This is the 57th episode of the podcast, so we take a very brief digression to discuss that milestone. Mostly, this episode looks at the first nine months of 1608, which saw the rise of John Smith to the colony’s presidency amid rising tension with the Powhatan Confederacy. To lower that tension, the English and the Powhatans exchange young men in a gesture of goodwill, and so will begin the stories of Thomas Savage and Namontack. Smith leads two separate explorations of the Chesapeake, in search of the Virginia Company’s three priorities: Precious metals, a “middle passage” to the Pacific, and “lost colonists” from the Roanoke Colony, in addition to an objective of his own — to make contact with tribes who are antagonists of the Powhatans, and potential allies of the English. Oh, and Ratcliffe ends up in the brig.

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected references for this episode

James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” The Journal of American History, June 1979.