A Trip To The Nation’s Birthplace Reminds Me Of The Mysteries Of Our Past

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This 1639 church tower was one of the few remnants of the Jamestown Settlement visible in the 1890s, when the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities began excavating the site. Creative Commons photo by Tony Fischer.

(OPINION) CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.— I’m certain there must be other couples whose idea of a rip-roaring  autumn vacation is to visit the homes of dead presidents, historic settlements and Revolutionary War battlefields. It’s just that I don’t know any of those other couples.

But Liz and I have had a wonderful time. We’ve been to the houses of presidents James Madison and James Monroe. We’ve spent an afternoon at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. We’ve walked the battlefield and village at Yorktown and meandered through the nearby American Revolution Museum.

Now we’re headed home to Kentucky, sated with history, basking in a contented afterglow, as exhausted and fulfilled as our friends seem to be when they return from a trip to Hawaii or an Alaskan cruise.

We are nerds, yes. No doubt about that.

At Jamestown, particularly, we both have skin in the game — kind of. Our first American ancestors landed there 400 years ago, hers in 1616 and mine in 1622. Liz’s guy appears to have been comparatively well-to-do.

Mine was only a teenager when he reached Virginia. According to family lore, he’d stowed away on the ship that brought him here, was discovered at sea and upon arrival had to work off his passage with a term as an indentured servant.

The trip across the Atlantic was perilous for those willing to chance such a thing, whether they were wealthy or poor. The journey took months in a cramped, fetid sailing vessel vulnerable to storms and beset by rats and rotting food.

Yet the land that awaited those immigrants when they arrived was worse. Life in the 17th century generally resembled Thomas Hobbes’ famous description: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Hobbes, I believe, was speaking of societies without a stable government or the rule of law. Still, his words could have served as an apt description of daily existence in early America.

The year my teenage forebear Thomas Prater (the “h” was added later) arrived, Powhatan warriors launched a surprise attack along the James River they hoped would annihilate the English. Between a quarter and a third of Virginia’s White population was slaughtered in a day — roughly 350 to 400 people. About 20 English women were kidnapped.

Conflicts with Native Americans were but one danger. The settlers were wracked by starvation and malaria. They froze in the winter and succumbed to heat stroke in the summer. They worried about invasion by the Spanish. Because they had no medicines or doctors worth the name, even minor ailments or injuries could prove fatal.

The thing Liz and I have discussed most about the Jamestown settlers is, what kind of people would undertake such a journey?

Were they foolhardy? Were they driven by an insatiable greed for riches? Were they so miserable or persecuted in England they had nothing to lose? Was it some combination of those things or something else altogether?

For 21st century descendants such as us, our ancestors’ decision to set out across the sea for America in the 1600s is unfathomable.

I can’t imagine any circumstances that could compel me to attempt a change that drastic today, even if I were still a hardy teenager. I’m too partial to my air conditioning and central heat, Wi-Fi, Starbucks coffee and interstate highways. I’ve always been a man fond of comfort and common sense, a proud and happy marshmallow.

But these people were not like me. Obviously, the Prather bloodlines have been diluted beyond reckoning across the generations.

That’s always the mystery of family, though, isn’t it — even when we’re only separated by 40 years rather than four centuries? We glimpse hints of ourselves in our kin, some common slope of the skull or turn of the mind or fondness for fried chicken — but mainly, we’re not them, and they’re not us. We look at a cousin or grandparent and think, “There’s something familiar in that stranger.”

The generations come and go, thrive and suffer and die out. Ultimately they’re forgotten, except for names on tombstones or signatures on ancient deeds and wills. Who they were, what they thought, who they loved, what they feared — it all vanishes into the ether.

And nobody but God knows what it all means.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He’s the author of four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.