The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne : an Archaeological and Historical Odyssey

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Knopf, 1994 - History - 491 pages
For thirty-five years, as writer, lecturer, and chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, Ivor Noel Hume has enlivened for us the material culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. After his warmly praised book Martin's Hundred, he now turns to the two earliest English outposts in Virginia -- Roanoke and James Towne -- and pieces together revelatory information extrapolated from the shards and postholes of excavations at these sites with contemporary accounts found in journals, letters, and official records of the period. He illuminates narratives that have a mythic status in our early history: the exploits of Sir Walter Ralegh, Captain John Smith, and Powhatan; the life and death of Pocahontas; and the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. He recounts a recent important excavation at Roanoke where he and his colleagues found the work site of a metallurgist named Joachim Gans, whose findings about the mineral wealth of Virginia helped to convince London merchants that America was a worthy risk This is an account of high and low adventure, of noble efforts and base impulses, and of the inevitably tragic interactions between Indians and Europeans, marked by greed, treachery, and commonplace savagery on both sides. The astonishment of this history is that despite bad luck, bad management, and bad blood, the English presence in America persisted and the Virginia settlements survived as the birthplace of a country founded on English law and language.
With clarity, authority, and elegant wit, Noel Hume has enhanced our understanding of the historical forces and principal players behind England's first perilous ventures into the New World, and proved again that he iswithout a doubt one of the great interpreters of our early colonial past.

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Contents

Whosoever Commands the Sea
3
The New Fort in Virginia
20
The Cittie That Never Was
54
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Ivor Noël Hume was born in London, England on November 4, 1927. He was evacuated from London during World War II. He studied at Framlingham and St. Lawrence Colleges and served briefly in the Army until he was injured in an accident. While working as a stage manager in London, he heard a radio report about a man who fished antiquities from the Thames and decided to give it a try. He delivered some of his finds to Adrian Oswald, the head of the Guildhall Museum. Hume began working with him doing postwar archaeology in the rubble of London and was given a job at the museum in 1949. A week later, he found himself in charge after his boss contracted pneumonia and never returned to work. He decided to specialize in 17th- and 18th-century wine bottles. He was the director of Colonial Williamsburg's archaeological mission from 1957 to 1988. In 1970, he and his colleagues discovered the remains of a once-fortified settlement called Wolstenholme Towne. He was able to verified the massacre the destroyed the settlement by exhuming the bones of its victims and found physical evidence of colonization. He wrote more than two dozen books during his lifetime including The Virginia Adventure, A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America, All the Best Rubbish, and A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist. In 1993, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service to British cultural interests in Virginia. He died on February 4, 2017 at the age of 89.

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