John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609

John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609

Author: Helen C. Rountree

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13:

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Captain John Smith's voyages throughout the new world did not end--or, for that matter, begin--with the trip on which he was captured and brought to the great chief Powhatan. Partly in an effort to map the region, Smith covered countless leagues of the Chesapeake Bay and its many tributary rivers, and documented his experiences. In this ambitious and extensively illustrated book, scholars from multiple disciplines take the reader on Smith's exploratory voyages and reconstruct the Chesapeake environment and its people as Smith encountered them. Beginning with a description of the land and waterways as they were then, the book also provides a portrait of the native peoples who lived and worked on them--as well as the motives, and the means, the recently arrived English had at their disposal for learning about a world only they thought of as "new." Readers are then taken along on John Smith's two expeditions to map the bay, an account drawn largely from Smith's own journals and told by the coauthor, an avid sailor, with a complete reconstruction of the winds, tides, and local currents Smith would have faced. The authors then examine the region in more detail: the major river valleys, the various parts of the Eastern Shore, and the head of the Bay. Each area is mapped and described, with added sections on how the Native Americans used the specific natural resources available, how English settlements spread, and what has happened to the native people since the English arrived. The book concludes with a discussion on the changes in the region's waters and its plant and animal life since John Smith's time--some of which reflect the natural shifts over time in this dynamic ecosystem, others the result of the increased human population and the demands that come with it. Published by the University of Virginia Press in association with Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, and the U.S. National Park Service, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and Maryland Historical Trust.


The Journals of Captain John Smith

The Journals of Captain John Smith

Author: John Smith

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781426200557

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This concise biography paints a rich and detailed portrait of one of America's most intriguing founding fathers. Historian Thompson guides readers through annotated selections of Smith's most important and compelling writings.


Chesapeake

Chesapeake

Author: James A. Michener

Publisher: Dial Press

Published: 2013-12-17

Total Pages: 1026

ISBN-13: 0812986288

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In this classic novel, James A. Michener brings his grand epic tradition to bear on the four-hundred-year saga of America’s Eastern Shore, from its Native American roots to the modern age. In the early 1600s, young Edmund Steed is desperate to escape religious persecution in England. After joining Captain John Smith on a harrowing journey across the Atlantic, Steed makes a life for himself in the New World, establishing a remarkable dynasty that parallels the emergence of America. Through the extraordinary tale of one man’s dream, Michener tells intertwining stories of family and national heritage, introducing us along the way to Quakers, pirates, planters, slaves, abolitionists, and notorious politicians, all making their way through American history in the common pursuit of freedom. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Chesapeake “Another of James Michener’s great mines of narrative, character and lore.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] marvelous panorama of history seen in the lives of symbolic people of the ages . . . An emotionally and intellectually appealing book.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Michener’s most ambitious work of fiction in theme and scope.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Magnificently written . . . one of those rare novels that is enthusiastically passed from friend to friend.”—Associated Press


The Big Oyster

The Big Oyster

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2007-01-09

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1588365913

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Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled. For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways. Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers. Kurlansky brings characters vividly to life while recounting dramatic incidents that changed the course of New York history. Here are the stories behind Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and Robert Fulton’s “Folly”; the oyster merchant and pioneering African American leader Thomas Downing; the birth of the business lunch at Delmonico’s; early feminist Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in the city; even “Diamond” Jim Brady, who we discover was not the gourmand of popular legend. With The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.


Love and Hate in Jamestown

Love and Hate in Jamestown

Author: David A. Price

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 030742670X

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A New York Times Notable Book and aSan Jose Mercury News Top 20 Nonfiction Book of 2003In 1606, approximately 105 British colonists sailed to America, seeking gold and a trade route to the Pacific. Instead, they found disease, hunger, and hostile natives. Ill prepared for such hardship, the men responded with incompetence and infighting; only the leadership of Captain John Smith averted doom for the first permanent English settlement in the New World.The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith, to the spirited Pocahontas, who twice saved Smith’s life. He also gives a rare balanced view of relations between the settlers and the natives and debunks popular myths about the colony. This is a superb work of history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.


Nansemond Chief Weyhohomo and His Descendants

Nansemond Chief Weyhohomo and His Descendants

Author: William A. Hinson

Publisher:

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 9781976758294

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According to Helen Rountree's John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages 1607-1690, pages 144-145, circa 1607 the coastal plain in the James River drainage was occupied by eleven Algonquian-speaking groups, with the piedmont being held by the Siouan Monacans. Of these eleven tribes, all but two belonged to the paramount chiefdom of the King Powhatan, who took his name from his hometown; modern scholars bestow it upon his subjects language and political organization as well. Two groups resisted beging absorbed into that organization: the Chickahominies, who were governed by elders and were populous enough to remain autonomous, and the Chesapeakes, who, were overrun sometime around the time Jamestown was founded.The Powhatan towns along the James were mainly dispersed-settlement towns: scatters of houses, gardens, and groves of trees along the banks of streams. The known exceptions mentioned here were in frontier areas near the Virginia Capes and near the fall line, where attacks from the Monacans were an annual occurrence.The Nansemond Indians consisted of four towns with an estimated 850 people, including 200 fighting men; the chief was Weyhohomo, with satellite town chiefs Amapetough, Weywingopo and Tichtough under him. To date there have been no major archaeological excavations. The towns were: Nandsamond, on the three points where the Nansemond River splits; Mantoughquemend, on the east side upriver; Teracosick, farther upriver on the west side; and Mattanock, uncertain location somewhere downriver on the west side. Sites revealed by archaeological survey and of the correct age are Mattanock and part of Nandsamond. By 1607, when the first English settlers founded Jamestown, the Nansemond lived in several villages centered near Chuckatuck, in present-day Suffolk, along the Nansemond River. Their head chief lived near Dumpling Island, where the tribe's temple and sacred objects were located. The Nansemond tribe spoke a dialect of Algonquian and was among the roughly twenty-eight to thirty-two tribes of Tsenacomoco, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking tribes that was ruled by the paramount chief Powhatan.Like the other tribes of Tsenacomoco, the Nansemond had a tense and often hostile relationship with the English settlers. The colonists had exhausted their supplies soon after arriving in Virginia and, unaccustomed to growing their own food, sought to trade with the Indians for corn. In late 1608, Powhatan directed the tribes of Tsenacomoco to refuse to trade. In 1609, Captain John Smith sent George Percy and John Martin, along with a group of sixty colonists, to bargain with the Nansemond for an island. After two of their English messengers disappeared, Martin and Percy's men attacked a nearby Nansemond settlement, where, according to Percy, they "burned their houses ransaked their Temples, Tooke downe the Corpes of their deade kings from their Toambes, and Caryed away their pearles Copper and braceletts wherewith they doe decore their kings funeralles." The English also destroyed the Indians' crops. More than half of Martin and Percy's men were killed during the attack, an event that helped initiate the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-1614), one of three distinct periods of hostility between the Indian and English communities. The Nansemond towns were burned again in 1622 in retaliation for the coordinated Indian assault against English settlements on March 22, 1622, which was led by the Pamunkey chief Opechancanough and marked the start of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-1632).The peace treaty that concluded the Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644-1646) set aside land for the people of Tsenacomoco, including the Nansemond. By 1648, according to the scholar Helen C. Rountree, the Nansemond lived on the northwest and south branches of the Nansemond River and this is the story of their descendants.