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John Smith's Virginia Village
Inside Colonial Jamestown

By Bruce Heydt


	Demonstrations of colonial life take place daily in the reconstructed Jamestown.

In 1607, the Virginia Company, a group of London-based investors intent on making fortunes in the New World, set up North America’s first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. Inside two years, the company plan — one of history’s great get-rich-quick schemes — went bad, drove most backers to the brink of bankruptcy and left the rest victims of starvation, disease or Indian attack. As survivor George Percy wrote: “There was never Englishmen left in a forreign Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia.”

Almost 400 years after the near-death experience, Jamestown survives. But not without a lot of help and explanation. Few of its first 104 colonists netted the fortunes they craved. The riches ended up in the hands of later settlers, people who followed their almost foolhardy example. And their town did disappear for awhile — abandoned by 1699 after a great fire turned it to ash and other, more promising parts of North America lured the last residents away.

But, centuries later, people have come back. East of the City of Richmond, the Jamestown thousands of visitors see today is a protected tract of land and a recreated community, places where the world of archaeology is opened up to everyone, where living history professionals entertain and educate the year around, and where the wild dreams of 17th-century swashbucklers never die.

“There was never Englishmen left in a forreign Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia.”

For generations of Americans, the story of Jamestown was the story of Captain John Smith, the man who — legend and Walt Disney had it — romanced the Indian princess Pocahontas and saved the Jamestown colony from ruin. In his own book, True Relation of ... Occurences in Virginia, the gallant captain made it clear he was the hero of the Jamestown adventure and, a big investor in the Virginia Company, Smith never told the public the details of the hardships of Jamestown life or what a mistake it had been to land there. The truth would have to wait a few hundred years. But for anyone who visits, the truth — and the adventure — is all around.

Modern Jamestown is two distinct sites. At the southern tip of Virginia’s Colonial Parkway, the site of the original settlement lies within the bounds of Colonial National Historical Park, administered by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The park more or less coincides with Jamestown Island, a roughly rectangular peninsula separated from the mainland by Back Creek. All sites of historic interest lie along about an 800-yard stretch of the island’s south shore. Here, settlers landed, built a fort for protection against Indians and the dreaded Spanish and put up America’s first Anglican church. East of these structures once stood the “New Towne,” the residential area that grew up throughout the 1600s and where the colony’s first statehouse stood.

Almost nothing remains of the first century of Jamestown life. Today, this area probably more closely resembles its appearance in 1607 when settlers first stepped ashore. Archaeological digs punctuate the landscape, and granite monuments commemorate events and people associated with the colony. Jamestown Island is a historic garden.

To get a look at the colony as it was during its first few years, travelers leave Jamestown Island and visit adjoining Jamestown Settlement, maintained by the Commonwealth of Virginia. A museum and living history area, it recreates 17th-century Jamestown on the far side of Powhatan Creek, a respectful arrangement saving the original site from burial under 20th-century reproductions.

At the settlement’s heart is a museum with galleries dedicated to life in the colony, local Native American history and the conditions in England that sparked American colonization. Outdoors, a recreated Powhatan Indian village, a facsimile of the small fleet that carried the settlers to Jamestown and a replica of James Fort all place visitors in the middle of Jamestown in the early 1600s.

Kept lively for centuries in history books, novels and movies, the Jamestown legend outfits some travelers with preconceptions. But wandering the island, settlement and museum, many discover they’re actually enigmatic spots that raise almost as many conflicting feelings as Washington, D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and hold almost the same semi-mystical qualities. Here, African slavery got its start in the English colonies and Native Americans first faced English steel. Here men who starved to death waiting for their gamble to pay off are memorialized, and so are the tough and lucky who survived. And all of old and recreated Jamestown is a monument to the American Dream, the Dream of Opportunity. What became of the Powhatans? This is one of the ironic, ethically ambiguous pieces of Jamestown’s history. It resists “politically correct” interpretation. Anyone feeling a need to identify the villain and the virtuous in the tale of what happened between the English and the Indians winds up reasoning in circles.

The Powhatans living in this neck of 17th-century Virginia were not, in the strictest sense of the term, “native” Americans. They are believed to have colonized the continent themselves by migrating across the Bering Strait in prehistoric times. The Powhatans seem to have occupied the Jamestown region only about 200 years before the English, after battling and evicting even earlier inhabitants.

Clashes between Indians and Englishmen were perhaps inevitable. But they were made so in large part by mutual misunderstanding. It’s difficult to know what the Powhatans thought of the English; without a written language, they couldn’t leave records. And what’s known about them today is based on impressions they made on English diarists — men whose understanding of Indian customs isn’t believed reliable.

The story John Smith told about his encounter with Pocahontas is a good example of this. The way he told it, he was captured by the local tribe. Its chief, called Powhatan, decreed Smith be beaten to death by war clubs, then, according to the Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, “Being ready with their clubs, to beate out his brains, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevaile, got his head in her arms, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: Whereat the Emperour was contented that he should live.”

Today authorities suspect Smith misinterpreted a ceremony in which he was being adopted into the Powhatan tribe as a sort of honorary “assistant chief.” By laying her head upon his, it’s believed Pocahontas symbolically staked her life against his future — that she sponsored his honorary entry into the tribe.