1607: Jamestown and the New World
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 074255838X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
1607 vividly tells the story of the founding of Jamestown, recounting the situation of the original Indian inhabitants, the arrival of British settlers 400 years ago, the building of the town-and modern excavations at the site. Along the way, we meet such familiar figures as King James, John Smith, and Pocahontas, but we also come across strange episodes of cannibalism and skullduggery, heroism, and romantic love.
as unruly as ever, and as impatient of government. As Rolfe wrote to Sandys in 1620: I speak on my own experience for these 11 years, I never amongst so few have seen so many falseherted, envious and malitious people (yea amongst some who march in the better rank) nor shall you ever hear of any, the justest Governor here, who shall live free from their scandals and shameless exclamations, if way be given to their reports. The ironworks, among Sandys’s favorite projects, may stand as an example
twenty-first, reports of man-eating were, nevertheless, as readily accepted and credited then as they are quickly doubted and discounted now. Perhaps it’s because today they come as something of a surprise. The earliest relations of Virginia made no bones about it: In the winter of 1609-10, the Starving Time, the English were reduced to consuming, as colony President George Percy put it, what they “could come by.” And not for the last time. Modern writers, however, are more circumspect; so
married her not for “carnall affection” but for the good of the plantation, England’s honor, his own salvation, and the conversion of “an unbeleeving creature” to the true faith. A re-creation of Jamestown’s fort trails a dismal, distant second to the Mayflower as symbol of America’s founding. Jamestown has a better claim to iconic status on political grounds. In 1619, Virginia established an elected House of Burgesses to balance the near-dictatorial power of the governor and his council. This
Many Native American tribes, likely including the Powhatans, did just that. The moon passes through a cycle of illumination, known as a lunation, in 29½ days. This composite of twenty-four digital photos, shot by Antonio Cidadão through a reflecting telescope in his home rooftop observatory in Oeiras, Portugal, tracks a lunation. Some were more precise with their lunar reckoning. We know the Delaware named the phases of the same moon; for example, the new moon, likely the first visible
1622 and April 1644 when Virginia’s Native Americans attacked European intruders. The historical record conflicts on whether Opechancanough took Easter into account when planning the attacks. What makes this difficult to corroborate in real time is that Easter is computed in such a wide variety of ways that reckoning when it was celebrated is difficult. Incidentally, there is a touch of irony in the fact that our way of calculating Easter depends on the Jewish lunar calendar, and, like dates set