Book Reviews 483 A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? Virginia Bernhard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. ix + 220 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95) 2009 marked the 400th anniversary of the shipwreck that initiated English habitation of Bermuda, a twenty-one-square-mile Atlantic archipelago several hundred miles from the nearest landmass. The years surrounding this commemoration have seen the publication of three books aimed at a general audience (Doherty 2008, Glover & Smith 2008, Woodward 2009), and now a fourth. Like these others, A Tale of Two Colonies recounts the terrible storm that drove the Sea Venture off-course from its intended des- tination of Virginia to shipwreck on the tiny island’s reefs; the infighting among the shipwrecked; the bounteous land- and seascapes that enabled the castaways to build other vessels and stockpile supplies; the eventual completion of their voyage to the mainland; and their invaluable assistance to the struggling Jamestown settlement in a richly detailed narrative that will delight fans of English and colonial American history alike. The first five chapters alternate between Bermuda and Virginia and their diverging paths—Bermuda’s to profitability, and Virginia’s a near-constant teetering on the edge of ruin, while each of the final two chapters consider both colonies as “The Confluence of Three Cultures” (English, Indian, and African). The bulk of the book overlaps with The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown (Glover & Smith 2008), including three similar chapter titles, but A Tale of Two Colonies extends the intertwined story of Virginia and Bermuda into the 1620s, through the early development of Bermuda under its own proprietary company of investors. The account of Spanish diplo- mats’ efforts to monitor English activity and convey their reports to Philip III brings to life the rippling European effects of English activity in Bermuda and Virginia, and also demonstrates the significance of Protestant-Catholic conflict at the time. Settlement, planting, and the development of the cash crop of tobacco flourished (thanks to the knowledge and skill of African experts) in Bermuda even as Jamestown suffered from extremely high death rates, administrative mismanagement, and antagonistic relations with the Indian peoples of the area, although divisive factions within the Virginia Company affected both colonies. Virginia Bernhard also offers general readers a behind-the-scenes look at how historians must work within the constraints of surviving evidence © 2013 Heather Miyano Kopelson DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340105 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ 484 Book Reviews to create a balanced narrative about the past, skillfully interweaving infor- mation about the often self-serving nature of various conflicting eyewit- ness accounts; the vagaries of document survival and archaeological finds; the happenstance of storms, voyage times, and personal rivalries; and the questions that still remain unanswered. Being open about this struggle puts her book in tune with recent scholarly attention to the way the avail- able archive shapes the stories that historians tell about the past, although she might have pushed further with such analysis of Indian and African perspectives. The explanations of historical messiness exist in tension with the book’s response to its subtitle: “What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda?” Bernhard answers primarily in the singular while other scholarship on the interactions of peoples in the Americas aims more toward acknowledging multiple valid versions of “what really happened.” (For a recent example, see Jacoby 2008.) That is not to say that this book argues for the myth that good Europeans brought civilization and religion to violent and savage Indi- ans and inferior Africans. Among other examples, the narrative carefully details two English reprisals against “the wrong Indians, in the wrong place” (pp. 135-36). But while the introduction instructs readers that the “absent voices” of “Indians and Africans . must be extracted from the traces they left on the land and from the writings of Europeans who observed them” (p. 2), the chapters that follow do not fully accomplish that task. This omission is problematic in a book aimed at a general audience, many of whom may neither be fully aware of the stereotypes present in the historical sources nor as knowledgeable about how to read for—and through—those inherent biases as are scholars like Bernhard. The char- acterization of the statement “Indians are devil worshipers” as one of the “half-truths” (p. 140) in an Irish spy’s report to the Spanish might read to those already versed in the scholarship as an allusion to European misper- ceptions of Indian religions, but it is likely to be less clear to other read- ers. The notes cite relevant publications, but in-text explicit treatments of European biases about Indian peoples in documents such as John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) are largely missing. To take one example, introducing a long passage from Generall Historie as being “one of the earliest (and still one of the best) descriptions of Virginia’s Native people” without further interpreting Smith’s use of adjectives such as “Craftie,” “Savage,” and “malicious” (p. 42) .