Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of Americas Origin Paperback – 8 Oct. 2019

I bought this as a gift and it's too late to return it now but I'm upset as it arrived slightly bent at the back with a tear in the cover. I expected better!

Marooned tells the story about what really happened in the First American Colony. One of the more dramatic things I learned in passing from this book was that Powhattan’s real name was Wahunsonacock and that he was the paramount chief of Tsenacomoco, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians in the Tidewater region of Virginia at the time English settlers landed in the Jamestown Colony. Also, I had no idea that John Smith led such an adventurous life before becoming the odd man out and eventually the leader of the Colony. It is astonishing that he survived since he put himself in harm’s way on numerous occasions. In the long run he needed more than a one Pocahontas. But unlike many others, he did survive to tell his story. The general impression we are left with after reading Marooned is that Smith really was a natural born leader. He also comes across as the most sensible and industrious of the lot. After seeing how well and with such verve he ruled the Colony until the arrival of the Third Supply, we regret that he was not allowed to lead the Colony from the beginning, instead we see the mishmash made of it by the gentlemen managers sent out from England. Ill equipped to serve as pioneers, we also are witness to the sad effects of micromanagement from a distance, as the hapless early colonists are decimated by disease, hunger, and death, which comes from an assortment of means at the hands of the Native Americans, called “naturals” by the English They were quite handy with arrows, hatchets, clubs and flaying knives. Also a surprisingly large number of colonists simply left the settlement and lived with the Indians. As Kelly explains this was a natural progression given the awful conditions inside the fort, a place they had to share with their dead because of their practice of burial in place. They did this in order to disguise the fact that their force was rapidly diminishing.Included in the “backstory” of the book is the story of Pocahontas, the life and times of the paramount chief Wahunsonacock, the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, Shakespeare and his play Tempest, the shipwreck and survival of the good ship Sea Venture and a great deal about Native American culture of the times. The most interesting part in this book for me was the moment the settlers began to explore the extraordinary region beyond their immediate settlement. As they wandered further throughout Tidewater Virginia they uncovered an extensive native culture and an established life style based on corn agriculture supplemented with all sorts of wild provender, game and seafood.Following the tyrannical rule of Lord De La Warr, the Great Charter of 1619 freed the settlers of martial law. Economic relief followed of a sorts in the form of tobacco and slaves. In 1616 John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, discovered a strain of tobacco that flourished in the Virginia climate and soil. And in 1619 the governor purchased the first African captives in English America: twenty Angolans sold by the captain of a privateer. The axis of the future American Colony was extended in 1620 with the arrival of the Mayflower and the settlement in Plymouth, a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. From there on the American North and South were truly established, the rest, of course, is history.

This was an eye-opening book for me. I had never known that there was a debate which was more important in the founding of our country, Jamestown or Plymouth; nor that so much of this debate rose in the 19th century and had to do with Civil War propaganda. In brief, Kelly says that we owe our American heritage less to either the Pilgrims or the Virginia Company than to the discontents of both Plymouth and Jamestown -- the common people who protested tyranny to the point of striking out into the wilderness, on their own or to join the Native Americans, and thus made themselves "maroons." John Smith emerges from his book as a mixed figure who, for all his faults, seems to have been largely responsible for what success Jamestown first enjoyed; his immediate successors look like some of history's bad guys beyond any quibbling about different times, manners and philosophies. The most outstanding hero of Kelly's study turns out to be Stephen Hopkins, who has probably made it into nobody's grade-school history book, but who survived the shipwreck which inspired Shakespeare's play The Tempest, was almost executed for spearheading a rebellion among the castaways in Bermuda, weathered punitive hardships in Jamestown colony, returned to England, and then back to America among the "strangers" (settlers not religiously affiliated with the Pilgrims) aboard the Mayflower. It was these “strangers,” Kelly argues, who were primarily responsible for the Mayflower Compact; and its ideas so greatly resemble what we can piece together of Hopkins' rebellious arguments in Bermuda, that he may well have had a major hand in drafting this key document of American history. There are places where I felt Kelly did not explain quite enough. For instance, he stresses that the commoners had it far worse in Jamestown than back home in England, and he makes ironic contrast between Shakespeare's heavy-handed treatment of comic characters based on Hopkins and the other Bermuda rebels, while the reality was so much different; but I couldn't find that he ever brought these two ideas together with an observation that Shakespeare and other English people back home could hardly have imagined, from the slanted accounts they received, what conditions were really like in the New World colonies. Nor does he observe that, cruel and unusual as were the punishments meted out by some of Jamestown's early dictators, the regular punishments back in England, while different, could be equally fierce -- between having one's tongue nailed to a tree and being left to starve, and being drawn, hanged, and quartered (read the descriptions), was there really that much to choose? And England was still burning women alive on grounds that it was more modest than hanging them -- which enabled the crowd to look up their skirts. And there are places where his book reads too much like a novel for my tastes -- as I prefer to eat steak and ice cream in two separate courses, so I prefer nonfiction to read like nonfiction and fiction to read like fiction; Kelly's reconstructions of what the commoners felt would have seemed very solidly based in a novel, but in a work of historical scholarship, I kept wondering, "How can you really know that these people, raised in a 17th-century mindset, felt such-and-such a way about it?" -- and while I didn't check every endnote, the ones I did check sometimes failed to cite a satisfactory source. (In fairness, some of the longer endnotes added materially to my appreciation of the material.) In his Acknowledgements, however, Kelly remarks that his ms. was once twice its present length, so perhaps these and answers to some of my other questions may have been left on the cutting-room floor. I think that, once started on it, I would have read it twice as long. Its basic arguments seem to me both sound and inspiring.

Joseph Kelly's Marooned is a well-researched and thought-provoking account of Jamestown. It details life in Jamestown, the exploration of the region, and the colonists' interactions with the Native People. It describes the distinctions between the classes of people in Jamestown and how those distinctions affect the individuals and the settlement. The scope of the book goes beyond Jamestown. It includes stories of the 15th-century Spanish explorers and pirates in the New World, a detailed account of the shipwreck in Bermuda of the Sea Venture, one of the ships bound for Jamestown, and an engrossing portrait of John Smith.While telling these stories in an engaging style, Kelly also presents his ideas about American democracy's genesis. It was the common man, such as the marooned, who foretold by their actions what the 17th and 18th-century philosophers and politicians would proclaim about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One of the passengers on the Sea Venture was a commoner, Stephen Hopkins. Hopkins spoke out for self-determination in Bermuda and a decade later was a signer of the Mayflower Compact. Kelly convincingly makes the case that Hopkins is the "first true American."I enjoyed reading this book and learned so much. In fact, I will be giving it a second read.

In the course of a long life, I've read hundreds of works of history, but this one stands out as a tour de force that rivets the reader with its unceasing drama.To say that the chief characters--John Smith, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Captain Newport, Thomas Gates, and many more--are larger than life would be an understatement. Truly, there were giants in the earth--both English and Native American--in and around Jamestown, and Joseph Kelly has captured their epic with remarkable artistry. To crown his achievement, he explains very clearly and convincingly why the state of being 'marooned'--cast out from civilization--is not only the original theme in American history but the origin of our democracy.BONUS: Along the way Professor Kelly exposes the priggish, anti-democratic strain in royal playwright William Shakespeare's sense of self. The play in question is THE TEMPEST, which was inspired in part by the story of Jamestown colonists who were stranded in the Bermuda islands for a year after being blown far off course by the hurricane which gives the play its title.

The book is supposed to be about Jamestown and the argument that it should be the mythological origins of America. Sounds great, except maybe 1/3 of the book is about that. The rest is comprised of nearly endless tangents that barely relate to the primary subject. Using some liberal thinking, the reader is able to make the leaps between the main context and the side stories and the them nearly together. Unfortunately when reading something like this book, it'd serve the author better to have him explain the connections between England's various campaigns in Ireland during the sixteenth century and the formative years of Jamestown. The author also had a tendency of imagining the thoughts and feelings of a people that left no records of such intimate knowledge.