Virginia Bernhard

It was a little hard to get into the story--perhaps because it had been sitting in my car for years, as emergency reading material. Once I got past the first section, however, the story was interesting enough. Bernhard focuses on the lives of the Yardleys, to give the history a human dimension, but the colony was small enough that we meet all the leaders at some point. She also has sections dealing with Pocahontas and her life, perhaps because to correct the most romanticized segment of the era or perhaps because as the daughter of a local chief her story also reflects the perspective of her tribe.
Some of the events were familiar to me (Bernhard tells us in her forward that she will stay true to known events, avoiding much of the romanticized history people may be familiar with) but some were new; e.g. the winter when Jamestown starved. There was so much death in the book--from killing, from disease, from starvation, from weather events--that I wondered why anyone would ever attempt to colonize the place. Of course, there were many deaths in Europe also.
Native American life was not romanticized either, and the leaders were portrayed as doing whatever it would take to survive. There was a certain level of naivete, or cultural differences which led to misunderstandings and mistrust. For example, why would leaders allow their children to board an English ship when there was fighting between the groups? Obviously they didn't believe anyone would take advantage of the children.
I did wonder at the low birth rate. In population studies I've done in the 1800's, families of a dozen children were common. Yet the women in Jamestown were not similarly producing a baby every year or so. Perhaps it was their poor nutritional status, or perhaps births weren't recorded unless the baby lived for a few years and thus the author didn't have documented births to include in her novel. She did end the book with many quotes from different writings which have survived to justify the events she wrote about.… (altro)