![]() ![]() ![]() Put people in trying circumstances, especially people used to the soft life, and you’re likely to get ugly politics. Alas, writes Price, those founders didn’t do their homework when they chose the spot for their new settlement though the wide mouth of the James River allowed oceangoing vessels to dock right alongside the town-a helpful advantage, given all the boatloads of gold, silver, and other riches that the colonists were hoping to extract from the surrounding countryside-the site of Jamestown was really a malarial swamp ill-suited to agriculture, cattle, and humans. “English America,” he continues, “was a corporation before it was a country,” and the founders of the Jamestown colony were a mix of corporate types, including plenty of middle managers and martinets who, under the rubric of “gentlemen,” had no intention of working, not even to save their own skins. So writes Virginian and Washington-based journalist Price, giving his tale a thoroughly modern spin at the outset. A graceful narrative history of the troubled Jamestown colony, “an entrepreneurial effort organized and financed by. ![]()
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