Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin

by Joseph Kelly Narrated by Bob Souer

Overview

We all know the great American origin story: It begins with an exodus. Fleeing religious persecution, the hardworking, pious Pilgrims thrived in the wilds of New England, where they built their fabled "shining city on a hill." Legend goes that the colony in Jamestown was a false start, offering a cautionary tale of lazy louts who hunted gold till they starved and shiftless settlers who had to be rescued by English food and the hard discipline of martial law.



Neither story is true. In Marooned, Joseph Kelly re-examines the history of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians.



In this gripping account of shipwrecks and mutiny in America's earliest settlements, Kelly argues that the colonists at Jamestown were literally and figuratively marooned, cut loose from civilization, and cast into the wilderness. The epic origin of America was not an exodus and a fledgling theocracy. It is a tale of shipwrecked castaways of all classes marooned in the wilderness fending for themselves in any way they could-a story that illuminates who we are as a nation today.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/03/2018
America is the land of runaways from colonial tyranny, according to this stimulating history of Jamestown. College of Charleston literature professor Kelly (America’s Longest Siege) recounts the tumultuous five years after the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Va., England’s first permanent colony in America. For ordinary settlers, he writes, it was a time of bitter hardship and virtual enslavement to upper-class soldiers and officials of the London-based Virginia Company, led by Capt. John Smith, a swashbuckler trying to conquer the empire of Native American potentate Wahunsonacock, father of Pocahontas. Amid famine and race war, as starving Englishmen deployed fire and sword to extract corn from Native American villages, Kelly highlights settlers who defied company edicts, escaped the Jamestown gulag, and lived peacefully among the natives. He entwines that saga with the story of a group of Jamestown settlers shipwrecked in Bermuda, who wanted to overthrow the despotic company governor marooned with them and establish an ur-Jeffersonian protodemocracy. Kelly sets this gripping narrative against an intelligent discussion of sociocultural context, ranging from political philosophy to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He occasionally indulges in rebel romanticism, finding the “real origin story” among “the diggers-up-of-roots, the card players, the fornicators,” but he paints a superb portrait of the founding, combining brilliant detail with epic sweep. Illus. Agent: Jacqueline Flynn, Joelle Delbourgo Assoc. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

[A] stimulating history of Jamestown . . . a superb portrait of the founding, combining brilliant detail with epic sweep.” —Starred review, Publishers Weekly

“An insightful re-examination of the 1607 Jamestown settlement . . . Kelly's lively, heavily researched, frequently gruesome account gives a slight nod to Jamestown as the 'better place to look for the genesis of American ideals.'” —Starred review, Kirkus Reviews

“The U.S. loves its creation myths, and this mythmaking, myth-breaking history gives us a new character, Stephen Hopkins… Though Hopkins and those like him left few records, Kelly fleshes out the available glimpses with a vivid, detailed description of the settlement and its English and Native American contexts…Kelly's dynamic narrative brings Jamestown to life and shows how history reflects the present as well as the past.” —starred review, Booklist

“Kelly has woven a tapestry that is so dense in detail and so richly colored that it may become a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of the history of Jamestown.” —The Roanoke Times

“Despite the volume of this book and the controversial interpretations, it makes a fast easy adventure in reading. It includes the familiar such as John Smith but so much else.” —Robert S. Davis, New York Journal of Books

“Most amazing new book on early Virginia.” —Anthony Comegna, Liberty Chronicles podcast

“For historians interested in the challenges of colonization, this groundbreaking work will be well received.” —John Muller, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-07-31

An insightful re-examination of the 1607 Jamestown settlement, the story of which is beginning to replace the Mayflower's as America's founding myth.

Kelly (Literature/Coll. of Charleston; America's Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War, 2013), the editor of the Seagull Reader series, opens with a recounting of the settlement's dismal beginning. Ships brought about 100 adventurers searching for gold and a passage to the Pacific. Neither turned up, and, unable to obtain food from the unwelcoming natives, most starved to death. Some deserted to the Indians. Others followed John Smith, an ambitious, pugnacious soldier of fortune who made himself leader in 1608 and probably saved the colony by extorting food from native villages. On his decree, "he that will not work shall not eat," rests his "reputation as the first American." However, writes Kelly, "appealing as that view is, it misinterprets what really happened that day in Jamestown. Meritocracy was not established. Democracy did not vanquish aristocracy. John Smith was a tyrant." Mass starvation resumed when he left in 1609, but settlers continued to pour in, eventually exterminating the Indians, and a thriving plantation economy developed. Historians traditionally blame Jamestown's early years on leaders who—John Smith excepted—couldn't handle the unskilled, lazy, and rebellious workers. Kelly makes an astute point: Aristocrats wrote every original document from those years. Reading between the lines, the author points out that the "lower sort" had no say in their governance and were expected to follow orders slavishly. They felt cast into the wilderness, marooned. Many realized that Britain's class system didn't apply in their new land and that survival required everyone's cooperation both in labor and government. Their repeated rebellions were quashed, often viciously, although a limited electoral oligarchy took shape as the century progressed.

Discovering seeds of democracy in Massachusetts' zealots or Virginia's autocratic patricians has never been easy, but Kelly's lively, heavily researched, frequently gruesome account gives a slight nod to Jamestown as the "better place to look for the genesis of American ideals."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177938356
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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