THE STORY OF AMERICA'S FIRST COLONY, IN PHOTOS

 NEW BOOK MAKES 400 YEARS AGO REAL

It is fitting that on the 400^th anniversary of America’s first permanent English settlement, a book celebrating those first tentative steps is also a collaborative effort. Robert Llewellyn’s photographs are enough to make Empires in the Forest a beautiful addition to the coffee table of any Virginian. When you add Avery Chenoweth’s revelatory take on Jamestown and the clashes of cultures, creeds and classes that surrounded the colony, the book becomes essential.

 “Instead of being a book of pictures,” Llewellyn says, “it’s more like a film between covers. The idea is that as you read the book these images will come up, almost like a voiceover  in a film.”

 The cover captures one of the book’s central themes: the expropriation of Indian land by English explorers. It shows three galleons sailing toward the Virginia coast while an Indian looks on, his image a double exposure that fades into the background as the ships approach. “It must have been like watching three flying saucers land,” says Llewellyn.

 The original idea was to create a book on the landscape of Virginia. But during Chenoweth’s research, he read through the collection of Jamestown diaries and realized that the colony held a drama far darker than what is typically portrayed.  “If you read [John Smith’s] account of himself,” Chenoweth says, “he comes across as a swashbuckling man, a guy who’s constantly creating [situations] that explode in his face. He becomes so volatile that it’s not the Indians who are trying to kill him; it’s his own men that are trying to kill him. If you snap onto it a lens of post-traumatic stress syndrome, where somebody comes home from war and they’re very mercurial and volatile and dangerous, then it makes sense. When you read his accounts, what he’s dong is presenting himself as an outpatient. That’s interpretive, but it really got me going, because I thought this is a story that we can still understand. It’s the story that we’re dealing with every day in the news… so I thought, focus on Jamestown, and that’ll be more than we can handle.”

 Once Chenoweth began writing, Llewellyn realized that he would need more than landscape photographs to do their project justice. “I said, ‘Wow, this is a real story with characters and people, none of whom are there anymore.’ So we said, ‘We’ve got to hire actors. And if we were going to use actors, we should hire Virginia Indians.’”

 Chenoweth adds, “There were a number of Native Americans who felt disrespected by The New World movie, because they were let go and [the studio] went out west and hired actors who looked ‘Indian.’

 That’s the old Hollywood Indian, the Southwest Indian with enormous cheekbones… . We decided it was a moral imperative: If we’re going to speak for these people, we should let their descendents be playing them. It was that simple.  And when we went to the pow-wows and told them, they really got excited.”

 Several Native American tribes participated and are credited in the endnotes. The pair also hired actors to portray English settlers, dressing them in period garb. “We set it up much like a film,” Llewellyn says. “We had producers and location scouts and we had costume people and make-up people. We had to go back to what they wore in Jamestown and what artifacts they had. The Indians had a lot of their own artifacts, so they were terrific. ‘

 The artifacts are used in live-action shots showing the interaction between Indians and Englishmen, sometimes in peaceful poses, sometimes not. Llewellyn shot over 10,000 pictures, now stored on his home computer. Chenoweth still anguishes over some that didn’t make the cut. “That was a great one,” he says, pointing to the Chief of the Oswego, who is painted black with a garter snake tied to his ear, twisting and curling about his head.

 The Chief is adorned in the same fashion as his ancestors, Likewise, everyone else who appears in the book gets an accurate portrayal. “We had three different Pocahontases,” says Chenoweth.  “Typically, everybody jus squares the difference and makes her 16, which doesn’t quite cover the weirdness of the real legend that she was 9 or 10 and Smith was 27 or 28… so we have one that is 9, one that is 13, and one that is 20 to show this young woman growing up.”

 Chenoweth explains the backstory and rationale of each major figure in a way that is both educational and entertaining, debunking some longstanding myths along the way. “When Smith first arrived here,” he says, “he was a guy in chains ready to be hanged. For the second time! He must have been real hell to deal with. I mean, this guy could not stay out of an execution lineup.”

 Empires in the Forest is a wonderful find. It is that rare combination of literature and art that compels one to grab friends by the shoulders, shake them and yell, “Buy this book!”

 Reviewed by Bill Glose

Virginia Living