Savage Kingdom

"Brilliantly framed narrative -- fascinating.... A well-told story." -- Kirkus Review Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men "led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric, and a government spy"l eft London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River. Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America. Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources, and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture. It reveals a reckless, daring enterprise led by outcasts of the Old World who found themselves interlopers in a new one. It charts their journey into a beautiful landscape and a sophisticated culture that they found both ravishing and alien, which they yearned to possess but threatened to destroy. An intimate story in an epic setting, Benjamin Woolley shows how the land of Pocahontas came to be drawn into a new global order, reaching from London to the Orinoco Delta, from the warring kingdoms of Angola to the slave markets of Mexico, from the gates of the Ottoman Empire to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Benjamin Woolley, an award-winning writer and broadcaster, is the author of the bestseller The Queen's Conjurer. He has written and presented documentaries for the BBC on a variety of subjects and has won the Arts Journalist of the Year Award and an Emmy Award. He lives in London. David Drummond has made his living as an actor for over twenty years, primarily in voice-overs. He won an AudioFile Earphones Award for his first audiobook, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, and has also narrated Conquering Gotham by Jill Jonnes.