The River Where America Began Quotes

“Virtually unable to attract new capital to the foundering enterprise, the company seized the next year on a novel approach to raising money to fund the embryonic British Empire: a lottery.
With the reluctant approval of King James and the Church of England, the Virginia Company sold lottery tickets to the public, discovering no shortage of gamers willing to hazard hard coinage for the chance to win the 01,000 grand prize, a fortune at a time when the typical working-class family scraped by on little more than a pound a month. Having begun as a corporation, Virginia had evolved into a gamblers' stake with a lively populist following back in England.”
― Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James

“Now, it was Smith's move. He had a trump card, it turned out, in the form of a notebook. He took out some paper, made strange marks on it, then told his captors, who had no experience with any written language of their own, to deliver it to Jamestown. If they did, he promised, the English would give them some specific goods-perhaps a hatchet, copper trinkets, and beads-which they could bring back to their chief. Smith actually wrote on the note a warning to the colonists that the natives were preparing another attack. He advised his fellow Englishmen to make a great show of their weaponry, so as to deter future strikes, and instructed them to give the Indians exactly the items he'd told them to expect.
After a three-day journey through snow and bitter cold, the Indians returned. They were astonished, Smith recalled, at how precisely he had divined their expedition, down to the last detail of what they would be given. In Smith's mind, at least, he had outfoxed the natives, saved the colony, ensured his survival, and further convinced the Indians of his magical powers, as they were made to believe that "the paper could speak”
― Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James

“Hakluyt built an equally compelling case for New World economic promise. In an era
when idleness was regarded as a sin and often a crime, Hakluyt described England as a land where unemployment was so high that "multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds" bent their effort to "pilfering and thieving and other lewdness" with such devotion that "all the prisons of the land are daily pestered and stuffed full of them." In America, Hakluyt reasoned, "these petty thieves" could be put to work enriching the kingdom”
― Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James

“INGINA-A golden shaft of sunlight cut the ghostly tissue of dawn that hung like a timeless web of mist in the rambling thicket at the river's edge. Wild grasses, weeds, and thistles bowed low beneath the weight of an overnight dew, leaving a wet and woven mat of deep greens and October browns along the unkempt nape of a broad terrace rising from the bank. The field stretched out a hundred yards or so to a silvery stand of beech, sugar maple and yellow locust at the base of a sheer granite cliff. A songbird chattered from the forested rim of the field, drawing the soft and steady applause of water pouring over the stone and grassy shallows upstream, and seeming to repeat the ancient Tutelo word for river-tak see ta, tak see ta, tak see ta.”
― Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James

“There was the granite, left by Paleozoic volcanoes more than three hundred million years ago, that formed what geologists call the fall line, a long, east-facing cliff in the river's jagged middle that prevented tall sailing ships or dugout canoes from passing further upstream, setting the stage for the creation of an even broader cultural divide and laying the groundwork for the building of a rough-hewn trading depot that grew into the city of Richmond.”
― Bob Deans, The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James