Jamestown at 400 Exhibition highlights >   

Jamestown at 400

A Conference at The Huntington
Sept. 8, 2007

Conference Overview
In conjunction with the exhibit, “Jamestown at 400: Natives and Newcomers in Early Virginia,” this conference brings together noted historians of early America, who will explore how this first English settlement was created and how it survived a turbulent era filled with strife with the local people, disease, and death before becoming a settled community.

This event is funded by The William French Smith Endowment and The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

View Selected Images from The Huntington's Historical Prints Collection

Program

Selected Images from The Huntington's Historical Prints Collection

The Huntington’s exhibit and featured conference on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding explore themes of English settlement, indigenous people, and Jamestown’s evolution as a settled community. In both the exhibit and conference, visual representations of the place and its inhabitants inform our understanding of what explorers could expect to find in the early years of the seventeenth century. Many of the representations are fanciful, imagined, or embellished, and can be a guide to the concerns and preoccupations of an historical era. Included is a selection of European imaginings of New World oddities, as well as images of the New World created using composite elements from different renderings. A selection of images more commonly associated with the Jamestown legacy -- John Smith, Pocahontas, and tobacco – are also presented.

Part 1:  Early Conceptions about the New World

During the sixteenth century many Europeans believed that sea monsters trolled the Atlantic Ocean and that Native Americans engaged in cannibalistic practices. Sir Walter Raleigh and other explorers fueled the hyperbole by reporting that monsters lived in certain regions of the New World. Engravers expressed these beliefs pictorially and featured them in learned books such as cosmological treatises.

“Monsters of Guiana,” from Levinus Hulsius,
Brevis & admiranda description regni Gvianae, Nuremberg, 1599.

“Map of the world from Pietro Martire d’Anghiera,” De orbe novo, Paris, 1587.
Richard Hakluyt arranged this edition.

Part 2:  Contemporary representations of the New World

Representations of settled areas of Virginia include composite depictions (a number of previously portrayed scenes blended together to form a unique image, as in “Indian Village of Secoton,”), early attempts at map-making, and portraits of indigenous people and food sources.

“Indian village of Secoton,” from Thomas Hariot,
A Brief and True Reporte of the New Found Land of Virginia,
(Latin edition), Frankfurt, 1590.

“Their seetheynge of the meate in earthen pottes” (plate xv)
from Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Reporte of the
New Found Land of Virginia, 1871 facs. Of 1590 ed.

Theodore de Bry, [folding map of Virginia], from Thomas Hariot,
A Brief and True Reporte of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1871 facs. Of 1590 ed.

“Their dances" (plate xviii) from Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Reporte of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1871 facs. Of 1590 ed.

[Turkie wheat] from John Gerard’s Herball, 1597, p. 76

Part 3: Englishmen in Virginia/Aftermath

Jamestown in the American popular imagination has been somewhat narrowly focused over time. The legend of John Smith and Pocahontas dominates illustrations of English settlement of the region: portraits of the two along with a number of versions of the mythical moment when Pocahontas saved Smith’s life come readily to mind. Less typically rendered (and therefore play less of a role in shaping our understanding of early Jamestown) are realities implicit in the settlement, including aspects of survival and consequences stemming from the interaction of two distinct cultures. One such consequence, the contemporary Native American practice of smoking and its influence on the English, is illustrated below.