next joseph kelly literature professor at the college of charleston provides a history of the jamestown colony. second coming up later on manhattan institute takes a critical look at u.s. labor and economic policies and suggests ways to improve them. that's what's coming up on book tv on c-span 2. here's joseph kelly on the jamestown colony. >> liz: good afternoon everyone. we're going to get started here. my name is liz artlip, a member of the event staff. i'd like to welcome you to politics and prose. just a quick note before we get started silence your cell phone. feel free to take pictures, do whatever you'd like in that

passion. just do it sliently. the reason being we record all the audio for archival purposes and we have c-span book tv with us here this afternoon. when we get to the q and a portion if you have a question, which we highly encourage step up to the mic right over here, so everyone can hear your question and at home when c-span airs this talk. and this talk is of course for joe kelly and his new book "marooned" 'jamestown, shipwrecked, and a new history of america's origin' in its bold retelling of american founding methkelly doesn't relocate the natural origin story from plymouth rock to jamestown. the settlers why they came to north america and what sort of life they hoped to build here. rather than seeing jamestown as a failed colony. kelly, author of "america's

longest siege," recast it as mew roon cast aways. eager to throw off authority, throw opthe channels of the and quality and suferlt skills many which were learned from the native americans than traditional social hierarchy. please help me welcome him to politics and prose. [applause] >> joseph: thanks liz, and thank you to politics and prose for inviting me here and that you can to all of you for coming in on a fall day to listen to me talk. i hope i can make it worth your while. okay, that was stole my thunder that was a wonderful summary of the book. i don't know what i'm going to say now. i'll begin by telling you a story. in the beginning a storm at sea, waves higher than a house, the

wind chopping the tops of the waves off like an axe, throwing the water into inheavens, and drowning the lightning, a brave ship full of noble creatures. that's how shakespeare's tempest begins. the play that was stadium in 1611 in a drafty, london theater in the winter of 1611, it was ripped from the headlines if you will to use a phrase from today, only there were no headlines then. neurpz would not be invented for a couple years yet but it was a true story and shakespeare had a scoop because he got it from a narrative that was written from a friend of his, that would share drinks with him at the mermaid tavern. william strachey, who was on board the ship. the name of the ship was "the sea venture," it was the flagship of the third resupply

of jamestown which had been founded a couple years earlier. a toe hold on the entire vast north american continent, the only english colony overseas. therere in my opinion ships nine ships sliding down the river, crowds cheering it was the biggest overseas enderve english had put together. they're getting into the empire business late, and trying to catch up with spain and portugal, and france who got a slow start they had beautiful weather, blue skies, wonderful breezes, normally what people would do going across the ocean is island hop going on a southern reut, but they were taking a direct route so they were not going to see land for

weeks. this is an unusual way of crossing the atlantic. they had wonderful weather, until they estimated they were about a week away from getting to the chesapeake bay, and they were overcome by a hurricane. the kind of storm that english sailors and very few european sailors had experience said. three days and three nights. it's more fantastic than what shakespeare does which is tbul of fantasy and magic. three days, and nights they're struggling against the waves. the very boards of the ship begin to come apart. the oakum is spewing out that sales between the boards. they're looking for the leaks, and there are leaks everywhere, and they're trying to plug them. they're taking salt beef and pounding it into the gaps to try to stop the water. the sailors are stripped naked, even the gentleman on the ship are stripped down to their shirt

sleeves and helping as well. still the water is rising, until it gets to the point, they're in the middle of the atlantic, no land anywhere for a thousand miles, there's no way they can serve, they decide to close the hasms and contine themselves to the keep. at that moment they sight land. and the admiral is able to turn this waterlogged ship to ram it up on a reef. they're on the north eastern edge of the bermuda islands. so this is not a new story. since 2007 there's been at least five significant books that have come out about jamestown itself. that was the 400th anniversary from jamestown. there's also books about "the sea venture" and the shipwreck itself. what i'm doing different is telling the story from the point of view of the common settler.

the laborers, the tradesman, the people who signed on to this adventure, who bought shares in the virginia company with their bodies, not with their money. so what we know now, and this is some of this i'm basing on a wonderful book by a guy named steven mentz who the title of the book is "shipwrecked modernity," and he has studied every text about ship wreks in the 16th and 17th centuries, he's identified a three-part psychological experience that people go through. metaphorically speaking, and literally speaking. the first is shock. you are hit in the face with cold, sea water. saltwater, and it shocks the sensibilities. you can't believe this is happening to you. then immersion. your feet leave the deck. you are floating, you see the rest of the passengers floating

away from you. you're detached. by yourself you see the wreck of the ship itself floating away from you. then if you don't drown, of course, you stumble up on the beach. if you drown that's it, only two stages of psychological experience. the third one, when you climb up on the beach, and the sea water is dripping off you, and you're blinking at the sun and you see the other survivors doing the same thing who themselves have been immersed and detached from every connection they had, and you look at the dudebris of the ship, and the material coming onshore too. and then you're faced with the next step. how are we go to survive? this is the third stage what steven mentz called salve page. the material salvage, let's get what food and tools and lumber to try to construct something that's going to allow us to survive on this island.

but it's also the salvage of the old way of life, your political and social organize, what are you going to choose that is going to stay and what are you going to leave behind. it is the psychological experience of going through ship wreck and facing the necessity of survival, that lest people make the impossible choices. let's take the example, but there are two very interesting people who are on the see adventure ship wreck, one is named elizabeth parsons, and she is the made from someone we know as mistress horton. both names are on the manifest, one is the servant, and begun is

the mistress. they get on to the beach and survive, and they sleep it off and get up in the next morning and what does elizabeth parsons do? does she go back to being the made of her mistress, or is she looking out for herself? we don't know the answer to that specific question but in general we do know an awful lot. so let me take a step back for a second, and tell you about how the whole adventure was set up. as i said this is the third resupply of jamestown. it was also they were bringing the second charter. they saw how horrible things were messed up so they brought a new charter, the governor was with them, and the admiral. there are two ways you can invest. one way is to use money, ten and a half pounds would buy you a share in the company, and all the gentleman had bought at least one share and they also purchased another share by virtue of being on the ship

itself. now all those commoners that i was talking about, the labors, the tradesman, the made to mistresses, they owned a share because of their body. they did not invest any money. what we do know, and historians have not paid attention to is that each one of these people entered into a literal contract when they got on that boat. they went down to philpot lane and went into the house of thomas smith, in london, the ceo of the virginia company and he explained to them the terms of the contract, they didn't really sign but they took an oath, and took two oaths, was equivalent to signing to giving their consent to this contract, and that contract meant mutual blaigzs. they would give a term of labor, and the virginia company was going to give them 100 acres, that's what we think, there's

some dispute in the documents about that. what's important is this is a set of mutual obligations. so when the settlers set foot on the ship in london they knew they were putting themselves under the jurisdiction of the virginia company. as soon as they departed english they started having buyers remorse. and the reason was because the sailors who were sailing these ships had been to jamestown before. the settlers they had p the propaganda but the sailors had been there and they started telling them what was going on in virginia, and what was going on was not what they expected from a plantation. an english person establishing a plantation thought it was going to be like the ones english had been establishing in ireland. where you have a group of people go over together and establish a town with -- and farms outside the town, and it's basically you're anglicizing ireland, and turning it into a little piece

of english. what they were going to find what they discovered when the sailors talked to them is that jamestown was like a military garrison. it was run by soldiers, and the settlers had become against their will foot soldiers under a military rule. now to make things worse those generals were incompetent. there were at least three factions among the counselors who were governing jamestown. maybe four. by the time, one of the them had been executed, and another was in chains on below decks on a ship they had sitting in the james river. incompetent, the place was messed up and after the first summer half the people had disappeared. probably most of us of them having starved. and this is not the starving time you've heard of where they

reduce to cannibalism, this is the starving time, the first summer on the james river. this is what we call trouble times. i take that from historians who were elab rating on the famous frontier thesis of american exceptionalism. not entirely popular thesis these days although it's coming back into facilitationen i would say since the 1990s since there's been new attention of middle ground, the meeting space between civilizations, between native american, and african civilizations. so with the new attitude, and the new scholarship that is done in the middle ground the frontier thesis is coming back into a -- into play. basically the frontier thesis

suggests that what makes americans distinct from europeans is our confrontation with the frontier. and with frederick jackson turner deposited this thesis, he was depositing it because the frontier had been closed in the late 19th century. he says this is what's causing anxiety in america right now. what happens on the frontier, and this is coming back to the term "trouble times" a group of people will go maybe across the appalachian mountains to settle a new settlement, and they have a confrontation with the frontier, and no matter where you're going, a new settlement on the frontier it's tough. it's hard, and you're going to run into problems. life challenging problems. and if your leadership is incompetent, democracy presents itself. that's the term. democracy trents itself as the

natural way we are going to deal with the situation where we have leaders who are no good, we're too far from the east which is on the other side of the mountains we're not getting help from them. we have to do it ourselves. how are we going to make decisions how are we going to save ourselves. trouble times had come to jamestown. those leaders were backstabbing each other, people were starving. trouble time came to bermuda too. a different kind of trouble though. bermuda was a paradise. they pot of it in those terms, fish, foul, fruit, enough pigs to have people eat barbecue forever for 153 people to -- the survivors could have lived wonderfully. what happened is the settlers after hearing the stories from the sailors said we're not going any further. we're going to start our colony right here.

why would we go to virginia when we can do it right here and we're not going to die if we stay here. so they decided to stay. but the virginia company had different ideas. which brings on to stage a character named steven hopkins who is the most important founding father that you guys have probably never heard of. has anyone heard of steven hopkins? he is probably the original stufawn o in shakespeare's tempest. according to william strachey, the guy who wrote the narrative, the friend of shakespeare's he had an adamantine tongue, which my knowledge of -- that's what the clause of wolverine is adamantine, so i guess it was a tongue that could cut through anything i suppose. he had the gift of gab. he could persuade people.

william strachey is describing him this way because he's a villain in william strachey's tale. steven hopkins -- he was a failed farmer which is why he was going -- sometime inn keeper. he was a commoner, he did not buy his way. he bought it with his body, not money. what he started telling people, was that yes okay everybody had consented to come on the sea venture in the first place but our contract creased when the rack was committed. as if when they were immersed in the sea water to come back to the metaphor that steven mentz gave us. their contract with the virginia company had dissolved when they were immerses in the sea water. i'm going to read a paragraph from the book. he said the ship wreck had freed

each cast away. that's his term, they were freed. from the government of any man. even the meanest by which he meant the poorest laborer among them. even the meanest was bound only by the law of self-preservation. which compelled him to provide for himself and his own family as he saw fit. this condition a political detachment depended on the fact they were confronting a wilderness. this is basically what being marooned means. you were cast away into a wilderness, beyond civilization, and beyond the law. essentially this is the state of nature. it's a foundation of hobs, and locks social contract theory. only steven hopkins voiced it 40 years before hobs's leviathan was published.

the cast aways of the sea venture experience this phenomenon but they didn't crews the terms. they didn't use the term marooned abecause it didn't carry this meaning in the english language until 90 years later. the original meaning of marooned and i want to make sure i capture this in the book, and any origin story of america has to include this. this is the contributions i hope i'm making. the original meaning of marooned is not cast aways being hurled into the wilderness. but it's enslaved people having the courage to flee into the wilderness. we need to recover this origin of western democracy. democracy then did not begin in the governance of puritan churches in europe, but on the frontier experience of escaped slaves. panama, jamaica, haiti of course

wherever spain had its colonies. when they imported africans to work on their slave labor camps, in each one of those places people escaped into the inhospitable hinter land, whether it was swamp or mountains wherever they would not be followed. they would go there. as a matter of fact the very first settlers in the continental united states. this is probably something nobody knows. it's certainly not out there in the popular imagination. in the 1520s before spain has even settled anywhere in the continental united states, the first settlers were bound workers africans, who had escaped spanish slavery somewhere, we're not sure where, somewhere on the carolina coast. okay, that term slave labor camp this is like a toll that brings us back to bermuda. what was happening in bermuda

was in fact a slave labor camp. they were work gangs, overseers, epeople with guns making the settlers build the very ships that were going to take them away from the paradise and bring them to jamestown. they labored for several months under these conditions. this is steven hopkins was whispering his insurection if you will, to his fellow settlers, and the conspiracy which included more than half of the 150 people that were there. it went one person too far. somebody denounced him. he was arrested, he was tried, he was convicted to death, his golden tongue as william strachey puts it, he talked his way out of the death sentence. he was given clemency by the governor. he kept his head down then, and there were two more insurections and executions before the ships

were finished. we don't hear anymore about steven hopkins, he disappears from history. >> were these people who were already there. >> these were people in bermuda on their way to jamestown. bermuda had no human habitation. >> joseph: they didn't call them slaves but that's what they were. and they were forced to get on the boats and go to jamestown which was a slave labor camp themselves and they proceeded to try to escape, and their mutiny, what the narratives called mutinies and in effect were people trying to maroon themselves just like those slaves in cartagena, and panama, and jamaica trying to run out and live with the indians, and

they were prevented from doing it. so hopkins did his years in jamestown, the way a convict does time. and then after he was done he didn't take his 100 acres he went back to english. ten years after the sea venture wreck, another ship sailed into a storm in the mid atlantic, this of course was the may flower. you know that story,itous wasn't supposed to end up in new english. it had a patent from the virginia company, it was supposed to go further south. this narrative we get from the point of view of william bradford who becomes the governor of plymouth plantation. and as he tells this there were two different types of people who were on the mayflower, the saints, and the strangers. while they were off the coast of massachusetts the strangers started some unruly talk. and what they were saying was

because we are not settling, in the territory the virginia company owns, the contract is dissolved. and when we land, we can do whatever we want to do. now the way william bradford tells the story, they then road up a -- what we know as the mayflower compact to prevent that from happening. these unruly strangers from doing whatever they wanted. and this is considered the founding document of america. democracy the playflower compact where they -- 41 people enter into a civil body politic. and using the words steven hopkins was doing in bermuda or failed to do, tried to do in bermuda. it's no surprise that the words are so similar to what steven hopkins was using in bermuda because steven hopkins was on the mayflower. he was one of the those

strangers. all right so why does all this matter? let me conclude by gesturing a little broadly and maybe to contemporary times. why is it important to tell this story, this new history of america's origin? we have a pretty good origin myth. we all know this. it's the pilgrim tale. religious oppression, flight in the mayflower escape to the promised land. i know it's not like we're naive about this. i saw on the table behind you "lies my teacher told me," by james loewen, over there is philbrick's "mayflower," it's embedded in the image we have that america is a shining city on a hill. that image that was made popular in the 1980s by ronald reagan he borrowed it from john kennedy.

nobody caught on until reagan used it. america, if this is america, this is our image, our myth of america that means america is built on a covenant not between people but between people and god. this image comes to us of course from the sermon in 1630 from john winthrop, and what he said was if god would prevent them from having a shipwreck, if he landed them safely, safe and sound and dry on land where they don't get immersed they will keep the faith and stay pure, and resist corruption. they will remain faithful to the faith of their fathers which of course was a european faith. and that's what the shining city on the hill will be. this righteous state. so as long as we retain this myth, we imagine that our

democracy grew out of religion, and the consequence of that conceit is our firm conviction that we as americans are as moses and the jews and exodus were god's chosen people. shipwreck and cast away being marooned in a wilderness is a better foundation for our modern society. not only is it more accurate, and that's what i'm arguing, that's really where our foundation of democracy comes from. not only is it more accurate it's a better myth. just think about the consequences between the myth that we have, and the myth of cast aways when we're dealing with something like the 14th amendment. knee are not bound to each other by cleaving to the faith of our fathers fathers to made a promise to god. each generations is marooned cast ashore in a worldwiderness and we must reform a more

perfect union by making promises to each other. thank you. [applause] if anyone has questions i'm happy to try to answer them. >> host: i thought you're going to talk more you stopped the story of "marooned" in bermuda but the story goes on. >> joseph: yes it does go on. >> host: they end up in jamestown, and terrible things took place and they all died. >> joseph: i only had 20 minutes to talk they actually didn't all die. i do talk about this in the book, thank you for asking that question. when they get to jamestown, people have been there for two years, but people have been desserting this garrison at

every opportunity, and going to live with the indians. as a matter of fact that first starving time ends because miraculously, the indians bring food to the fort. they had been burying their people in secret because they're afraid if the indians know everybody's dying in the fort they'll be overrun. the indians know it. they knew exactly what was going on in the fort. they knew how many people were dying. they saved it, and the reason is because people had english people desserted the fort and were living with the indians. i think what happened is they persuade the indians to come save the english. john smith, president wingfield the executives of the virginia company described this as a miracle. god told them to do this. how else can it be explained? >> guest: you said it came -- the indians came in and

explained how to farm and brought stuff after the harvest failed. >> joseph: my distinction in what's happening in plymouth, as i say if this is the origins of democracy we're basically looking at a failure, because the commoners did not win out. they did not establish a democracy. there's a new book out 1619 in that pbs series, it begins in the 1619 whether the first burgesis formed in jamestown. what we're looking at an attempt to form a democracy but it didn't quite work. what happens in plymouth is not the kind of assimilation, not the openness to change that we expect in the middle ground of the frontier. the pilgrims succeed to the degree and this is in their own words. the degree to which they remain impervious to the influences. they think of the indians as the devils out there in the woods.

they're not knowing to adopt indian ways. that kind of thing. this is probably most -- one of my favorite examples of this is satire that the simpson's did of the pilgrims, i won't go into it all but manager says essentially william bradford bragged about how laws are stricter in massachusetts than they are in english, and this is what made the righteous city shining city on the hill is that there was less freedom in massachusetts than there was in openingland. england. >> guest: just a mechanical and bigraphical question. steven hopkins going back to where? >> joseph: he died in new

england. >> guest: so he signed up twice? optimist at heart. >> joseph: because he had been in virginia he had a very salable commodity. he may have spoken the al gong wn dialect in virginia. he knew how to deal with native americans. so he was one of the more important people who were on the mayflower we don't hear very much about that. >> guest: i think both of them included part of my question. i was just going to say when you referred to them experiencing the frontier, that included their interaction with indigenous people in that area? >> joseph: absolutely. >> guest: my question is -- do

you know if anyone on the 1603 ship, or later, were any of the crew part of the expedition that landed and the roanoke island in 1587? and that 100 people vanished that people had been looking for ever since. >> joseph: the same people involved in the virginia people had been involved in roanoke. they went to sir walter raleigh's house and had to talk him into giving them the patent. he was in charge of the roanoke colony. you're exactly right. they melted into native american violation villages, scholars think that's the best guess. some of them were probably

killed in conflict with the native americans, but many of them survived. and there's lots of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that they melted into the native american society. but the thing about roanoke that nobody talks about, and this comes back to the original meaning of marooned, was that there were hundreds, hundreds of liberated african slaves that sir francis drake had gone down -- while they were establishing roanoke, roanoke was going to be a pirate depot that was going to help english raids on spanish caribbean. and sir francis drake went down to caribbean with a fleet of ships and raided cartagena, and hispanolia, they raided florida, almost raided cuba. they were going to try to topple the spanish empire by getting slaves to rise up.

and they liberated hundreds of them and took them on their ships, and went to roanoke on their way home, in those hundreds of people disappeared. no one knows what happened to them. they got put off somewhere between florida, and roanoke. i imagined they were put ashore at roanoke because they don't go back to england. those are the lost people of roanoke. we have a good idea what happened to the white people. no one talks about the black people and there are hundreds of them. >> guest: there is a few that talk about some of the africans that assimilated with the indians and -- >> joseph: we think very quickly about florida, and the seminal indians, we think about maroons who were up in the swamps of carolina, the great dismal swamp, and these people are

assimilating into native american tribes, certainly being helped by native americans. you're exactly right. >> guest: i want to mention i have met people from various caribbean islands who call themselves descendants of maroons. >> joseph: haiti jamaica, and absolutely. and they still what is i think what anthropologists recognize as really distinctive about the ancestral communities. people whose ancestors were marooned is they retain this as their identity, and they identify with freedom more than anybody. they're very existence is defined by the word freedom because their ancestors had the courage to escape slavery. and it took courage not only because you're going out into the wilderness, and dealing with the snakes and predators, the difficulties of living in the

wilderness, but if you got caught and brought back you would probably be killed in horrible ways because they wanted to make an example of you. so it took an amazing amount of courage and bravery to do that. >> guest: this will probably display a good deal of ignorance on this whole period here. but what is known between the relationship between the maroons and native americans whoever received them, and took them in? how much in the way of written accounts are there of the experience? >> joseph: there's very little which is the reason this kind of story is really hard to tell. what we know from -- the narratives that remain to us have been written by the english. if you're talking about the continental united states and not florida.

and of course there's always described -- we get the leaders, the executives of the virginia company for example being bewildered by why the englishman would go live with devil worshipers, that's what they were imagining, and of course they couldn't get out of that mindset. but the commoners got out of that mindset. anthropologists know this is the study of interaction between french colonists and native americans in the midwest now. if we draw by analogy by those studies shaws suggested is that the english settlers, went into the tribes, and probably took indian wives, they're children would grow up indian. we have many examples in later days of this happening. as a matter of fact, benjamin franklin comments on the fact that if a native american child is somehow kidnapped and brought

into a white family the first chance they get they run back out to what the whites consider the wilderness. they don't want to stay in civilization, but if a white child is captured by native americans, and grows up in a native american village. even when they're recaptured by white, they desperately try to get back to the indian village. so we have -- in later days we have a lot of testimony about what happens. there's something obviously very attractive to people about the native american way of life. >> guest: that speaks -- that answers a follow-up question i had in mind. and that is at least in some cases, when an escaped marooned person of any sort, after they

had been taken in, seems like some would have some urge to at least go back and visit in some way, maybe in disguise or whatever. it seems amazing that none would make the reverse trip, and perhaps not reidentify themselveses but nevertheless -- >> joseph: it depends on which sense of the world -- if we're thinking about the original sense of maroon where you're escaping from a tiranical situation that's threatening your life. of course the last thing you want to do is have anyone know where you went. you definitely don't want to go back. if you're shipwrecked and cast away. the vast majority of them want to revisit civilization. we have situations that's remarkable about jamestown and bermuda, they didn't. they wanted to escape civilization if you will, and restart society, civil society on their own terms.

and in terms where they made mutual promises to each other, and that kind of lifestyle was far more attractive than what they had come from. >> guest: you're saying that they failed, right? >> joseph: yes. we're here -- and i part of the argument of my book is that we need to -- as i said at the end this should be our founding myth. when you think about beginning of american you should not be thinking of shining city on the hill, puritan, massachusetts, you should be thinking people cast into a wilderness trying to reconstruct society where democracy presents itself. that's what we should be thinking. for those individuals it did not work out for them. but what i would say what i'm

arguing is that we acknowledge this myth. we live by this myth. these are the stories we tell each other. what got me into the project in the first place was ten-12 years ago i was fascinated that ship wrecked and marooning was popular in -- i think there's 37 different versions of the survivor series in the united states. we are fascinated by this. we retell stories of ship wreck and maroonage, "the walking dead," those apocalypse stories are maroonage tales, people cast into a wilderness that have to reshape society. we don't tell owferlszs stories of exodus. we tell ourselves stories of cast away, and being marooned. that's how each generation --

okay let's figure out what this thing democracy means. well let me maintaining a zombie apocalypse. what would we do? how would -- we have a group of 15 people. how are we going to make decisions who's in charge? that's how we discuss what democracy means. think this is already our myth, and we just haven't acknowledged it yet. >> guest: i believe i read recentlily that peggy -- added shining to the phrase "city on the hill" so it's been added in there. >> joseph: i'd like to retain that word because i'd like to think what is the spit and polish on the shining city, and the polish should be liberty and equality. well thank you very much, i appreciate you all coming out. >> liz: thank you everyone. if you'd like a purchase a book

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