A Little Waste Ground

In May 1607, about a hundred English men and boys built a three-cornered fort on a marshy island in Paspahegh country. By September, half of them were dead. The rest lived because the people around them chose to feed them.

A Little Waste Ground tells the first two years of Jamestown from both sides of the palisade: the colonists who kept lists of their dead, and the Powhatan chiefdom that sent corn, made the strangers its subjects, and then watched them take by force what it had offered freely. At its center is John Smith, soldier, trader, captive and president, whose own pages are the source of nearly everything we remember, including a famous rescue he never mentioned until years later.

Built from the colonists' own words and the recorded speeches of Powhatan and his people, this is the true story of a colony that survived on a chiefdom's harvest, and of the man who wrote himself into its legend.