Savage Kingdom:

The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America

by Benjamin Woolley
469 pp. HarperCollins, 2007 $27.50

Reviewed by Nancy Webber

Benjamin Woolley has previously written about the beginnings of computer science (The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter ) and simulation theory (Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality ). So it isn’t surprising that he created a database of original texts, more than 3,500 books and documents, in preparation for writing Savage Kingdom. He uses that database to write a refocused, detailed and interesting story of the first English settlement in North America, Jamestown.

This panoply of resources allowed Woolley to write history from several points of view and to place the settlement where contemporaries saw it, not at the center of the story, but at the edge of the contest between England and Spain for colonial dominance in the Americas.

In this story the long held and romanticized notions of Captain John Smith as hero, the marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahontas as true love and Virginia as paradise fade away, revealing a commercial venture planned poorly and in secret, launched with too few men and not enough supplies, and bent on finding a nonexistent pile of gold in the tidal marshes of Tsenacomoco, soon to be renamed “Virginia.”

Smith and his successors dealt brutally with Wahunsunacock, the great and powerful leader, whom the English mistakenly called “Powhatan,” and his people who were known as the Powhatans. Within seven years of the English landing, Wahunsunacock realized that the life of his people had been unalterably changed by the European settlement and he moved further west. It was the beginning of the forced migration across the North American continent that would last for the next 300 years. And while John Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas was no doubt influenced by an emotional connection, Woolley reminds us that Pocahontas did not come to the English settlement willingly. She was kidnapped.

In the ten short years between April 1607 and August 1617, which the book details, the great themes of American history were developed: A challenge to the king, establishment of a representative government, slavery, Indian removal, dominance in international trade, and a shared belief that America’s mission was to spread Protestant values to nonbelievers.

Rather than overwhelming readers, Woolley steps back from the material and lets the voices of the people involved in the Jamestown adventure occupy center stage. He reanimates the one-dimensional figures we know from previous accounts of the Jamestown story, creating complex characters as one imagines they truly were. Woolley wants us to see the settlement of Jamestown as the participants lived it, full of intrigue and mystery, violence and romance, politics and greed, courage and fear. It is literary nonfiction at its best, a factual account that reads like a very good novel.