Rating: 
Summary: history at its exciting and informative best
Review: This is a book for all of us for whom names like Roanoke, Jamestown, Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, Powhatan, Pocohontas, and John Smith are merely dim memories from grade school Colonial History studies. Giles Milton has taken a marvelously colorful cast of characters and a set of intrinsically dramatic events and made of them a wonderfully readable, genuinely exciting history of the earliest English efforts to colonize North America.An accretion of myth has grown up around colonization, which at least implies that Europeans stumbled upon bountiful lands and picked them clean at the expense of helpless native populations. Milton's book masterfully recaptures a sense of how enormous were the risks, human and financial, which accompanied the process. The human risk was taken by the colonists and administrators who set sail for a New World which Milton amply demonstrates they knew practically nothing about. The book charts the stuttering attempts to establish a secure foothold on the Atlantic Coast, through episodes of shipwreck, starvation, murder, and war; ending with the uneasy truce reached between colonists and natives when John Rolfe fell in love with and married Pocohontas, legendary daughter of the warrior chieftain Powhatan. Lest anyone believe that the English had an easy time of all this, consider the moment when just fifteen men were left behind to hold the fort at Roanoke, alone amidst an unexplored and untamed wilderness. These men and a subsequent group of colonists famously disappeared--the lost colony of Roanoke--though Milton offers an intriguing theory of their fate in an Epilogue. The expense of settling Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay was largely borne by Ralegh, a pampered favorite of Queen Elizabeth. He comes across as the one player who had a vision of what the American colonies might become and a stubborn determination to establish them. In Milton's portrayal, he is the quintessential Renaissance man--courtier, poet, scientist, diplomat, soldier, etc.--and the hero of the tale. Ralegh made every effort in these early years to treat the natives fairly, even making one of them, Manteo, who had been brought back to England and educated, the Lord of Roanoke. Ultimately his peaceful policy was abandoned, but thanks to the rising demand for the tobacco which his minions had brought back with them his vision of a permanent colony became a reality, though he tragically ended up on the chopping block, beheaded by James I on a dubious accusation of treason. Milton relies heavily on first hand accounts, many presented with their original chaotic spelling, and these take some getting used to, but they do lend the tale a greater immediacy than it might otherwise have had. With stories of piracy, war at sea and on land, cowardice and bravery, blind luck and vicious backstabbing, there's always plenty of action and the whole thing ends with an improbable love story. Never mind what you think you remember from those school days long ago; this is history at its exciting and informative best. GRADE : A
Rating:
Summary: If I could give this book more than 5 stars I would!
Review: This is an absolute cracker of a read. Milton has the happy of knack
of making his subjects, his story and the time come alive - and this
is a great story. On the cover the blurb reads "The Adventures
and Fate of the First English Colonists in America" - but this is
really a history of all the men and women who made the first colony in
America - so this includes Elizabeth I, and men such as Sir Humfrey
Gilbert and his half-brother (yes half-brother) Sir Walter Ralegh, who
put together these expeditions in the sixteenth century. Milton has
a lovely way of putting together this story. It is chronological, as
each new attempt or piece of information builds on the last, but he
draws in details to build the picture perfectly. So when we get to
Ralegh (Milton's spelling of the name) there is a welter of detail on
his early life, and Elizabeth the First's court life to show the age
he lived in, what sort of person he was and the privelege he had
experienced. Milton's style is very light and I enjoyed that too. For
Instance, he refers to Elizabeth I's great favourite "the
swaggering Robert Dudley, her 'sweet Robin,' who had come within a
codpiece of depriving the virgin Queen of her much vaunted
epithet." Milton also lets the adventurers tell their own stories
by interspersing the text with their own comments and writings which
is rather fun and occassionally laugh out loud funny.
The life of the settlers in England's first American colony on Roanoke
Island just south of Chesapeake Bay comes alive in all its grim detail,
under Milton's pen. He overlays the sources from England, ship's logs, and
survivors accounts, to show us a picture of poor planning, conflicting
interests, ill-suited personalities and petty politics which effectively
sabotage each attempt to settle in America. And in the end there is an
amazing mystery left. For following the first failed settlement on this
island another group of settlers was sent to establish a new town but this
time in the more salubious area of Chesapeake Bay. Unfortunately, owing to
problems with ambitious ship's captains, they are dumped back on Roanoke
Island. It proves just as unhappy a place for them as for the last settlers,
and after some troubles they decide to send the town's ineffective governor
back to England to beg for more help - and that is the last time the colony
is ever heard of. The years pass and problems in England, and war with
Spain, mean that no one makes any concerted search for them. However, Milton
has been through all the contemporary accounts and thinks the answer is
there. Gradually, layer by layer, he unwraps the mystery of what happened,
leaving clues through the book which he marks for us to take note of. And he
also makes the whole thing very personal, for not only are the settlers
missing, but among them is Virginia Dare, she was first white American child
born to the colony, the grand-daughter of the colony's Governer to boot. It
makes it very compelling, trying to fit the pieces of this puzzle back
together to discover what on earth happened to lost settlement.
This book
reads as easily as a novel, it's a real page turner and an absolute
gem as a follow up for "Nathaniel's Nutmeg"
Rating:
Summary: Intro to American History
Review: Too often we Americans seem to believe our history begins with Plymouth Colony. Or worse yet, with the War for Independence. Milton has done us a wonderful service in providing a text to introduce us to the true beginnings of the English settlement of North America. The text is easy to read and flows more like a story than history. This book will well serve both the casual reader and the student of history. If I may be allowed one critical comment on the work, it is that Milton fails to provide notes in the text. He does, however, provide a comprehensive bibliography. As an avid reader of history, I enjoy being able to track sources. The omission of notes in no way detracts from the value of the book.
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