A Land As God Made It - James Horn
In his recent book, A Land As God Made It, James Horn attempts to reestablish the primacy of the Jamestown settlement as the true birth place of America, fighting back the Puritan Pilgrims whose Thanksgiving tale has risen to dominance in popular legend (which Horn attributes to pro-New England sentiment in a post-revolutionary world). Horn's text lacks much of the nuance that made Alan Taylor's American Colonies such a superb read. But Horn does well enough to bring to life the natives whose alternating cooperation and hostility largely controlled the fate of the colony.
Horn also does well in his main aim to restore some of the luster of Jamestown that has been lost through historical memory of the colony as a miserable failure. In many, perhaps most ways, it was a failure. Unbelievable percentages of people died, as many as 5 out of 6 of the first several thousand colonists. Relations with Native Americans, originally intended to center on Christian conversion, devolved to bitter violence. It took years to finally discover tobacco as a potential cash crop, and even this was not enough to prevent the dissolution of the Virginia Company. But, as Horn points out, Virginia succeeded anyway. The path blazed by the early colonists was taken up by the crown and, as we know with hindsight, Virginia emerges as a key colony for (and then against) England.
Where Horn disappoints, surprisingly enough, is in his treatment of the English. If his book was intended to set the record straight about Jamestown's true place in American history, it is a bit confusing that he spends so much time talking about John Smith. While Smith is undoubtedly a pivotal character, popular legend already focuses almost exclusively on Smith and Pocahantas, to the detriment of the larger story.
Horn seems to fall into this trap as well, spending so much time on Smith and his adventures that I was shocked halfway through the book to find that Smith had spent a mere 30 months in Virginia before being injured and shipped back to England. Smith is a larger-than-life character, and his actions make for excellent story-telling. But that is why he is already famous. More important, at least to this reader, are the actions of those that accompanied Smith, opposed him, and succeeded him.
While many of these men make their way into the narrative, such as John Ratcliffe, John Rolfe, and George Somers, they all seem like mere supporting actors in a tale about Smith. Even after Smith is back in England and entirely disconnected from the Jamestown narrative, Horn continues to track Smith. While Smith's authorship of books about the New World were undoubtedly important to contemporary and historical knowledge about Virginia, it seems disproportionate in such a slender volume to give Smith so much ink.
Not recommended. For colonial completists only.
