Where to Stay Williamsburg is home to most of the area’s hotels and restaurants. Check in to the Williamsburg Lodge (from $179), with American folk-art décor and Federal-style guesthouses, orthe more modern Williamsburg Woodlands Hotel & Suites (from $139, including breakfast), with spacious rooms and an outdoor pool. Both are within walking distance of the site.
Where to Eat Christiana Campbell’s Tavern (dinner entrees from $22), a favorite of George Washington’s, specializes in seafood. The more casual Josiah Chowning’s Tavern (from $19) serves up pit-cooked barbecue along with music and stout rum drinks. For lunch, duck into The Cheese Shop for a roast-beef sandwich ($4.85) with house dressing on home-baked bread.
title: “Talk Transcript The Real Jamestown” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Edward Galarza”
In fact, as New York University historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book “The Jamestown Project,” the settlement was to some extent “the creation story from hell.” One starving resident cannibalized his pregnant wife; others ate rats and shoes, and extorted and killed the Indians. By the time Jamestown gave way to Williamsburg as Colonial Virginia’s capital (1699), its denizens had mortgaged themselves to tobacco-growing and African-American slavery.
One reason that American children, obsessed by laser tag and videogames, have been so turned off by history is that the traditional airbrushed version of the American past seems so unreal. Visitors to the new Jamestown won’t have that problem. Just opened on the site is a state-of-the-art structure dubbed an “archaearium,” which displays some of the Kelso team’s most dramatic discoveries—including some actual Jamestownians. While digging near one of the fort’s walls, the team found a surprisingly well-preserved skeleton with a bullet in what used to be its leg. Another skeleton on display probably belonged to Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold, an early Jamestown leader. Gosnold was the Briton who discovered and named Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.
Thanks to CSI-type technology, you can see three-dimensional renderings of what these men probably looked like. Still other discoveries—tools, medicine jars, Indian beads, body armor—offer hard facts about their warfare, diseases, trade and physical labor.
Outside the archaearium, you can walk up to the edge of the pit where Kelso and his team are digging and sifting. Nearby, you’ll see a historic American community coming back to life, starting with the framework of a barracks rebuilt on its original site.
Presumably to the delight of teenage visitors, those discoveries help illuminate a chapter of American history that is both murky and menacing. Unlike the child-friendly tale of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock—often portrayed as a feast of freedom-seeking Pilgrims abetted by Squanto the friendly Indian—Jamestown’s tale includes murder and deceit. By the end of the 17th century, the Powhatan had been murdered or scattered.
In stark contrast to the way (white) Virginians have usually presented the town, the new museum treats Jamestown as a compelling, sometimes tragic, intersection of English, Native American and African-American cultures. One diorama shows the rich African culture from which Jamestown slaves were wrenched. We see how the Pocahontas story was later embroidered to raise new London money for Jamestown. In fact, the Indian maiden (actually called Matoakah) was only about 12 years old when she first met the British. They kidnapped her to prevent an Indian war before she was baptized as Rebecca and married to the Jamestown elder John Rolfe, who found her “manners barbarous.” For his part, John Smith was accused of mutiny during the 1607 voyage.
If there is any justice, Jamestown’s startling new rendering of itself—offered at the moment of its 400th birthday—should bring the old settlement new visitors and national attention. If it does, future visitors will come to recognize our national origins in that flawed, pugnacious group of men and women on the banks of the mighty James.
title: “Talk Transcript The Real Jamestown” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Tara Leone”
Smith described putting an Indian in a “dungeon” to make his brother return a stolen pistol by dawn the next day—or face execution. By the time the brother returned with the pistol, however, the captive was unconscious. The brother furiously accused Smith of double-crossing him, but Smith offered him a deal: if he would promise to never again steal firearms, he would restore the brother to life. A stiff drink did the trick—and the archeology suggests how Smith brought the Indian back from the dead: the captive had been knocked unconscious by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unventilated fire, a state that can sometimes be reversed with a liquid stimulant.
On May 13, it will be 400 years since three English sailing vessels dropped anchor on the shores of a small island in the James River and 104 colonists stepped onto what is now Virginia. Once the colonists (and the Indians they met, fought and lived beside) took their memories to their graves, the only records of what became the first successful English colony in the New World were the written records left by some of the survivors. But the journals and other documents are sketchy, ambiguous and, on some points, in conflict. Written by what archeologist William Kelso calls “interested parties,” such as John Smith, they “have told us a great deal,” he says. “But eyewitness accounts are sometimes distorted, which is why the archeological record is so important: it can be a more objective record.”
Excavations at Jamestown, begun in earnest in 1994, have unearthed the remains of the original triangular fort (which historians thought had been swallowed by the river) and more than 1 million artifacts, ranging from coins and crucibles to pottery shards, armor and helmets. Together they tell a richer story than the usual dismal and simplistic one in the history books. (Excavations at the site of Pocahontas’s village are the subject of a NOVA episode on most PBS stations on May 8.) “We’ve turned up more evidence than anyone expected,” says Kelso, “and it’s given us a new understanding of the settlers’ lives and their interactions with the Virginia Indians.”
By 1617 the original fort had been expanded to a town of three or four acres, the excavations show, with four buildings inside the walls of the fort (the archaeological team calls them the barracks, the quarter and the rowhouses) and a factory outside that was used for storage and to trade with the Indians. Inside the footprint of the fort, archaeologists have found more than 200 Indian arrow points and, more intriguingly, flakes used to produce them from a stone. “This tells us that an Indian was producing points inside the fort itself,” says Kelso. A well-preserved reed mat like that Powhatan’s people used was found in the fort as well, more evidence that the relationship between the Englishmen and the Indians was much closer than surviving documents reveal. “They were not mortal enemies,” Kelso says. “Some Indians apparently lived inside the fort, working with or for the colonists.”
Written records are unclear about why so many settlers died at Jamestown. Starvation took a huge toll, as did disease. But an account by one of the leaders of Jamestown, William Strachey, also refers to poisoned well-water. Excavations have turned up a well as old as the settlement, and tests showed the water was neither brackish nor otherwise polluted, as Strachey claimed. Why was he wrong, or lying? Kelso suspects that leaders of the struggling colony wanted to blame some of the deaths on their watch on factors other than the food shortage—which they should have prevented—and poisoned drinking water seemed like a good scapegoat.
Smith, Strachey and other eyewitnesses pulled no punches in describing the “starving time” during the winter of 1609-1610. Archaeological finds, though, show just how brutal a time it was. In a pit under the barracks, Kelso’s team found bones of poisonous snakes, butchered horses, rats, cats and dogs, a desperation diet. On other points, however, Smith shaded the truth. He wrote that only 60 of 500 settlers survived the starving time, but archeological evidence shows that the colony then numbered 215—making only 60 survivors tragic enough, but less than the enormity Smith claimed. “By making it seem worse, he was probably trying to impress London with how bad things were so they would send more supplies,” says Kelso. “It was a fund-raising ploy.” Smith also grumbled that the colonists were all “gentlemen” who refused to do physical labor. “But we found postholes, cellars, artifacts and other evidence of the settlers working hard,” says Kelso. “So Smith’s is more of a political statement, an attempt to assign blame and explain why Jamestown had such problems.”
Jamestown still fascinates because, as Kelso wrote in his 2006 “Jamestown: The Buried Truth,” “the American dream was born on the banks of the James River.” It was almost still born. The colonists suffered drought, starvation, disease, political chaos and other turmoil that threatened to make Jamestown a dismal failure. All the more reason, then, to be suspicious of the writings of the leaders who almost let it all slip away. Stones and bones, on the other hand, don’t lie.
