In 1607, a galleon called the Susan Constant arrived in the New World from Blackwall, London, and established the first permanent English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. Over the river in Surry County lies the land John Rolfe received as a dowry when he married Pocahontas. Today, up the road in Yorktown, the children of the fife and drum society make their evening parade around a monument marking the last great battle of the American Revolution, in front of a family-run bed and breakfast called the Hornsby House Inn. In Colonial Williamsburg, the heart of this historic triangle, distant cannon fire can be heard and every so often someone runs past in a tricorn hat.
A few years back, Williamsburg’s best-known modern-day son put out an alternative settlement narrative for Virginia in the form of a punk rock sea shanty called “The Black Rats of London”, in which he pointed out that it wasn’t divine intervention that toppled the natives but “parameciums” from “imported English dirt”. Bruce Hornsby is the first person I’ve heard use the phrase “American Holocaust” in casual conversation but then his family goes back a long way. At the inn, his cousins explain that their five-times great-grandfather, Nathaniel Bowditch, wrote The New American Practical Navigator, the oceanography bible still carried on every US naval vessel.
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