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Issue Date: Chesapeake Bay Magazine - June 2007
FROM THE EDITOR: An Affair to Remember |
By the time
you read this, Her Majesty the Queen and Phil the Royal Husband will
have come and gone from our midst. And the Jamestown 400th anniversary
hoopla will be in full swing. Three replicas of Captain John Smith's
"discovery barge," or shallop, will be afoot on the Bay--one of them
actually retracing Smith's famous 1,700-mile exploring marathon of 400
summers ago. A new and improved replica of the Godspeed, one of the
three ships that brought the English to Jamestown in 1607, will also be
out and about, continuing her tour of Chesapeake ports. And everywhere
you turn there will be re-enactments and festivals and exhibits and
concerts and seminars and . . . well, in a nutshell, all Jamestown all
the time.
But you
knew all that, didn't you? Because you read about it in our big
overview of the Jamestown 400th in last month's issue. And about now, I
suspect, you're saying, oy, enough already with the Jamestown! . . . We
don't blame you. In fact, we agree. It is all, as my dear old Ma is
fond of saying, a little bit of much. So from this issue on, for our
sake as much as yours, we're going to keep one foot on the brake, as it
were. We'll limit our coverage to a series of features this summer,
focusing on what we consider the most interesting and meatiest aspects
of the Jamestown commemoration.
And I use
the term "commemoration" advisedly. That word, rather than
"celebration," is much preferred by descendants of the Native Americans
who were here when Smith and company came ashore. That comes through
loud and clear in this month's interview with Kenneth Adams, chief of
the Upper Mattaponi tribe in Virginia [see page 56]. "There are some
things we can celebrate, that we're part of a great country and that we
have survived against overwhelming obstacles," Adams says. "What I
can't celebrate is that ninety percent of our people were erased from
the face of the earth. . . . I don't see how a reasonable person could
celebrate that." He has a point, and he makes it quietly and without
spite. Indeed, he's politic enough to say nothing at all about the
anniversary's gallingly euphemistic catchphrase, "a convergence of
cultures." That makes me wince every time I read it. A convergence of
cultures? Really? And a bank robbery is what, a "financial transaction"?
Next month
we'll talk archaeology--or rather, William Kelso will. Jamestown's
chief archaeologist will tell us how he discovered in the 1990s, to
everyone's great surprise, that the settlement's original fort had not
been washed away by the James River, as had been presumed for years. In
the August issue, our man in Norfolk, Paul Clancy, will tell us what it
was like to watch the replica ships of the "Jamestown fleet" come
ashore for the big re-enactment this spring at First Landing State
Park. And we'll wrap it up in September with an inside report on the
shallop voyage--dispatches from Andy Bystrom, brother of the skipper
and official "scribe" of the shallop crew.
All Jamestown all the time? No, more like a little bit of just enough.
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