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 own shortcomings, and against all the odds, they managed to build Jamestown, England’s first successful colony in America, which laid the foundation of the British Empire and the United States.
Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a commercial venture inspired solely by greed. Instead, 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 landscape and 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’.
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