Word: jamestowne
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...colony flourished, its Powhatan neighbors became alarmed. Trading posts were one thing, permanent farms another. On March 22, 1622, the new leader of the Powhatan, Opechancanough, launched dawn raids on 28 plantations and settlements along the James River, killing 347 colonists, a quarter of the total population. Jamestown itself escaped, warned by an Indian boy who had converted to Christianity. "Besides them they killed," a survivor lamented, "they burst the heart of all the rest." Dispirited and disorganized, hundreds more colonists died the following winter, the second "starving time...
...fate of the attackers. The survivors responded with all-out war. In July 1624, some 800 Indian warriors risked a two-day battle with 60 armored and well-armed colonists and lost. Twenty years later, Opechancanough, nearly a century old, was captured and shot in the back in a Jamestown jail. This too set a pattern: of conflict and expulsion, which lasted until the last Indians were beaten and settled on reservations in the late 19th century...
...Jamestown left a record of spite, want and death, to say nothing of the long-range problems, from racism to lung cancer, of which the colonists were unaware. Yet they survived. Key aspects of the Jamestown template--chiefly the lures of religious liberty, private ownership and a measure of self-rule--guaranteed that British North America would be populous enough to withstand challenges from France and Holland and, finally, the power grabs of the mother country...
...America, aboard one of three ships that would land at Jamestown, one passenger seemed to grate on the rest like a splintered oar. He was a stocky, sawed-off stub of a man; a seasoned war fighter with a valiant past he seldom tired of highlighting; an unconscionable braggart of modest means who resented the blue bloods among the group; a bigmouthed know-it-all with a sanctimonious air and little or no regard for decorum. His name was John Smith...
...American history. No one can quite agree on what to make of him. "Unblushingly Machiavellian," wrote his biographer, Philip Barbour. In the best of light, Smith was the impolitic outlaw with more grit than tact, the archetypical don't-tread-on-me misfit without whom the fragile experiment at Jamestown would have collapsed within months. What historians can agree on is that he was a victim of his time: the pivotal English figure in the first sustained Anglo-American culture clash, the accidental envoy who would cross the Atlantic but never bridge the broader divide between the two very different...