Joseph Kelly: Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origin – Jospeh Kelly – 978-1-63286-777-3 – Bloomsbury – Hardcover – 512 pages – $32 – October 30, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

I really enjoy reading books about American history, and especially lately, books that explore some of the stories and moments that are foundational to the history of this continent, but are not well known or well told. And I’ve also become extremely concerned about gaining a better and more nuanced understanding of those stories that have been told solely from the perspective of the European (white) perspective that dominates our historical narrative, and thus our understanding of ourselves.

Joseph Kelly’s Marooned is just such a book, and I was immediately drawn to it. This is an insightful re-examination of the 1607 Jamestown settlement, the story of which really should replace the Mayflower colony’s position as America’s founding Puritan-centric myth.

In fact, the multiple stories of Europeans’ initial contact with the native peoples who fully inhabited North, Central and South America all require a complete re-examination, and I have been reading several books that provide insight into the way these continents were conquered by the marauding Europeans and their violence and diseases.

Marooned is about much more than just the Jamestown settlement. The book begins by recounting the settlement’s really awful circumstances. Most of those early settlers died of disease or starvation or deserted to the local tribes for protection. The workings of the Virginia Company that was set up to colonize and exploit the supposedly “virgin” New World are fascinating and in some ways depressingly familiar to our modern large scale version of unrestrained capitalism.

The traditional blame for the miseries of Jamestown’s early years goes to those leaders who failed to manage their “lazy” colonists, as opposed to those who were ready, willing and able to literally whip them into shape. But Kelly makes it clear that because it was the aristocrats who wrote the documents on which our traditional history relies, the real story may be, likely is, significantly different. Kelly finds ample evidence that the colonists who were cast into the wilderness, “marooned” from home and trying to survive, experienced a far different reality than their leaders. Many of them had a nascent understanding that Britain’s rigid class structure would not work in this different environment, and that their actual survival required a far more equitable system of governance. In fact, there were many uprisings and expressions of rebellion, all of which were put down, although a limited electoral oligarchy emerged during the course of the 17th century in the Virginia colony.

There are many side trips and journeys throughout this engaging narrative. The story of the castaways from one of the resupply ships on Bermuda, truly a story of being marooned, is striking.  Nine ships en route to re-supply Jamestown in 1609 were hit hard by a hurricane, a storm of extreme high winds and waves, and one ship, the Sea Adventure, with some of the key leaders of the expedition on board, was wrecked on the shores of the Bermudas. The crew reached one of the islands in safety, and almost a year later, after building two boats by hand, they sailed again for Jamestown, and somewhat surprisingly, were able to reach their destination not long after departing from Bermuda. This story circulated widely in London, and may well have inspired Shakespeare’s great play, The Tempest. The timing is certainly right for that to be the case.

Kelly contributes a significantly better understanding of the Powhatan Confederacy’s formation and politics before and during the settlement period, as well as the fluidity between the cultures of the native peoples and the colonists. Marooned is not just the story of the Europeans and their conquest, but successfully weaves together the the narrative of the struggles of native peoples of that time and place in their powerful efforts to survive the arrival of the brutal land grabbing English settlers and the lives of the colonists at the lower ends of the social strata, whose stories we rarely, if ever, get to know.

It is a pleasure to discover such a good writer and story teller as Joe Kelly is. In this book, he truly brings history alive through its people, and with a narrative built on a solid grounding of research and a deeper understanding of the complexities of perspective than many other historians.

Joseph Kelly holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, Austin, and is a professor of literature and director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston. He is the author of America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward Civil War, and the editor of the Seagull Reader series. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Joe’s blog can be found here.

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Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning reading in Tucson, Arizona

What a great trip! Starting January 18, 2019, with a reading at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, poets Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning, started a cross country journey together (you can view their trip itinerary here).

Appropriately, their story and journey began in Brooklyn, where Barbara lives, and this amazing cross-country jaunt ends in Denver two months later, where Maureen lives.

The two writers have been blogging about their adventure here – their writing is terrific and fun, it is always fresh and lively, truly poets’ reportage, and reading their travel log will make you feel like you are along for the ride with them. They are having alot of fun and meeting and talking with some wonderful people along the way. They are getting to see some beautiful parts of our country too. Their two months on the road will feature 16 public events, and innumerable anecdotes and stories. It’s really fun to follow along with them as they travel, and when they are done, this will make a really interesting book.

I had the good fortune to be in Tucson, Arizona, when the two writers arrived there on February 14. Maureen is an old friend and colleague, so it was wonderful to get together with her, and to meet Barbara for the first time. When I went to hear them read for the POG Poetry reading series at the Steinfeld Warehouse Community Art Center, 101 West 6th Tucson on Saturday, February 16, and I recorded the event for this Authors Voices series here on Writerscast.

Local writer Steve Salmoni introduced the event. Poet and publisher (Chax Press) Charles Alexander introduced Maureen, and artist Cynthia Miller introduced Barbara, who lived in Tucson for a few years and has many friends there still.

It was a great event, and a wonderful opportunity to hear two terrific writers, both of whom engage with their audience and their writing. I’ve known Maureen for a long time, and believe she is one of the best poets of our time. Getting to hear Barbara Henning was a treat for me, as she is also a terrific writer of both poetry and fiction. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to present this reading here.

Poet Maureen Owen was born in Minnesota, lived and worked in New York City and Connecticut, and has been living in Denver for a number of years, where she has long taught at nearby Naropa University. She was the founder of Telephone magazine and Telephone Books, worked at the Poetry Project in NYC, and is the author of a number of wonderful collections of poems.

Barbara Henning is a poet and fiction writer, born in Detroit, who has lived mostly in New York and Tucson since the early eighties. Aside from being the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, she was also the editor of a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She is professor emeritus at Long Island University, where she taught for many years.

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