The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605-1614 (Real Voices, Real History)

This volume collects contemporary accounts of the first successful colony in what would become the first thirteen United States. Most of the accounts were written by the colonists themselves; others reflect the perceptions and expectations of investors and observers back in England, while two reveal the keen and hostile interest taken in the colony by England's chief rival, Spain. These narratives take the reader from the London stage to Powhatan's lodge, from the halls of royal power to the derelict hovels of the Starving Time. They speak of unimaginable suffering, cruelty, hope, and perseverance. They show the modern reader what an adventure the founding of English America was-the desperate battles and fraught negotiations with Powhatan and his warriors, the political intrigues in Europe and Virginia, the shipwreck that inspired William Shakespeare's The Tempest, the captures and escapes, the discoveries that thrilled the colonists, the discoveries that broke their hearts.