The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia: Expressing the Cosmographie and Comodities of the Country, together with the Manners and Customes of the People

by William Strachey

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1849 edition by the Hakluyt Society, London.

Paperback

First published November 4, 2009

Reviews

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book (an ethnography of the Powhatan people) is quite interesting as is the dictionary of Virginia Algonquian in the end. The second part is mainly on putting the history of Virginia into context with other European explorations and also describes the lost colony of Roanoke incident. In some ways, Strachey seems to recognize the complexity of Indigenous societies (in writing about their governing structures for example) but he also is not the best ethnographer compared to his contemporaries. You can see this in the part where he desperately tries to fit the Powhatan into Biblical history by saying they must be descendants of Ham (who he calls Cham) from the bible.

[Allison Thurman]

UMD