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Jamestown Experiment: The Remarkable Story Of The Enterprising Colony And The Unexpected Results That Shaped America (2011)

by Tony Williams(Favorite Author)

3.53 of 5 Votes: 1

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English

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History & Biography

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review 1: Mr. William's hypothesis is the virtues that ultimately allowed the Jamestown colony to succeed are those that determined the American character. Jamestown was founded by investors hoping to find gold and silver, convert the native people to Anglican Christianity, find the Nothwest Passage to Asia and her riches, and to keep the Spanish out of North America. The experiment was an absymal failure. The settlers starved or died of disease. They were indolent. The Natives were most definitely NOT friendly. Several supply ships were sent, along with several thousand settlers, incuding "gentlemen adventurers" who brought the idea of "class" along with them. Martial law was imposed along withmreligious obligations. The leaders underestimated the negotiating and political ... moresavvy of the Natives because the leaders saw them as simple savages. Precious metals were never found. And there was no Northwest Passage. Colonists starved, died from disease, or were killed.Tobacco, private enterprise, and overcoming the Natives by brute force allowed the Colony to finally thrive. The class structure had to be abandoned outmof necessity and the colonists granted all the rights of free Englishmen. The "mercantile model" of colonization was also established: the colony supplied the raw materials; the mother country supplied finished goods. But the beginnings of representational government was established, along with the "American" character.
review 2: I feel like I may have read two books. One I really liked. And one that was what the author wished he could have written. One is the very detailed and interesting story of the Jamestown colony. Despite growing up only an hour away, I knew very little about Jamestown. I mean I knew the basics. Englishmen got there, they fought Native Americans, they died a lot. Helps that my high school was in the same county as Matoaca High School (Matoaca--another name for Pocahontas), Monacan (a Native America Tribe), Thomas Dale (once governor of the colony). So yeah, I knew a lot of the names.However, I didn't know much beyond what was taught in elementary school (my knowledge of American history is almost shameful). I didn't know the colonist brutality. Amazingly, the story of putting Native American children in the river and then shooting them while their mother watched was somewhat glossed over in second grade. My teachers truly ignored that the first decade of Jamestown was drenched in blood on both sides. I also didn't know how Bermuda was at all related to Jamestown--a fact still reflected by the arms of Bermuda. One of the ships wrecked there and a group of colonist survived there for nearly a year--and survived better than those in Jamestown. The ship is pictured on Bermuda's coat of arms.This book that described how the colony's survival--taught as almost a sure thing in my memory--was almost scrapped repeatedly throughout it's history, tormented by starvation, failure to prepare for winter (yep, happens every year), infighting, politics, not getting along with the native population at all, and the basic problem of being sent there to find gold and finding none.The other book is one that wanted to show how only when the colony adopted fully representative government and enterprise did it succeed. I don't have any doubt that enterprise added to success, I do doubt that had it been instituted with the first wave of colonist that we would have seen a massively different beginning. It could be argued instead that it was operated more like you would operate a factory, as this is mostly what the investors saw the colony as--a factory that was supposed to bring back gold. To support this premise, Williams uses repeated insurrections and rebels, as well as starvation, to demonstrate that the martial law imposed by the Virginia Company (the group of investors in London that funded Jamestown and the colonization in Virginia until it went bankrupt and was taken over by the crown)was a failure. However, I'm still not convinced that this was a causation of the events as much a correlation. And four insurrections while you're stuck on an island with little hope of rescue for over a year--I'm not sure that's a horrible record there.This part of the book leaves me unconvinced that the martial law imposed by the leaders or the original set up in the colony added (or detracted for that matter) from the original plight of the colonists. The problems they faced in the early years were (in my opinion) less a function of the government system than that of sending groups of colonists to Virginia who were completely unprepared for living in a swampy wilderness--a farmer or two probably would have been helpful. I am willing to be convinced, but it's going to take more than this book.All this aside, I do think I want to read more about the early colonization of America, because it's a whole lot more interesting than my second grade history text book led me to believe. less

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