same time literary studies allow us to go beyond the simple truth/ falsehood dichotomy in reading Smith's biography. We can now understand how Smith was fashioning a self in his literary works, as he presented his own exploits and his analysis of the colonial scene. Smith's great work, the Generall Historie, was published in 1624, ten years after his last trip to America, and his autobiography, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, was published in 1630 in the last year of his life. The early seventeenth-century London literary world saw many dramas, poems, and prose works in which English venturers faced exotic foes and some experienced captivity and even forced conversion. Some, such as The famous historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (London, 1605) or Richard Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turke: or, The Tragicall Lives and Deaths of the Two Famous Pyrates, Ward and Dansiker (London, 1612) took off from the published life stories of actual people, English and Fleming, who became renegades. Philip Massinger's very popular The Renegado, or The Gentleman of Venice (1624) featured a Turkish princess named Donusa whose slave named Carazie was an English eunuch; Carazie told his mistress that he “was made lighter by two stone weight, at least, to be fit to serve you!” John Fletcher's The Island Princess, written in 1620–21, was set in the Moluccas and the hero, a Portuguese venturer, resisted forced conversion to Islam so steadfastly that his princess was won for Christianity, as was Donusa in The Renegado.10
As Jean Howard points out, many of these plays center on men who, like Smith and unlike Othello, were not born to elite heroic roles, but who took on such leading roles in novel exotic locations. The new Atlantic scene made possible a kind of advancement unavailable at home. Smith first wrote of his rescue by Pocahontas in 1624, and he told the story of his early life and his exploits in eastern Europe culminating in captivity in the Ottoman Empire in 1630. Like Carazie in The Renegado, he was the slave of a noble woman in Constantinople; he wrote that he made his violent escape when he was sent to be trained as a janissary. Rather than assuming that he simply made up these stories, an interpretation made much less plausible by recent research on the background of these events, it seems reasonable to argue that Smith saw the dramatic possibilities in his own story and presented those remembered events from decades earlier in a form that would draw the attention of the world he then inhabited.
All the disciplines whose research makes possible a renewed interest in the texts of the early modern Atlantic have in common the seriousness with which they take their sources and the generators of those sources. The first requirement for all of us is to examine the sources fully and carefully rather than to mine them for pithy quotes. The second is, having placed the sources under the microscope, to open them out and place them in the broadest possible context. Scholars must try to know as much as the creators of their sources knew and must try not to make easy assumptions about their motivations, justifications, and evasions. We must seek first to comprehend the choices they made and the institutions they created as contemporaries understood them rather than in terms of their meanings to later generations. The result of such interdisciplinarity is a far richer picture of the past—and one that contemporaries might recognize.