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EDWARD ROTHSTEIN  |  Exhibition Review  The New York Times, Mar. 2, 2007

Captain Smith, the Tides Are Shifting on the James


JAMESTOWN, Va. - At the banks of the James River here, not far from where an
archaeological dig has found pottery shards and remains of settlers from 400
years ago, a proud Capt.  John Smith faces the waters and the setting sun. A
wooden stockade extends near the shoreline - the water has moved inland over
the centuries - showing where his frail fort once stood. But Smith stands
heroically tall, his bronze cape seeming to ripple in the brisk winter
winds. Even the inscription proclaims his importance: "Governor of Virginia,
1608." 

 

Governor? Virginia? At the time Jamestown consisted of a paltry isolated
settlement of several dozen souls, with disease, starvation and battles with
local Indian tribes regularly claiming almost as many lives as   Virginia
Company could send in delayed relief ships from England, the funds raised
from wary investors. But the Smith statue does give an accurate sense of the
scale of the leadership, strategic thinking, ruthlessness and courage Smith
demonstrated during the brief period (not even two years) he led that first
  English  colony in the Americas - qualities reflected in his own memoirs
and other accounts (many of which are about to be republished by the Library
of America). Nearby, offering further testimony to Jamestown's grandeur, a
giant obelisk stands, erected, like   the statue, a century ago, as part of
the tercentennial celebrations of the founding. 

 

But now, two months before the 400th anniversary festivities begin , the
monumental hardly matters anymore, and neither, it seems, does John Smith.
Other kinds of commemoration have been prepared. It isn't that Jamestown is
being treated as less important: it is still regarded as the place where the
DNA of a  nation was first laid out, where, in 1607, England established an
early beachhead against the expanding empires of Spain and Portugal and so
determined the main language we  speak and many of the ideas we share. 

 

But a different understanding is made explicit here in the two historical
museums and outdoor facilities devoted to the Jamestown theme. Jamestown
Settlement, run by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (a state agency), was
established in 1957   just before the 350th anniversary so the nearby
historical site would not be disrupted with the Settlement's outdoor
"living-history" demonstrations, costumed guides, period crafts and
reproductions of the Jamestown fort, an Indian village and the three ships
that brought the first group of 104 men and boys to these shores. In 
October, Jamestown Settlement added a major 30,000-square-foot exhibition
hall  to its  new visitors' center, telling  an unusually detailed history
of the area through the 17th century. 

 

Meanwhile the original site, now called Historic Jamestowne, is part of the
Colonial National Historical Park and jointly run by the National Park
Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. It
incorporates the monuments of past tributes  -  the statue, the obelisk, a
memorial church  -  but has just added a modest historical exhibition in its
visitors' center, and, last spring, opened a 7,500-square-foot museum  - 
the Archaearium  -  devoted to the Jamestown artifacts unearthed by the
on-site excavations, ranging from cooking utensils and weapons to bones and
coins. 

 

These exhibitions are ambitious and often informative, particularly the
Settlement's, and provide much of the detail needed to begin to understand
Jamestown. Yet a price is paid for the latest in museumware and historical
thinking:   One isn't quite sure what is being celebrated or why, or whether
in fact a celebration is even occurring. 

 

The exhibition created by the Park Service, for example, repeats the classic
tribute: "Jamestown's notable legacies include the introduction of
representative government, English culture and heritage, and Protestant
religion,"    all of which had an impact on the evolution of Virginia and
the other colonies. But those legacies also include conflicts with Indians
and the introduction of "race-based slavery."  These   matters, once
considered secondary,   have become central.  Now Jamestown is seen as the
precursor  to  "a multicultural society grappling with a legacy of slavery
and racism." 

Another panel emphasizes the point: 

 

"Past Jamestown anniversaries were referred to as 'celebrations.' Because
many facets of Jamestown's history are not cause for celebration, like human
bondage and the displacement of Virginia Indians, the Jamestown 400th
Anniversary is referred to as the Jamestown 2007 Commemoration." Throughout
this introductory exhibition Jamestown is not the beleaguered settlement
cheered on against all odds, but is a hothouse laboratory for conflict,
oppression and perhaps accommodation. 

 

A similar, though slightly less polemical, vision suffuses the major
Settlement exhibition, with its artifacts, textual panels, statues and
dioramas. (Thomas E. Davidson was the curator and Gallagher & Associates the
designers. ) When the institution was founded 50 years ago, accompanying
exhibitions were about Virginia's British heritage and great achievements by
Virginians. Now the theme is: "Three Cultures, One Century: America's
Story." Jamestown becomes archetypal not because it laid the foundations for
British influence on American political culture, eventually enshrining
notions of rights and representation, but because it established a pattern
of conflict with Indians and enslavement of Africans  -  something that is
here homogenized into a more vague multicultural interaction. 

 

The first major galleries are devoted to the three cultures. They include
descriptions of local Indian tribes (largely based on Smith's writings)
accompanying a life-size diorama of a forest hunt; a depiction of West
Central African ways of life with a diorama  showing a man smoking outside a
 hut,  a world from which the first blacks in Virginia had been wrested; and
a depiction of an Elizabethan-era London street. The Indians, we read, were
"in harmony with the land that sustained them" and formed an "advanced,
complex society of families and tribes." English society  -  the society
that gave us the King James Bible and Shakespeare along with stirrings of
democratic argument  -  is described as offering "limited opportunity" in
which a "small elite" were landowners; in London, we are told, "life was
difficult," with social dislocation, low wages, unemployment, etc. 

 

True enough about England, except for the lack of perspective and the whiffs
of implied equivalence between vastly different universes. Less true with
its idea of an "advanced complex society" of Powhatans: all human societies,
even agrarian ones, are complex in their methods of organization; in this
case there is little information to suggest much more among these 30 warring
tribes bound by a strong ruler's conquest. The overall impact of this
three-culture mélange is only to diminish a visitor's sense of English culture. 

 

But finally the depiction of the three cultures begins to seem irrelevant,
because it is never really shown that "it is from the interaction of these
different cultural traditions that 17th century Virginia society was born." 

In what way, for example, apart from name places and types of food, was
Powhatan culture a major influence on Virginia society? The continued state
of conflict with the Indians was a major influence, in which negotiations,
accommodations and episodes of trade were punctuated with battle. That
conflict was not a simple matter. It was a confrontation between alien and
opposing cultures possessing unequal powers,  a conflict that has
accompanied most cultures' migratory histories, from ancient times to our own. 

 

As for the influence of West Central African culture, with its described
political hierarchies, and its own internal history of enslavement through
conquest (referred to in the exhibition's text), it is also difficult to see
just how Angolan or Kongo culture shaped  early-17th-century Virginia. Even
in later years the cultures created by American slaves are not replications
of African cultures but distant echoes of it,  something hinted at in one of
the exhibition's later galleries. 

 

During the entire formative period of Jamestown  -  from 1607 through 1619,
when the nature of the settlement was established and its economy finally
began to find a footing with the growing of tobacco  -  there were no
Africans in Virginia at all. The first black chattel servants were brought
to Jamestown during that latter year almost by accident, just as
representative democracy was also being established. These unfortunate
20-some prisoners were looted during a piratical English attack on a
Portuguese slave ship. Systematic slavery doesn't appear to begin in
Virginia for decades. 

 

So the idea of mutual interaction is not too convincing. Still, there is
much to learn in the exhibition's unfolding: it touches on the European
drive for colonial power, on sea navigation, the establishment of Jamestown,
the story of Pocahontas, conflicts with Indians, the discovery of tobacco as
a major source of income leading to the development of Virginia's gentlemen
farmers (and the drive toward the importation of slaves), the evolution of
Virginia's legislature. But John Smith's extraordinary interactions with the
Powhatan chief  -  matching him as a wary warrior and negotiator  -  are not
explored. The dominant statues in the exhibition galleries are of the
Powhatan rulers, Wahunsonacock and Opechancanough, along with the African
Ndongo ruler, Queen Njinga, who fought against the Portuguese and from whose
lands the first blacks brought to America were pulled. 

 

So what exactly is being celebrated here? A closing gallery makes some
suggestions: "Principles of Law and Justice," "Exploration and Discovery,"
"Representative Government." But also "Displacement of Indigenous People"
and "Servitude and Injustice." What a change from the Tercentennial when
Jamestown was the symbol of America's birth and President Theodore
Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington spoke. On the 350th
anniversary Queen Elizabeth II made her first royal trip to the United
States,  and she is expected to come this time as well. But what will she
find? Not the triumph of British influence, but the triumph of ambiguity,
discomfort and vague multiculturalism. 

 

Of course much has changed in 50 years; much had to. Those 1957 celebrations
themselves provided evidence of the sins of the past: the Virginia Chamber
of Commerce withdrew some invitations to festivities after it found out they
were sent to distinguished Virginians who happened to be black.  Clearly too
it is impossible to understand Jamestown without understanding the fate of
Indian tribes. And, despite its flaws, the Settlement's exhibition does much
to spur a greater understanding of Jamestown. 

 

But the impulse to commemorate rather than celebrate is a sign of how
rigidly the Jamestown affair and its aftermath are now being seen.   And
unfortunately an  extraordinary culture  unable to celebrate itself and its
past,  with all  its  imperfections and failings,   is not  likely to have a
clear vision of the present and future.

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