This paper seeks to discuss from the Indians Perspective about James Horne`s book called A land As God Made It. I need it to be about the Indians perspective. The books’ author James Horn tried with an impressive effort to bring together the views of recent generations of scholars in this relatively brief and highly readable work. Horn was basically arguing that America was born not in a city upon an untidy and sometimes depressing Jamestown settlement and in the obstinate refusal of the settlement to die, even after the Virginia Company fell.
He pointed for the heroic, the prosaic, and the utter evil elements of the story; in trying to defend this belief hat America’s genesis came of that complex totality. In the book one could read how colonizers came to possess the land and how the indigenous made their choices in respond to the act the former. Colonizers essentially include the English people taking center stage, but the book cited participations from the Spaniards and the book may be considered only a profoundly political story but also a social and economic one as author was able to point how the people made their struggle in trying to live in those old time.
Horne made efforts to break away from old style of authors before him by opening the book’s prologue and the first chapter with the Indians, who where the Native Americans. The central characters of the story include Don Lu’s de Velasco, who in the story was kidnapped from the Chesapeake and taken to Spain) and Wahunsonacock, latter called Powhatan. American or Indian readers may fully realize in a significant way that the land was theirs before there was a Jamestown.
Horn graphically painted the arrival of the English colonists with simple introduction of: “On a raw December day, three small ships slipped quietly down the Thames on the ebb tide, their departure unnoticed except perhaps by a few friends, relatives, and curious onlookers. ” It must be made clear that Horn has relied on the writing of other writers like John Smith, where Horn takes Smith’s contentions with a grain of salt.
Horn narrated about English colonizers coming to America to coming alive in ways that are uncommon in the current ways of telling a history. He paints about one learning of the colonists’ fighting with each other in agonizing detail so that symbolic descendants of the settlers cannot help but be uncomfortable by their all-too-human unfairness in their dealings with each other. He posited that the famous gunpowder accident suffered by Smith (prior author) certainly was not, after all, a calamity.
This therefore made the story very interesting. Horn may have done well in a chapter on “Virginea Britannia,” which describes about crossing the Atlantic to look at events unfolding in London. With Horn’s keen observation of the seventeenth-century city and its men well, then, one would not find difficult to have its readers still smelling the stink of objects particularly of clothes drying in taverns with men then coming in out of the snow and rain.
In the story, the author may be discerned to have the story for the Indians’ side as he stated “it is unlikely that Sir Thomas Smythe gave much thought to the plight of the poor as he left his house in Philpot Lane, in the heart of London’s commercial district, and walked over to the old Royal Exchange, although he might very well have been pondering the fate of the colonists in Virginia”. His empathy for settlers is very clear about a part about these people bank in Jamestown.
Compared with many scholars, it may stated that it may not believable to assume that the English were as cheered as the Indians were devastated as may be gleaned by a meaning in the story that prevented the colony from being abandoned and ending its English colonial chapter. Perceiving the matter in a more levelheaded light, Horn believes that he settlers simply wanted to go home by that point with this statement in the book “Gates [who had just started out] was ordered to return to Jamestown forthwith and immediately headed back upriver to the utter dismay of his company, who dearly wished they had burnt the place down” .
Horn makes also mentions about the Spanish contemplating a hurried raid to destroy the gatecrashers, but instead did not bother to decide to do because of what Horn perception of not very much encouraging experience of Englishmen. Horn may however be a little discordant in the treatment of certain subjects related to the indigenous, where the author is perhaps stretching too far as distinguished form the work of other scholars as latter view these matter in terms of time, culture, and intellectual habit.
To illustrate Horn is note to have brought the old idea that Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough may actually have been Don Lu’s himself. This position that Horne has taken by acknowledged by him that most serious historians of Native America no longer give credence to the idea, thus it was just his inclination to believed. To conclude, it may be inferred that Horn was just trying to take an old historical tale because of his use and criticism of other writers position of the and present the story of the Indians in ways that are in accordance with with contemporary scholarship without actually separating it from the traditional telling.
The book will surely expose those who may not have seen the story of America from the point of the view of the Native Americans. Horn’s work in the context then of any American wanting to view his country’s history from a native’s point of view will surely find the book fit for the purpose. To see one’s history is to see one’s own interest and hence it may offer a fresh perspective than those who might have known from others perspectives.
It is said that historians have different ways of present their story. They of course use evidence to convince their readers including events or situations that are happening now. In the final analysis, it is the readers who will make the final say on how they will take the story to affect decisions that they could make now for their lives that could affect their neighbors.
Work Cited:
Horn, J. A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, New York: Basic Books, 2005.