Uppowoc

Just before moving on from talk of early colonial America, I would just like to say a little something about the work John White. He was a mapmaker and part of Raleigh's inner circle who worked on the top secret plan to establish an English settlement in North America before Catholic France and Spain grabbed the lot. We don't know very much about his life but what we do have is his work - his astonishing paintings from the Roanoke project of 1585. His careful objective drawings of plants and animals are years - centuries maybe - ahead of their time. This is a catalogue of a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum a couple of years ago.

The paintings of the Algonquian people - the local Secotan - who initially welcomed the English, are stylised and there is definitely a noble savage agenda going on here. The sponsors of this venture included the Queen herself and these drawings are marketing tools. They are selling this place as a land of plenty - a new Eden. They will eventually be copied as engravings and illustrate Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

But if you look past that, the drawings show real individuals and a culture that was about to be snuffed out. White struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. It is hard to see at first that these natives have a crest with hair shaved at the sides (quite an achievement in a place that had no metal except for copper jewellery). They painted their bodies and seemed to tattoo themselves with dotted lines. They had fields of corn, pumpkin patches, they barbecued their fish and ate a kind of chowder. All this they gave to the English. We gave them smallpox and took their land.

Oh and they also gave the settlers a special medicinal herb called Uppowoc. Harriot says that it purgeth superfluous phlegm & other gross humours, openeth all the pores & passages of the body and he seemed convinced it was why the natives were so damned healthy compared to the sickly English.

We ourselves during the time we were there used to suck it after their manner as also since our return. . .

Harriot died of cancer of the nose in 1621, possibly the first recorded smoking-related death. Maybe the Secotan got their own back after all. Uppowoc was of course tobacco.

New World

By strange coincidence I was already well on the way to writing New World when Terrence Malick's movie of (almost) the same name came out. The movie is about Pocahontas and the Jamestown colony, whereas my book is about Roanoke.

There are still many people who think that the Mayflower in 1620 was the first ship to drop colonists in what is now the USA, but they were not even close to being the first. If we discount the Spanish and French settlements, then Jamestown in the Chesapeake Bay predates the Plymouth Plantation by thirteen years and Roanoke predates Plymouth by thirty-five.

Admittedly, the Roanoke colonies were failures, culminating in the famous 'Lost Colony'. My book deals with the first settlement, its planning by Raleigh and the polymath Thomas Harriot, the rather inevitable falling out with the local Algonquian Indians, and their rescue by Sir Francis Drake. It is all seen through the eyes of young Kit Milton who is apprenticed to the painter and mapmaker John White.

I haven't seen The New World - it did not get good reviews - but the trailer makes it look fantastic and strangely it could easily be a dramatisation of my book: almost everything shown happens in my book. Maybe that just goes to show how history simply kept repeating itself over and over in the tragic meetings of Europeans and Native Americans.

Black Robe

Going back a couple of posts to my bookshelves and to my interest in the Iroquois and Algonquian Indians and the clash of cultures that occurred when Europeans encountered them - I thought I would mention Brian Moore's Black Robe.

Brian Moore is a lovely writer. If you haven't read one of his books you are in for a treat. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is possibly his most famous, but Black Robe is also excellent. It is a wonderfully convincing piece of historical fiction telling the story of a European - a French Jesuit missionary rather than a Puritan this time - as he gets pulled deeper and deeper into an alien world.

The book was made into a very good movie of the same name, directed by Bruce Beresford (screenplay by Moore himself). It is beautifully shot - watch it on the biggest screen you can find - and also eye-wateringly violent at times. Unfortunately it seems to be inexplicably unavailable in Region 2 DVD format at the moment.

Witch Hunt

Having mentioned Witch Hunt a couple of times now, I thought I ought to actually show the book as it is no longer in print (though you can probably pick it up on Amazon for pennies). Witch Hunt was the last book I did with Anne Clark when she was at Hodder and it is a book of which I am very proud. The reading public was a little slower to see its quality, sadly.

The book tells the story of the Salem witch trials of 1692, when a group of girls claimed they were being tormented by witches living secretly in their communities. Puritan ministers like Cotton Mather had encouraged their flock to believe that they were uniquely blessed by God and that all their enemies - whether it be pirates, disease, the weather, the indigenous people or witches - were all agents of Satan. They had no doubt about their own goodness - the Goodmen called their womenfolk Goodwife (Goody for short). But being called Goody Good still didn't stop Sarah Good being hanged as a witch, and eighteen of her neighbours suffered the same fate.

Arthur Miller's The Crucible famously deals with these events, but Miller is more interested in the themes and what they say about his own times - particularly the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and America's 1950s witch-hunter, Joe McCarthy. Miller conflates characters, misses out important players and events and just plain makes things up. It is a powerful play - and one that is just as relevant today - but it is a shame that people think they know this story because they have seen The Crucible. The truth - as is so often the case - is more complex and more fascinating.

One of the things that I discovered that most intrigued me was the link between Salem and the Hopkins inspired witch craze in England fifty years before. Both were obsessed by the idea of a contract between Satan and his supposed followers, the witches. Both showed that confessions extracted under torture are worthless - most were retracted as soon as it became clear the victims were going to die anyway (a lesson that keeps being forgotten time and time again).

And this link is not accidental. A casual look at the place names in Massachusetts shows where the settlers came from: many were East Anglians. One of the victims - Rebecca Nurse - was from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Her own father had been a minister and had called in Matthew Hopkins and his accomplice, John Stearne to 'discover' sixteen witches. Their shadow stretches all the way to New England.

In 1706 Ann Putnam, one of the ringleaders of the 'afflicted girls' apologised for what she said had been 'a delusion of Satan'. This 'delusion' had involved seeing spectral visions of her tormentors, one of whom she swore had 'tortured her most grievously'. Dorcus Good was four years old at the time, but was still arrested and imprisoned. She never fully recovered from the experience.

If you are interested in the subject I recommend that you forget all you think you know and visit the fantastic online archive provided by Virginia University. Archives don't get much more moving than this.

Witches, puritans and a Romantic poet

Another snapshot of my bookshelves. This group has some connection with the last lot. There were quite a few in the last photo linked to the Salem witch craze as research for Witch Hunt and here are books devoted to English witch trials including the East Anglian witch craze prosecuted by Matthew Hopkins, the odious Witch-Finder General, in the 1640s. I don't know where I first came across Hopkins - probably at school when we did the English Civil War - possibly at college - but he has intrigued me ever since.

There are three books about Puritanism (that were also connected with Witch Hunt) and a few books on Restoration England - though it is a period I have yet to write anything about: Claire Tomalin's book on Pepys, Neil Hanson's A Dreadful Judgement about the Great Fire of London, Liza Picard's excellent Restoration London, two books on Newton (by Patricia Fara and Michael White).

Some books seem to have wandered in from elsewhere: a Lonely Planet guide to Antarctica, The Anglo Saxon Age from OUPs excellent A Very Short Introduction series, a Penguin Classics Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries (which is wonderful), Philip Zeigler's gruesomely fascinating The Black Death. Bede's Eccliastical History of the English People seems to have wandered down from the shelf above.

But the best book here by far - though also somewhat out of place - is Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes. There are few writers I would rather read - fiction or non-fiction - than Richard Holmes and this book is superb. More about him later. . .

The unredeemed captive

I just wanted to pull down a couple of books from the shelves and give them a bit more exposure. I mentioned The Unredeemed Captive yesterday, but I make no apologies for mentioning it again. Most of my non-fiction books are there to give me a fairly neutral grounding in a subject or to confirm or add detail to things I already know a little about. Others like John Demos' book are there with all the force and imaginative presence of a good novel.

The Last of the Mohicans probably began my interest in the Woodland Indians of northeast America. I don't really know why I find them so fascinating but I do. John Demos tells the story of a raid by a French and Indian war party on Deerfield Massachusetts in 1704. Puritan minister John Williams, his wife and five children were captured. Rev Williams was released two and a half years later and spent the next ten years trying to buy back - redeem - his surviving daughter Eunice. But Eunice was more Mohawk than Puritan by then. It is an amazing story, but even a story as good as this can be crushed by bad writing. John Demos tells it brilliantly.

And a lovely cover too. It is a very clever and subtle reworking by illustrator Walton Ford of Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow. There is enough of Bruegel to make it a lovely picture but not so much that it is simply a rip-off or a pastiche.

World Book Day

As it is World Book Day, I thought I might introduce you to some of the books on my book shelves. These shelves are in my office - the front bedroom of the terraced house we rent here in Cambridge.

When we moved, we thought we would only be here for a few months and have actually been her for two and a half years. With limited space here, my choice of books settled mainly on non-fiction and much of that reflecting the fact that I was still mainly writing historical fiction when we left Norfolk.

But though I haven't been writing out-and-out historical fiction lately, the Tales of Terror books are set in a version of the Victorian period (I see them as being set in the world of Victorian fiction, if that doesn't sound too precious) and they often refer back to earlier times. I also believe that for fiction to convince, the factual components need to be right. The world needs to seem authentic. And given that I have a compulsion to buy books that works very well.

So what do we have in this snapshot? Well they show some of my research into the Salem Witch trials when I was writing Witch Hunt for Hodder. Frances Hill's A Delusion of Satan is about that event specifically and a pretty good way of getting into the subject. Cotton Mather was a prime mover in that tragedy and is a particularly fascinating character I think.

There are books about Native Americans - particularly those of the east, with whom the original settlers came into contact. The best book on that subject by far is The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos. It is a fascinating book and just typing the title makes me want to pick it up and read it all over again. Mind you, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives is also a wonderful book on the same subject - published by Penguin it is a compendium of accounts given by women who had been taken as captive by Native Americans.

North Carolina features because when I moved here I was writing New World - a book about the Roanoke Colony the English established in what is now North Carolina (but what they actually called Virginia) in the 1580s. The Narrow Sea by Peter Unwin (about the English Channel), The Tower Menagerie by Daniel Hahn and Old London Bridge by Patricia Pierce are the kind of books that are endlessly useful and that I will dip into on a regular basis. I have lots of books about London.

Sitting on top of the books is a fantastic survey of Penguin covers called Seven Hundred Penguins. Go and buy a copy immediately. You won't regret it. Just visible above that is a book of English Fairy Tales and a big fat Brothers Grimm.