Queen Elizabeth II returned on Friday to the marshy spot where it all began 400 years ago: the far-flung British Empire, and the enterprise that would be the United States of America, with its cruel intertwining of slavery and democracy.
But even with the weight of history upon her, she was not too serious for a joke about a subject normally considered too distasteful to raise in her presence.
The Queen, who wore a teal coat and high-crowned hat over a silk dress in muted tones, was particularly struck by exhibit 15, a foot-long black spatula. The accompanying placard said it was designed by the settlers’ surgeon, John Woodall, to treat constipation — ”a disease that killeth many”.
The Queen called out to her own doctor, Commander David Swain, who customarily travels with her on such visits carrying a black bag containing matching blood plasma. ”You should have some things like that,” she joked, according to pool reporters.
The last time the Queen was at Jamestown half a century ago to tour the first permanent English settlement on these shores, Virginia was bitterly resisting extending full rights to African Americans, and the remnants of the Indian tribes who met those first white settlers officially did not exist.
But Jamestown is now very different from the place she visited then. ”This wasn’t here in 1957 when she was here last, which is amazing,” said William Kelso, the chief archaeologist at Jamestown, sweeping his arm past the reconstructed palisade of the settlers’ first triangular fort, which was unexpectedly yielded up by the sandy soil 12 years ago. He said new excavations toured by the Queen were uncovering up to 1 000 artifacts a day.
Virginians hope the Queen’s presence here on Friday, and this year’s celebrations, will restore Jamestown to what they see as its rightful place in US history.
Pocohontas
”So many children were brought up to believe that it all began with the Mayflower in 1620. It’s so annoying,” said Judith Wysong.
Wysong was being pushed in a wheelchair by another woman who traces her origins to that first encounter between the US and Europe. Anne Freeman (73) says she is a direct descendant 12 generations down the line of the Indian princess Pocohontas. Like many old white families of Virginia though, the blood lines are so deeply intertwined that Freeman can trace her ancestry through official documents and Bibles to that distant ancestor on both sides. ”My mother and father were kin and I am trying to figure out if we are related on that side too,” she said.
Wysong traces her ancestry to settlers who arrived at Jamestown two years later, in 1609. She wants that first place of arrival recognised.
Kelso’s finds have contributed to that historical correction. In 1994, defying conventional wisdom that the first fort had been swallowed up by the James river, he began digging, and soon discovered stained lines in the earth that indicated where the fort had stood.
But the United States’ willingness to reclaim ownership of the Jamestown settlement is also a product of Virginia’s efforts to make good on the past.
In some ways, the Queen’s two visits to Jamestown serve as a bookend for those changes. In the visitors’ centre, there is a photograph of her with the then vice-president, Richard Nixon. On Friday, she was to be accompanied by Dick Cheney.
She acknowledged that passage of time in prepared remarks to be delivered at a lunch in historic Williamsburg. ”The Jamestown landing is not just a historical fact but a symbol — a symbol of the convergence of civilisations, of the spread of the rule of law, of the growth of representative democracy, and also the symbol of friendship, the deep and enduring friendship between the United States and the United Kingdom,” she said.
Historians say her own visits to Virginia encapsulate that change. ”When the Queen early in her reign came to Jamestown, came to Virginia, she came to a place that was characterised by white supremacy and racial segregation,” said Peter Wallenstein, author of Cradle of America, and a professor at Virginia Tech. ”The world she returns to now is just a radically different enterprise in terms of racial identity, opportunity, and power and it is reflected in important ways in the change of language and the deliberate effort at inclusion.
”There is a sense that the landscape ought not to have only Englishmen on it and white faces,” he said.
The first three ships of the Virginia Company landed at Jamestown on May 14 1607 with 104 men and boys aboard. They built the triangular fort in 19 days. But by December, only 38 were alive.
The dead that have been rediscovered so far lie in a small graveyard covered with oyster shells, victims of brackish and contaminated water mostly, although Kelso did find the skeleton of one boy with an arrowhead in his leg.
”I, like so many others, could not but be moved by the poignancy of walking around the archaeological site where the original fort once stood and of imagining something of the experience of those early settlers when they first made landfall,” the Queen said on Friday.
Such horrendous death tolls were typical of early colonial expeditions but somehow the miracle of Jamestown’s survival — despite starvation, Indian attack and feuding among the settlers — never quite resonated with Americans.
Ask the average American about the founding fathers and they will answer with the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620 — a full 13 years later. Their knowledge of the Indian tribes might not go much beyond Pocohontas, who married the settler John Rolfe and went to England to die of smallpox in 1617 — and that thanks to the Walt Disney film.
”It was as if Virginia’s contribution has been airbrushed out of history,” said James Horn, author of a book about Jamestown, A Land As God Made It.
Some reasons for this seem obvious. Virginia was on the losing side of the civil war two centuries later — and history is written by the victors.
Slavery
But Jamestown has also never fit the US’s self-image. The first representative government in the colonies was established here, a few years after those first landing. However, the settlement also saw the start of slavery with the arrival of the first manacled Africans in 1619. Thanksgiving was claimed by the Mayflower.
”It is very easy, with the pilgrims and the Mayflower, to ignore those aspects of early America that were tough and not a pretty story,” said Horn. The bloody history of the last 400 years can not be undone. ”When you think of Jamestown, if you are native, you see those images of pain and suffering. But on the other hand, you see where you are today, you see the rights we have today,” said Stephen Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe. ”One of the legacies of this commemoration was that our story will find its way into the history books.”
But Virginia has worked hard to involve African Americans and Indians in the anniversary. Adkins had a seat on the planning committee. Earlier this year, the Virginia state assembly passed a resolution apologising for slavery.
That doesn’t leave a lot to celebrate, he admitted. ”We celebrate the fact that we are all here. We didn’t disappear.”
Backstory
The six-day visit to the Americas is the Queen’s fourth official tour since 1957. From visiting the heritage sites of Virginia, she is scheduled to attend the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. She travels on to Washington on Monday where she is to be welcomed with a state banquet by President George Bush. She returns home on Tuesday after a visit to Nasa’s Goddard space centre in nearby Maryland, and after paying her respects at the World War II memorial on Washington’s Mall. – Guardian Unlimited Â