A Tale Of Two Colonies

Subject: In this fascinating tale of England's first two New World colonies, Bernhard links Virginia and Bermuda in a series of unintended consequences resulting from natural disaster, ignorance of native cultures, diplomatic intrigue, and the fateful arrival of the first Africans in both colonies. --from publisher description

In 1609, two years after its English founding, colonists struggled to stay alive in a tiny fort at Jamestown.John Smith fought to keep order, battling both English and Indians. When he left, desperate colonists ate lizards, rats, and human flesh. Surviving accounts of the “Starving Time” differ, as do modern scholars’ theories. Meanwhile, the Virginia-bound Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda, the dreaded, uninhabited “Isle of Devils.” The castaways’ journals describe the hurricane at sea as well as murders and mutinies on land. Their adventures are said to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A year later, in 1610, the Bermuda castaways sailed to Virginia in two small ships they had built. They arrived in Jamestown to find many people in the last stages of starvation; abandoning the colony seemed their only option. Then, in what many people thought was divine providence, three English ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay. Virginia was saved, but the colony’s troubles were far from over. Despite glowing reports from Virginia Company officials, disease, inadequate food, and fear of Indians plagued the colony. The company poured thousands of pounds sterling and hundreds of new settlers into its venture but failed to make a profit, and many of the newcomers died. Bermuda—with plenty of food, no native population, and a balmy climate—looked much more promising, and in fact, it became England’s second New World colony in 1612. In this fascinating tale of England’s first two New World colonies, Bernhard links Virginia and Bermuda in a series of unintended consequences resulting from natural disaster, ignorance of native cultures, diplomatic intrigue, and the fateful arrival of the first Africans in both colonies. Written for general as well as academic audiences, A Tale of Two Colonies examines the existing sources on the colonies, sets them in a transatlantic context, and weighs them against circumstantial evidence. From diplomatic correspondence and maps in the Spanish archives to recent archaeological discoveries at Jamestown, Bernhard creates an intriguing history. To weave together the stories of the two colonies, which are fraught with missing pieces, she leaves nothing unexamined: letters written in code, adventurers’ narratives, lists of Africans in Bermuda, and the minutes of committees in London. Biographical details of mariners, diplomats, spies, Indians, Africans, and English colonists also enrich the narrative. While there are common stories about both colonies, Bernhard shakes myth free from truth and illuminates what is known—as well as what we may never know—about the first English colonies in the New World.

Four hundred years earlier the great spaceships had departed from Terra to colonize distant planets. Few ships reached their destinations; their sporadic signals waned and disappeared. No one knew whether the colonists survived. Now, construction of a new generation of hyperdrive ships was scheduled at one every five years. Planet Delta was selected as the next target for survey because the arrival of a brief signal suggested the descendants of the colonists were alive. Tiger Lily longs for freedom. In her fight to escape the subterranean slums of Terra, Lily competes to join the scout team selected for the next spaceship along with a new set of prospective colonists. Their mission to discover the lost colony faces the challenges posed by the voracious predators of the planet. In the mountains, they encounter Conley, a grim warrior who longs to escape the confines of his isolated valley. Has Tiger Lily met her match in this tortured warrior? But, where is he leading them? Danger lies ahead, and conflicts between humans and aliens. Can they ensure the safety of the new human colonists, or must they retreat to Terra? Other science fiction novels by Aurora Springer are: The Lady is Blue, and Dragons of Vkani, in the series called Atrapako on Eden.

Based on Robert Silverberg’s bestselling Sci-Fi novels about Humanity’s search for immortality out among the stars.

In 1587, John White and 117 men, women, and children landed off the coast of North Carolina on Roanoke Island, hoping to carve a colony from fearsome wilderness. A mere month later, facing quickly diminishing supplies and a fierce native population, White sailed back to England in desperation. He persuaded the wealthy Sir Walter Raleigh, the expedition's sponsor, to rescue the imperiled colonists, but by the time White returned with aid the colonists of Roanoke were nowhere to be found. He never saw his friends or family again. In this gripping account based on new archival material, colonial historian James Horn tells for the first time the complete story of what happened to the Roanoke colonists and their descendants. A compellingly original examination of one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history, A Kingdom Strange will be essential reading for anyone interested in our national origins.

Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth. Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.

Hakim's ten-volume history of the United States makes American history as exciting as an adventure story and as stimulating as a suspense yarn. She tells stories with all the fascinating sides of factual history. The dates and events, characters and complexities, heroes, heroines and villains are woven into the great American history. B&W illustrations throughout, index and timelines.

In 2013 archaeologists in Jamestown, Virginia discovered the grave of a fourteen-year-old girl who had died there 400 years ago. Her bones bore the unmistakable marks of cannibalism: proof that in the terrible "Starving Time" in the winter of 1609-1610, some of the desperate colonists who ate rats, mice, shoe leather to stay alive, also ate human flesh. Their story is told in this extraordinary historical novel. Based on the actual history of Virginia, this is a tale of savagery and squalor, love and betrayal, of unquenchable hope and gritty courage. Many of the characters are known from colonial records: John Smith and Pocahontas (the site of her famous "rescue" of Smith has recently been discovered); the shrewd Powhatan, father of Pocahontas and ruler of 15,000 Indians; Temperance and George Yardley, a couple separated by a shipwreck and reunited with unforeseen results; and others who made the perilous voyage to Virginia. There a determined company of settlers struggled to survive in an unfamiliar land. Surrounded by natives who did not welcome them, they battled grim adversity and human frailty, deceit, and treachery to plant the first successful English colony in the New World. By the time the Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620, English ships had already carried more than three thousand people to Jamestown, Virginia--and nearly two thousand of them had died there. Their story is the story of America's beginnings. Virginia Bernhard is Professor Emerita of History at the University of St. Thomas. She is the author of A TALE OF TWO COLONIES: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN VIRGINIA AND BERMUDA? (2011) and other works on early American history. She and her husband live in Houston, Texas. A complex tale of courage, treachery, cultural conflict, administrative bungling and desperate choices. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Colonial Jamestown springs from the pages. An absorbing telling that blends fact and fiction. NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Combines Bernhard's expertise as an American history professor with a vivid, sure prose style to produce a rich tale of suffering and triumph in 1600s America. KIRKUS REVIEWS