History of Jamestown by David A. Price
David A. Price is a historian and author from Richmond, Virginia. He for many years studied about the history of Jamestown using, multiple sources. He has published articles in many journals, magazines, and newspapers. He graduated from multiple colleges/universities including the College of William & Mary, Harvard Law School, as well as Cambridge University. Not only has he written this book but he was also published on this topic in National Geographic and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He has given lectures on the subject of Jamestown and the initial years of the new colony including the not so glamorous struggles to survive.
According to his listed bibliography, he utilized multiple resources and has done extensive research to ensure his facts are accurate.
Price writes this book, to tell the truth of John Smith and Pocahontas and how they were the key reasons that Jamestown was able to survive. Price gives the story of the people who settled at Jamestown and the skills or trades that each represented.
John Smith was a leader and his role began before they landed in the New World. Smith and Pocahontas were not a romantic couple. Price tells the story as each event takes place from the financing by the Virginia Company of the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean to settling in the new colony, and how the settlers interacted with the Native Americans they encountered. He presents the events in chronological order as they unfolded. Price’s truth about the events that occurred is not the tales we witness in the Disney movies.
The tales down through the years have been romanticized.
Pocahontas was a true Princess of the Powhatan people. Her father Chief Powhatan (formal name Wahunsenacawh) was the chief of their tribe. Pocahontas was able to change her father’s mind and get her way and this is how she helped to save Jamestown from being destroyed by the warriors in their tribe. Price shows that Pocahontas was actually around eleven years old when John Smith and the others came to settle Jamestown, and while she and Smith were friends, they were not romantically involved. Many of the settlers who came over on the cramped ships were labeled as “gentlemen” which price points out as those with education but not a strong desire to do manual labor. It is documented that there were no women on the ships when they sailed for the New World. Smith set a policy of “one, who does not work, does not eat.” Smith with his policy and being a leader who was able to organize and use his many skills was the reason that Jamestown did not immediately collapse. He tried to maintain relations with the Native Americans in hopes to be able to survive in the new colony. John Smith left Jamestown after being betrayed and the time known as the Starving Time came and as it indicates many of the colonists died from starvation and the effects of losing John Smith’s leadership and abilities to organize and trade.
The English took Pocahontas away and while she was in England she married a man named John Rolfe. Pocahontas began following the ways of Christianity. Upon her death, the peace that she had helped establish began to unravel. She had on multiple occasions kept the savages from destroying the Jamestown settlement.
Price, in his notes near the back of the book, explains his use of dialogue, how he uses seventeenth-century period text as it would have been written in that period. He also included the colonial place names throughout this book. In the bibliography, Price lists many, many resources used in his research of the truth about the Jamestown colony. Through his research Price gives facts in a way that they are believable and interesting. He is not writing his opinion but facts good or bad. He wanted to present the actual truth about the reason that Jamestown was successful against many odds. In the later part of the book, Price gives personal opinions about the events of Jamestown. His facts tell of the beginning of slaves being transported to America. Price documents many factual resources on which he writes this history of the settling of Jamestown, he is detailed and thorough not choosing to only tell one side of this period of our history. Price’s research and documentation of the time show that the period was a time of fear, hate, suffering, success, and failures.
In reading this book I was taken in with all the detail that Price used, it was a slow start given that he used actual period text and dialogue but I got used to that after a while. The story goes from highs to lows, it was scary at times and there were periods of hate and then periods of love. There was so much change in the settling of Jamestown and the relationship between the colonists and the Native Americans. While part of it lost me for a moment due to the use of period time dialogue, overall it is a good book. I believe that Price used so many periods and well-researched materials that this book I believe is an accurate account of the events of the settling of Jamestown. I would recommend this as a resource for anyone who was studying history and would recommend it as part of a class about this period of our history,
The book would not be something that I would just pick to read for pleasure but I found that it is a good factual resource for this purpose. The book, in my opinion, is of high quality as it has multiple resources to support the facts written about this period. While I appreciate the authenticity of the choice of Price to use period text and dialogue, I believe it would not have been so hard to keep reading initially if that had not been as prominent. However, I did enjoy the actual detail.
