| Savage
Kingdom - Virginia and the Founding of English America
Author: Benjamin Woolley. Stunning epic history of the first
Virginia Colony and the true story of Pocahontas, to coincide
with the colony's 400th anniversary in 2007. Four centuries
ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men-led
by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate
cleric and a government spy-left London aboard a fleet of
three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in
Virginia in the spring of 1607, and set about trying to create
a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite
their shortcomings and against the odds, they built Jamestown,
a ramshackle outpost which laid the foundations of the British
Empire and the United States of America. Drawing on new discoveries,
neglected sources and manuscript collections scattered across
the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of
Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless,
daring enterprise led by outcasts of the old world who found
themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey
into a beautiful landscape and sophisticated culture that
they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to
possess, but threatened to destroy.
It shows them trying to escape the 'Savage Kingdom' that their
homeland had become, and endeavoring to build 'one of the
most glorious nations under the sun'. An intimate story in
an epic setting, Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas
came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London
to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola
to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman
Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
480 pages hardback
(50%
off cover price £25.00)
BOOKSAV
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