Giles Milton. Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 358 pp. $24.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-374-26501-4.

Reviewed by Carla Gardina Pestana (Department of History, Ohio State University)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2001)

Big Chief Elizabeth: Discovering the Limits of Popular History

Big Chief Elizabeth: Discovering the limits of popular history

Big Chief Elizabeth offers a popular history of early English colonization efforts in North America. It deals relatively little with Elizabeth I, who makes a few cameo appearances, generally as Sir Walter Ralegh's benefactor and patron. Ralegh serves as the focal point of the tale and is in some ways its hero. It does not confine itself to Elizabeth's reign but provides a narrative of early Jamestown in a few later chapters. It deals even less with the Native Americans in the Roanoke and Virginia regions, despite the allusion to them in the title reference to Elizabeth as their "Big Chief." Big Chief Elizabeth narrates events in Roanoke and early Jamestown, based largely on various first-hand accounts. As history, it does not inspire much confidence, and as a literary effort, I found it disappointing as well.

The jacket of this book promises "swashbuckling history" and "marvellous, vivid stories." Intended to build upon the success of Milton's earlier work on the spice trade, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, the book is meant for a popular audience that seeks a readable and entertaining account of early English colonization. In keeping with the desire to entertain, Milton provides the occasional description of an individual's motives or thoughts, descriptions that involve some imaginative entry into the world he attempts to recreate. Yet he restrains himself from inventing information and clearly believes himself to be writing history rather than a historical novel. When considering how to treat a "good story" that cannot be verified about the meeting of Pocahontas and Ralegh, for instance, he contrasts its appeal with the "empty truth" (p. 327) that the historian sometimes faces. Like the professional scholar, he will not fully embrace the good story that cannot be proven. Professionals like John Demos and Jill Lepore have famously allowed themselves far greater imaginative license than Milton grants himself.

Yet for all Milton's commitment to historical accuracy, his judgments do not always inspire confidence. He castigates John White as a weak and ineffectual leader, which he attributes to White's supposed "artistic temperament" (p. 179). Simon Fernandes was duplicitous and even criminally negligent, and John White's inability to control his underling is a prime indication of White's ineffectiveness. Milton however describes Fernandes as a mere navigator, when in fact he was a ship's master and one of White's most powerful and experienced fellow leaders. Small misreadings of this sort are fairly common. Larger ones also occur. Milton describes Elizabeth as "the unchallenged ruler of the New World" (p. 223). What, one wonders, would Philip II have made of such a claim? Milton anticipates maritime developments by many decades, designating England a major sea power in 1615. Occasionally he contradicts his own limited analysis. For instance, when Ralegh first meets Elizabeth, she was not yet "the wizened harridan" she would become (p. 40); a decade later, when the reader might expect she would be well advanced in her "harridan" phase, Milton refers to her as a "chaste beauty" (p. 241). Similarly in 1585 the all-male group left at Roanoke bemoaned the lack of "women to keep them company" (p. 113) subsequently Milton underscores the necessity of women's skills to an outpost's survival (p. 336), in an impassioned description that omits the previously emphasized "company" that had been the sum total of what they were needed to provide.

These oddities are not the most disturbing aspect of Milton's work for the historian; more troubling are his uncritical readings of the accounts of exploration and colonization, from Richard Hakluyt through John Smith. In writing about this period, Milton covers oft-trodden ground, which such historians as David Beers Quinn, Kenneth R. Andrews, and Karen Ordahl Kupperman have explored before him. Despite having met with Professor Quinn, Milton appears to think little of what professional historians can offer him. His bibliography is highly revealing in this light. He lists the published primary sources he used separately from "Reference Works," a highly selective bibliography of secondary sources. Big Chief Elizabeth reads as if Milton literally used this second list as references, to look up selected aspects of the history. Little effort was apparently made to understand the larger society that gave rise to these explorers or colonizers. "Elizabethan" is a favored adjective, often used and seemingly meant to convey much, but never defined. Nor does Milton evince any interest in the critical readings of his major sources that other historians have offered. Every writer is accepted uncritically and his description of events is taken at face value.

Milton's account therefore partakes of the prejudices and foibles of his authors. This is most obvious where Native Americans are concerned. Milton's descriptions often express the prejudices of the seventeenth century colonizer. He describes Indians as having an "alarming propensity for murder and bloodshed" (p. 157) and as "vengeful and warlike" (p. 175). Milton's reference works included not a single book or article on Native American history or culture. It shows.

Milton seems utterly unaware that numerous scholars have explained Pocahontas's intervention in the supposedly impending execution of John Smith as a component of an adoption ritual. According to Milton, as to Smith before him and to Disney Studios since, Powhatan wanted to kill Smith and was stopped by the startling heroism of his child. Milton assumes in that incident and throughout that Pocahontas pursued her own policy vis a vis the English, in continual defiance of her father. How she nonetheless ranked as his favorite child, Milton never considers.

The drama that drives much of the narrative is the fate of the Roanoke colonists, but Milton claims not to have read Kupperman's work on Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. For my money, Kupperman's book (which is still in print with Rowman and Littlefield) presents a more interesting read, one that is quite suitable for undergraduate and popular audiences. What the reader of both narratives will realize is that Milton's effort at revealing the truth of what happened to the Roanoke settlers adds nothing to what Kupperman has already told us. Milton, however, presents his answers to the "mystery" with great flare, waiting to announce the fate of the settlers in an epilogue that rather confusingly doubles back to review and explain events described previously.

Milton agrees with Kupperman that the settlement was abandoned, that the settlers lived for some time after that, and that some were probably incorporated into native communities. Both present the account of a native attack on the settlers in 1607 along with reports that a few of the English survived to be absorbed into other communities. The major difference is that Kupperman weighs the evidence and contextualizes it, while Milton presents it uncritically, as the surprising and definitive answer to a mystery of long standing. Uninformed readers will not realize that Milton has added nothing to our knowledge. He in fact tells us less than what has long been known and he does so in serviceable but not especially vivid prose. Buy Kupperman's Roanoke instead.

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Citation: Carla Gardina Pestana. Review of Milton, Giles, Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. January, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4854

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