Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation

Abstract

Rountree reviews Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation by David A. Price.

Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. By David A. Price. (New York: Knopf, 2003. 305 pp. $25.95, ISBN 0-375-41541-6.)

This trade book, written for the general public, covers a great deal of ground, as the title indicates. It is a biography of John Smith, less so of Pocahontas (due to limited study of Powhatan ethnography), and a history of the English colonization of eastern North America between 1607 and 1620, the time John Smith himself was involved. With that broad a set of interests, the book is not especially useful as a classroom text, especially with its visual drawbacks (see below). So, with the four hundredth anniversary of Jamestown's founding approaching, how useful will it be to tourists who visit the area and those who want to know more about the colony? The answer is: fairly useful, but no more than that.

The book is extremely readable, with prose that is very lively in places. The author has done careful research in the English records of the time, as the endnotes show. He has not come up with anything new, which means he did not look into the Ferrar Papers. He stays close to the standard interpretations of Eurocentric historians of the last three decades. His version of events differs from theirs mainly in its readability and in its greater-than-usual coverage of the personalities involved. He is at his best when describing the internal politics of the English colony.

Political correctness obtains throughout the book, something I definitely appreciate. The word "Indian" appears only when a seventeenth-century writer is being quoted; ditto "savage." Instead we see tribal names or else the word "natives," which-I hope-has a less pejorative meaning nowadays to American readers than to British ones. (Ironically, most people in the modern Powhatan tribes I work with prefer the term "Indian" or "Indian people" if the tribal name is not used.)

The book, however, has one major drawback that makes it a better follow-up book than an introduction to the English side of things: it scores very low on imparting a sense of what the land or protagonists looked like, or where events occurred within that land. The visuals consist of two maps. Period. For the engraved portraits made of both John Smith and Pocahontas during their lifetimes, even more the extant portraits of other people connected with the colony, one looks in vain. The text is not much better when it comes to geography. A newly captured John Smith is "marched . . . through the countryside to one village after another" (p. 64). No mention of the route or how Smith used the trek to gather data for the spectacular map he ultimately published (which, of course, is not shown anywhere in the book). There is a vivid description of the trials of the Atlantic crossing, and then John Smith's equally strenuous experiences in sailing around the Chesapeake and its tributaries are glossed over completely. Considering the vast amount of territory he visited under hardship conditions and the quality of the data he collected there, the omission is a major disservice to Smith as well as to readers.