by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright June 2019
"Based on a True Story"
Movie makers love putting this at the end of their credit roll, and it seems colonial historians loved adding it to their writings as well. (This implies there is instinctive thinking at the root of this phenomenon.) In both cases, though, the stories being told usually have enough internal inconsistency to imply this is wishful thinking rather than fact. I will be discussing the internal inconsistencies in the historical documents we have been asked to read.
One of the big inconsistencies in this story is deciding where to set up the colony. The plan was to set up on Dominica in the Caribbean area, the reality came to be a colony in the Virginia area. In British context this is the difference between setting up a colony on the White Cliffs of Dover and setting up one in the Edinburgh, Scotland area.
Wow! If you’re an investor in this project, or someone planning to support this project, this is something you can't just say "Ah well…" to. This is a huge change, it would not have been accepted blithely.
And there is conversation going on between the settlers and the natives. From the text, "The day before the ship's departure the king of Pa-maunke [i.e., Opechancanough] sent the Indian that had met us before in our discovery, to assure us peace,… " This implies that the natives had been dealing with Europeans and English speakers long before these settlers arrived. The inconsistency: unlike what the story is saying, these people were not the first Europeans here.
In sum, lots of inconsistency.
This story also implies that these were the first Europeans in the area. But like in the Smith paper these people ran into lots of Native Americans who had dealt with Europeans before -- one is even described as speaking English to them. This implies there had been routine visits by Europeans to this area long before these settlers showed up.
Also the author is telling of the Native American deaths as contemporary with him, not something that happened in the past. Here is the opening statement "... There was no town where we had any subtle devise practiced against us, we leaving it unpunished or not revenged (because we sought by all means possible to win them by gentleness) but that within a few days after our departure from every such town, the people [Native Americans] began to die very fast, and many in short space."
More inconsistency between what the story is telling and what really could have been happening.
As the introduction to these charts notes, "There is no full consensus among scholars regarding the figures underlying Graph 1; in particular, the size of the indigenous population of the New World at the time of contact is a matter of dispute, and indeed may be unknowable." In other words, "We are guessing, and there are many people who don't agree with our guesses."
An interesting but hard to answer question: When did these colonists, and later the immigrants coming to established colonies, feel like they had overcome enough hardships that they felt like they were living a better life than they had been back in the old world? Related but not the same, when did their physical prosperity equal that which they left behind in the Old World? These questions are not addressed in the class discussions, but they are relevant to the "settler story" that is being talked about.
We are being introduced to stories here. The authors are describing them as "true stories" but there is little evidence to verify that, and there are many inconsistencies within the stories themselves which indicate there may not be as much truth in them as the authors would like to believe there is.
--The End--