KEY POINTS:
WASHINGTON- Early on a late April morning, when the vast waterway of the James River vanishes into an endless misty horizon, you can imagine America as they must have seen it for the first time.
True, the odd speed boat and the expensive homes scattered among the trees on the distant shoreline intrude on the primeval fantasy. But when you gaze across the reed banks and marshes, the woods glowing with the first green of spring, the New World must be much as it was for those English settlers when they first set eyes on "fair meddowes and goodly tall trees", after they made landfall in this corner of southern Virginia on April 26, 1607.
This year Jamestown, the colony they founded, is marking its 400th anniversary as the first permanent English outpost in what is now the United States of America. On Friday the Queen will visit the site, as part of her latest state visit to the US. In the spanking new visitors' centre erected to mark the occasion, you can see a photo of her doing the honours at the 350th anniversary in 1957, accompanied by the then Vice-President, one Richard Nixon.
Just as in the world, much has changed at Jamestown as well. When those 104 Englishmen arrived, this region of coastal Virginia was not virgin territory, but the ancestral home of the Native American Powhatan tribes, quickly thrust aside as the European colony took root.
None of this much mattered back in 1957, when a few token Native Americans were wheeled out as props to the glorification of the nation hewn from the frontier. This time, things are different.
Jamestown anniversaries used to be termed "celebrations". This year, however, the event is not a celebration but a "commemoration". Yes, this is where the seed of America as we know it was first planted. But now the darker side of the events is on view. This time, we are being asked to remember not just the founding of the US, but of the displacement of Native Americans and of "human bondage".
Today, the once mighty Powhatan tribes are reduced to a handful of dingy reservations. As for slaves, they quickly made their appearance at Jamestown, too. George Yeardly, for instance, who was appointed Governor of the colony of Virginia in 1618, had eight black servants.
Now these uncomfortable truths are being accepted. And with them you start to understand that great oddity in how most Americans regard the origins of their country. Why does the focus remain on 1620 and the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts - when more than a hundred Englishmen had set up home a few hundred miles to the south more than 13 years earlier? Why has Jamestown, like pictures of Trotsky in Stalin's Soviet Union, been largely airbrushed out of the collective national psyche? The same goes for the ships, too. The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria are forever associated with Christopher Columbus. Everyone knows about the Mayflower. But who remembers the God Speed, the Susan Constant and the Recovery, that brought the settlers to Jamestown?
There are obvious reasons why the Mayflower has hogged the limelight so long. New England and the north-east dominated early US history. The Civil War, too, played a part. By the mid-19th century, Virginia's centre of gravity had long since left Jamestown - and Virginia, as a member of the Confederacy, lost the war. History in America, as everywhere else, is written by winners.
Then there is Thanksgiving, that most symbolic of all American national holidays. The Massachusetts settlers are not only supposed to have held the first Thanksgiving. It is said to have taken place as a seal on their good relations with the local Native American tribes. Cheerleaders for Jamestown still maintain the first Thanksgiving feast in fact was held in 1619, a year earlier, at a nearby plantation. But the claim does not withstand scrutiny.
In reality, Jamestown's relations with the local people were mostly appalling - notwithstanding the rousing tale of the princess Pocahontas who supposedly saved the life of the settler John Smith by hurling her body across his as her father Powhatan was about to kill him.
Fighting was constant. In 1622 and 1644 Powhatan's younger brother and successor, Opecancanough, carried out massacres of European settlers in the area. Within a few decades the Indians had been herded into reservations. Their numbers shrivelled and their language died.
Today for most Virginians, this lost civilisation exists only in the strange names of rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay: the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the Mattaponi, the Occoquan.
But there may be yet another, even deeper reason. It is tempting to see the Massachusetts and Jamestown settlements as opposite poles of the American experience, geographical symbols for God and Mammon. The story of the Pilgrim fathers reflects the moralistic and idealistic side of the national character, a tale of brave and high principled men who left Europe to build a nobler society. That is still America's view of itself. The Jamestown settlers, by contrast, were adventurers who went to the New World in the hope of making their fortune from gold and the other fabled treasures - and of course to convert the local heathen to Christianity.
By most standards early Jamestown was a dismal failure. Most of the settlers died, not to mention countless Native Americans. There was no gold; the settlement was ultimately saved only when tobacco became a cash-generating export.
Even the Pocahontas story itself - which brought Jamestown into the wider public consciousness thanks to the 1994 Walt Disney cartoon film - is a mirage too. The film has her as a Native American siren when in fact she would have been no more than 11 or 12 when she first met Smith, by all accounts a violent ruffian. In real life she was kidnapped by the settlers, and married another settler John Rolfe.
The new exhibits installed for Jamestown 2007 put this record straight. More importantly, for the first time Native Americans have played a serious part in the planning of festivities.
- INDEPENDENT
