Yet the surveyors, instead of laying out private estates for upwardly mobile colonists, were mostly tracing the bounds of thousands of acres of common land. These vast tracts of public land were intended to accommodate hundreds of new colonists and their families, who would serve as tenants, raising crops and paying rents to support infrastructure while learning agricultural skills.

This symbiotic vision of common land and public institutions was one of the most dramatic innovations in the history of English colonialism to that point. But we have lost sight of that original vision and how it was undermined.

In late July of 1619, delegates gathered at the colony’s first representative government for white men. Just a few weeks later, two ships arrived in the colony and traded away a cargo of African prisoners seized from a Portuguese slaving vessel, inaugurating a bitter history of slavery and racism in English North America.

This confluence of events happened seemingly by chance. But slavery and exploitation were not unforeseen by-products of an American drive for free land and free enterprise. They were bound up with a conscious decision to turn away from public land and public institutions in early Virginia. The full story of 1619 is the tragedy of how early English Americans’ desire for private land and individual freedom, which we have long celebrated, went hand in hand with their determination to exploit and enslave. Virginia’s leaders made a conscious choice to abandon the commons by privatizing land and purchasing laborers, choices that would reverberate for centuries.

Because Virginia had been settled by a company, all profits were supposed to be shared between investors and settlers. By 1617, though, colonists were reporting that acting governor Samuel Argall had seized company property and was forcing them to grow tobacco for his own private gain.

This news enraged the most idealistic shareholders. These men, led by veteran politician Sir Edwin Sandys, envisioned Virginia as an ideal new English society. Sandys seized control of the Virginia Company in 1618 and dispatched a new governor, Sir George Yeardley, with instructions for comprehensive reforms that became known as the colony’s Great Charter—a Magna Carta for English America.

This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood events in early American history. The instructions have long been remembered for establishing a system of private grants on the land the English had seized from indigenous people, and for establishing the 1619 General Assembly as a representative body for the new class of private landowning individuals. Yet Sandys’s charter mandated not the distribution of private land but rather the division of Powhatan land into large commons—an aspect that has been all but lost to public memory.

The Great Charter actually organized Virginia colonists into “four Cities or Boroughs”; anyone wanting to receive private land had to be a member of one of these communities. Rather than focusing on the private grants, the charter carefully outlined the allocation of thousands of acres of conquered land to each of these new communities to hold in common. Each borough’s public lands were to be farmed by new tenant families that the company would ship to Virginia. The new families would pay rent, with the revenues used to fund infrastructure, capitalize new industries, and pay public officials, and all the while they would gain the experience necessary to become independent farmers.

This was a public version of the American dream, albeit one limited to white men. All English male colonists would have access to land while also having a stake in common resources and a shared sense of identity. Public servants would be able to count on a reliable income that would “take away all occasion of oppression and corruption” and encourage evenhanded regulation of trade.

From the outset there were practical problems. For the system to work, large numbers of new migrants needed tools and supplies to clear and cultivate land, so they could pay rents. Although company leaders dispatched throngs of new migrants to Virginia, the people they sent were poorly provisioned, and many arrived at the wrong time of year to begin planting. Thousands of these new migrants died. Although as many as 4,000 new colonists had arrived by 1624, the total English population of Virginia only grew by a few hundred.

These practical problems, though, were vastly compounded by the actions of those who opposed the vision of the Great Charter. Some investors in England actively worked to undermine the public structure and replace it with a more hierarchical system of large private estates controlled by aristocrats. A faction including two former Virginia governors sabotaged the plan by withholding investment until the communal structure was revoked and the colony’s governance was placed in the hands of men recognized for their “Eminence, or Nobility.”

Meanwhile, in Virginia, some colonists went even further to stymie the realization of a communal vision. When asked to contribute labor to their communities, colonists protested “as much as if all their goods had been taken from them,” one commentator said. Such reports—true or not—helped to justify the argument that the whole communal enterprise was failing, inaugurating a myth about the “tragedy of the commons” that perpetuates to this day.

Delegates at the much-celebrated 1619 General Assembly neglected to take any action to shore up the colony’s common land or protect new tenants. Instead, individual planters petitioned company officials in London to send not tenants, but bound servants who could be “let out” to them—forced to labor for five to seven years on private estates. Ready access to easily exploitable labor, one planter claimed, was the only way to “restore the fire in the hearts of the Adventurers.” These proposals set out a privatized vision of the colony’s economy and society, in which individual gain was the only effective motive.

Over the next few years, Virginia’s leaders used the pretext of limited supplies and facilities to commandeer new immigrants. The system of indentured servitude would soon result in men and women being traded and even gambled away.

It was into this context, with Sandys’s vision of public land and the common good under attack, that the privateering vessels White Lion and Treasurer (well-known to many of the colony’s leaders) landed on Virginia’s shores with their African prisoners in the late summer of 1619. Given their knowledge of enslavement in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, English colonists almost certainly assumed that, unlike white migrants, the Africans would be held in perpetual bondage. More important than the precise legal terms of their exploitation, though, was the fact that the Africans arrived outside the company’s framework of tenants and common lands that still controlled the arriving English immigrants. Not coincidentally, then, just as colonists were appealing for the chance to convert company tenants into servants, these ships, crewed by their friends and fellow Englishmen, brought laborers who could be even more easily commodified for private purposes.

This was precisely what happened. The prisoners were commandeered by a small group of planters. John Rolfe, who first reported the arrival of the so-called “20 and odd” Africans, cagily noted that they were purchased by the “Governor and Cape Merchant,” the company’s official trade coordinator in the colony. This official involvement implies that the men and women were exchanged for public supplies.

When this group of prisoners next appeared in the records, however, most of them were laboring on the private estates of the colony’s leading figures, where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Although it would take years for African slavery to be formalized in Virginia law, the experience of these first Africans set an important precedent. Their vulnerability to sale played into the hands of English colonists who were eager to overturn the system of common land that America’s Magna Carta had stipulated.

Within a few years, the English Crown revoked the Virginia Company’s control over the colony. The Great Charter and its vision of shared public infrastructure nurturing colonial opportunity was abandoned. Virginia became a place where bound and coerced workers satiated planters’ abstract demand for cheap labor to cultivate isolated private estates.

The effort to balance public and private interests was crushed by a race to both privatize land and commodify labor. The fate of the African arrivals in 1619 and the future of representative government in English America were ultimately driven by the undermining of the commons.

Americans have begun to absorb some of the lessons of 1619, from the horrors of the theft of land from indigenous peoples to the bitter legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But the critical insight we have missed from that year is that the weakening of public institutions leaves vulnerable groups exposed to exploitation. As we grapple with the legacies of racism and abuse from 17th-century Virginia, we would do well to remind ourselves of Sandys’s observation that “the maintaining of the public in all estates” is “of no less importance, even for the benefit of the Private, then the root and body of a Tree are to the particular branches.”

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Such exchanges of young people were considered normal. As English expeditions began to venture into the continents across the Atlantic, the Chesapeake Algonquians who owned the land wanted to know as much as possible about the newcomers—and vice versa. The quest for knowledge was practical: In order to deal with the English arriving in Jamestown, who were impulsive and sometimes brutal, the Powhatans and their allies needed to understand English motives and capabilities. Venturers from across the Atlantic needed local knowledge just to survive, and they hoped to discover valuable products that they could send home to pay for their American bases.

The issue for both sides was how to get inside the other’s settlements to gain all this necessary knowledge. The answer? Send young people to live and learn in the other culture. Youths were flexible, able to adapt, and much better than adults at learning new languages. As Shakespeare’s character Lafeu said in All’s Well That Ends Well, boys are “unbaked and doughy.”

Namontack soon sailed to England on the return voyage of the ship that had brought Thomas Savage to Virginia. Powhatan said that he “purposely sent” Namontack to “King James his land, to see him and his country, and to returne me the true report thereof.” Everyone assumed the young emissaries would remain completely identified with their birth culture and just act as spies. But their immersion in a very different culture at such a young age complicated their identities. Their knowledge was absolutely crucial, but leaders on both sides increasingly wondered if the boys could be trusted.

Every English ship that crossed the Atlantic carried boys who were expected to perform whatever duties commanders chose for them. No one thought this was strange, because English children typically left home around the age of 13. As their childhood ended, they entered a stage called nonage, and they stayed in this phase of life until they reached adulthood, often well into their twenties. A fortunate few went to Oxford or Cambridge or studied law at the Inns of Court, and some, whose families could afford it, became apprentices. Most became servants in another family’s home or business, where they were supposed to learn the skills necessary for adult life.

The records tell us nothing about Thomas Savage’s origins or his family. He was listed as a laborer in the ship’s records, and Richard Savage also appeared on that list, so he may have traveled with his brother. In 1609 another boy, 14-year-old Henry Spelman, arrived and was given to Powhatan’s son. We know more about him, partly because his family was prominent enough to appear in the records, and because he wrote a memoir of his life with the Chesapeake Algonquians. The first sentence of his Relation of Virginia tells us why he was sent to America, “Beinge in displeasure of my frendes, and desiring to see other cuntryes.” The fleet in which he sailed confronted the huge hurricane that inspired the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

It must have been a terrible shock for the boys as they were thrust out by the English commanders, but eyewitness accounts tell us that their hosts dealt with them kindly and the teens quickly adapted. The chiefs accepted them into their own households and treated them as sons. Powhatan called Thomas Savage “My childe.” And Patawomeck Chief Iopassus, with whom Henry Spelman had eventually gone to live on the Potomac, punished his wife for attacking Henry, “tellinge me he loved me, and none should hurt me.”

Chesapeake Algonquian boys and girls took on adult roles as they entered their teen years, so Thomas Savage and Henry Spelman entered a new American life. There, girls joined the women in planting and caring for the agricultural fields, and dealing with the tribe’s food supplies. Men, including the boys, engaged in hunting and fishing, which meant creating all the equipment for these pursuits and setting up the maze of nets to trap fish in the rivers. While the leaders back in Jamestown considered Savage and Spelman servants at their command, living with the Chesapeake Algonquians allowed them to be members of a society that valued them.

Being American involved getting used to a lot of shocking changes in everyday life. For one thing the boys had to bathe, something quite foreign to the English experience. William White, a runaway who had lived among the Powhatans, reported that at daybreak everyone older than 10 “runnes into the water” and “washes themselves a good while.” On top of that, they had to drink water. The water in England was so polluted that it was unsafe, so everyone drank beer or wine. Starting the day clean and with a clear head was part of what it meant to be American.

Namontack made a private report to Powhatan, so we do not know what he thought of the dirty, crowded, and noisy city of London. He did learn enough about English customs that he helped persuade Powhatan to wear the crown and robe sent to him by King James I of England. And as they acquired facility in Chesapeake Algonquian languages, Savage and Spelman and other boys like them also came to understand the American environment and how to navigate it. They learned about dangerous plants like Jimsonweed, a hallucinogen, as well as the plants they could consume on their travels. They also came to know how to read the landscape and find their way. Such knowledge was absolutely necessary to survival, especially given the extreme environmental conditions prevailing at the time. Tree-ring studies of cores taken from living, 1,000-year-old bald cypress trees show that the region was gripped by a disastrous seven-year drought, the driest period in the preceding 770 years, so food was short for everyone.

Meanwhile, the men back in Jamestown were unprepared to grow their own food. The soldiers they had led in Europe “lived off the land”—expecting the people they had invaded to feed them—so that is what they expected to do in America. Leaders constantly widened their search for food grown by Chesapeake Algonquians, sending ships as far as the Potomac, hoping for a cargo of corn. The land’s owners were forced, often at gunpoint, to hand over food they desperately needed for themselves. Increasingly, English dependence led to anger and conflict.

Thus it fell to the kids—English and Algonquian—to do the crucial work of making any kind of relationship possible. In the first year or so of the Jamestown settlement, 10-year-old Pocahontas had tried to help the Englishmen learn how to interact American-style. She accompanied her father’s emissaries to the colonists’ fort several times; Pocahontas’ presence indicated the embassy’s peaceful intentions. While the Powhatan men attempted to instruct colonial leaders in American diplomacy, Pocahontas’ playfulness offered a welcome respite from the grim reality of the colonists’ life. But, as relationships worsened, Powhatan moved his capital farther away from the English, and Pocahontas quit coming to Jamestown.

As the relationship between Jamestown and the Powhatans became increasingly fraught, Savage and Spelman were caught in the middle. Both Powhatan and the English leaders sometimes sent the boys with false messages, resulting in dire consequences. After Spelman had been living with Powhatan for three weeks, the chief sent him to Jamestown with a message saying that if the English sent a ship, he would fill it with corn. As soon as the ship arrived, the English eagerly started trading, but they thought the Powhatans were cheating them. When they objected, they heard noises coming from warriors hidden in the woods. All the English were killed except for two.

Spelman was so upset about this that he soon deserted Powhatan to live with Iopassus on the Potomac. At the same time Powhatan sent Savage back to Jamestown. This was a very early instance of the American conundrum of dealing with the other, as each side worried about the boys’ true loyalty. Could leaders trust their translations and their messages? Had their identities been compromised—or changed completely?

For a time, Pocahontas, the most famous of these kids, was out of harm’s way. She had married a man named Kocoum and taken up her role as a Powhatan woman. But in 1613, an English ship searching for food found her visiting on the Potomac and its captain forced Iopassus and his wife to assist in her capture. Pocahontas was brought to Jamestown where young Rev. Alexander Whitaker instructed her in Christianity, and John Rolfe fell in love with her. Ultimately, Pocahontas ceased to be an American, at least in English eyes. Whitaker wrote home that she had “renounced publickly her countrey Idolatry.” She and John Rolfe married, had a son, and the Virginia Company brought her to London to show her off as the ultimate English gentlewoman.

Pocahontas’ conversion signaled to English investors that the Virginia colony had made the first step toward bringing Americans to Christianity, one of the venture’s stated goals. But English Virginia still had to establish itself as a going enterprise. The venture had been a money drain from the beginning, and its fortunes turned around only when the English began to adopt a truly American understanding of the environment.

This engraving by Simon van de Passe is the only known portrait of Pocahontas drawn from life. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/National Portrait Gallery, London.

Though she died at the age of 20 in Gravesend, England, as the ship carrying the Rolfes back to Virginia moved down the Thames River, Pocahontas was key to the Americanization of the Virginia English because she taught John Rolfe how to grow tobacco—a crop whose planting and maintenance was very different from any the English had grown back home. Colonists, including Rolfe, had been trying for years to produce a marketable crop, but with no success, and so the English had to develop a new, American relationship with the land and its products. Once they learned how to grow tobacco successfully, colonists began to plant more and more, ultimately pushing the Powhatans off their most valuable land. Drinking tobacco, as contemporaries called it, quickly went from being a luxury for the elite to a commodity of mass consumption in England.

While Virginia was becoming a financial success, the question of how to deal with Savage and Spelman loomed. Now adults, they were no longer under leaders’ direct control and their knowledge and relationships made them potentially dangerous. Another boy who had lived with the Powhatans, Robert Poole, brought treason charges against Spelman at the first meeting of the Virginia Assembly in 1619. Poole testified that Spelman had told Opechancanough, the new paramount chief who had replaced the retiring Powhatan, that Gov. Sir George Yeardley would soon be replaced by a much greater man. Spelman was convicted of treason for endangering the colony by bringing the governor into “disesteem.” He was sentenced to serve the colony as an interpreter, which meant that he had been “degraded” back into servitude. Even though the English no longer trusted Spelman, his knowledge still mattered.

Thomas Savage escaped most of the turmoil by moving to the Eastern Shore across Chesapeake Bay. He formed close relationships with the Accomacs there, and the chief, known to the English as Esmy Shichans, gave him 9,000 acres of land. He continued to send information to Jamestown, and the leaders there decided what to do with it. Savage conveyed a warning about Opechancanough’s plans for a massive attack on all the colonists in 1622, but English leaders, skeptical about his intentions and his sources, decided to ignore it. Hundreds of colonists were killed in the great attack and Henry Spelman died the next year in the fighting that followed; he was only 28.

Thomas Savage lived on in peace. As a substantial landowner, he married a recent migrant from England and they had a son. Savage did not grow tobacco; instead he grew provisions, food for the colonies now being established all along North America’s Atlantic Coast. He continued to send information to Jamestown, and he maintained close relationships with the Accomacs. Of the kids involved in this early drama, he was the one who ended up living as a new-style American.

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Even before they landed, the governing councilors were at each other’s throats. John Smith, a former mercenary, was nearly hanged—twice—and narrowly escaped an assassin. Another councilor, George Kendall, was executed by firing squad. John Ratcliffe deposed the colony’s first president, Edward Maria Wingfield, and installed himself as president. Later, Ratcliffe himself was flayed by the Native Americans. Even the lowly settlers of this colony, which was a private venture of the Virginia Company of London, were impossible to rule: lazy, greedy malcontents. The ghastly image of cannibalism hovered over the colony in those early years.

By contrast, we like to talk about Virginia’s rival colony, Massachusetts, which got started more than a decade later. The Mayflower Compact and a spectacular, three-day Thanksgiving feast have come to symbolize ingenuity, industry, and self-determination. The authoritarian and puritanical Pilgrims, so the story goes, might have been staid and a little boring, but their governing was sober, orderly, and successful.

But it was out of the mess that was Jamestown, not the order of Plymouth, that American democracy was truly born. It was Jamestown’s colonists—in fact one particular man named Stephen Hopkins, present at both Jamestown and Plymouth—who invented the idea that government derived its authority from the consent of the governed.

Officers of the Virginia Company wrote all of the “reports” and “discourses” coming out of Virginia, and so most of the story of Jamestown has been sanitized, but when carefully reading one of those narratives, the True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, I found intriguing evidence about the curious career of Stephen Hopkins. The True Reportory tells the story of how a fleet of nine ships sailed from the River Thames in June 1609, ferrying 500 settlers, including women, children, livestock, and enough material to plant a whole English town in Virginia. For 400 years, Hopkins has been the villain of the tale, but reading the text suspiciously allows us to see Hopkins as he really was—and turns what we think we know about Jamestown on its head.

True Reportory was penned by the company’s secretary, William Strachey, a gentleman dilettante who lived on the edges of London’s theater society and hung around with William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The Reportory is his only memorable work, but it’s a masterpiece, a sea yarn so wild that it inspired Shakespeare’s last play, the fantastical story of shipwreck and marooned castaways called The Tempest.

The fleet, named the Third Resupply, was hit by a real-life tempest worse than its stage version. On July 23, 1609, “a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow.” A hurricane of unimaginable force overtook the fleet when it was just a week away from the Chesapeake Bay. Europeans thought those cyclonic, tropical storms were a sign that they had sailed beyond the frontier of civilization, out of God’s realm, and right into the wild territory of the devil. For three days and three nights the ships struggled against wind and waves. The smallest of them sank: All hands drowned.

The largest of all the ships, the Sea Venture, which carried most of the supplies, the new governor, the admiral, and Strachey, disappeared in the storm and was presumed lost at sea.

Seven ships limped, out of joint with broken masts, into the Chesapeake Bay. They found that Jamestown had been transformed by its first settlers into a strange American-English amalgam ruled by a man named Captain John Smith. He might have been a dictator, but the only respite from hunger and misery in Jamestown had come under Smith’s regime. By force of arms, he had detached the Nansemond, Paspahegh, Kecoughtan, and several other districts on the James River from the Powhatan Confederacy. These Native Americans paid tribute in food, and they bivouacked many settlers in their towns.

But among those on the seven remaining ships of the Third Resupply was the old president, John Ratcliffe, who deposed Smith within a few weeks of their landing. Smith was severely wounded and was obliged to sail back to England under charges of treason.

His successors were incompetent. Ratcliffe managed to get himself and couple of dozen men killed on a diplomatic mission to Powhatan. The Native Americans on the James River rebelled against the subsequent regime of George Percy. Jamestown now had several hundred mouths to feed and no resources. The winter and early spring of 1610 culminated a few months later in the infamous “Starving Time.” In desperation, some settlers carved meat off of the emaciated bodies of the dead.

Meanwhile, the Sea Venture had been lost to the world, but it had not sunk. The battering of the hurricane pried its planks apart. Oakum sealant spewed from the seams. The sailors hammered salted beef into the gaps. They pumped and they bailed—sailor and settlers alike, laborers and gentlemen like Strachey, who had never done a lick of real work in their lives—everyone struggled against the inexorable sea, against the gradual rising of the water in the hold. But there was no hope. They were in the mid-Atlantic. Everyone could see that the ship would founder. They bailed seawater just to lengthen for another hour the short interval of their lives. Finally, their limbs could work no longer. They consigned themselves to death. And at that moment, they sighted land.

The admiral steered the ship onto a reef a mile from shore. Improbably, 150 people made it alive onto one of the Bermuda islands. Strachey joined the corps of gentlemen that Sir Thomas Gates, the new governor of Virginia, organized to guard the company’s weapons and food and cordage and tools, which they salvaged from the wreck.

The settlers realized they had landed in paradise. Bermuda was a complete wilderness, inhabited by neither natives nor Europeans, its lagoons teemed with fish, fowl and swine roamed the woods, and fruit grew everywhere.

Most of the settlers had signed onto the adventure because of all the media hype that the company had orchestrated in the spring of 1609, but by the time of the shipwreck the sailors had opened their eyes to the real conditions in Jamestown. Virginia was not the “New Britain” of the propaganda machine. It was hell. Why go on, they asked themselves? Why not stay in Bermuda?

But Governor Gates had no intention of staying. He set the men to work on a new ship, a hybrid of timbers pried from the Sea Venture and new lumber hewn from the Bermudan cedars.

Some of the settlers resisted. Each plank hastened the completion of their coffin ship. They dragged their feet. They malingered. One group plotted to escape to another island and maroon themselves in the wilderness.

Gates caught wind of their plot, hauled the conspirators before the assembled camp, and convicted them for mutiny. Ironically, their punishment was to be marooned—without tools or supplies—on a little island. After several days of starvation, they begged for mercy.

The castaways knew then they were prisoners. Gates mustered them in the morning by a bell, counted them, marched them off under overseers to labor on the ship, and counted them again in the evening. They ate in messes—and all food was controlled by the company. They were forced to pray each day. Leisure was granted or withheld by the governor. It felt like a slave labor camp.

In January 1610, as the skeleton of the new ship was clothed by hull and decks, Stephen Hopkins revived the idea of escape. Clandestinely, he persuaded most of the castaways to abandon the company’s camp, sneak off to another island, and build their own village in the wilderness.

Hopkins was an unlikely leader. Indifferently educated, the 28-year-old might have had a low-level office leading prayers in the church. He had been an undistinguished farmer who had lost the lease on his fields. But on Bermuda, Hopkins found that he had a natural gift for oratory.

The settlers had all contracted with the Virginia Company, Hopkins admitted. They promised several years of labor. But the company did not keep up its end of the bargain. It was supposed to deliver them safely to Jamestown, and feed and clothe them. The hurricane intervened. It marooned them on a desert island, an abundant wilderness owned by no one. The shipwreck, he reasoned, dissolved their contract with the company, just as the waves had picked apart the Sea Venture on the reef.

These circumstances placed the castaways in a unique political circumstance. Each castaway, Hopkins explained, had been “freed … from the government of any man.” Even the “meanest” or poorest laborer among them was bound only by the natural law of self-preservation, which compelled him to “provide for himself and his own family.”

Hopkins did not use these terms, but he was describing pre-civil man in “the state of nature,” which is the basis of the social contract that would be theorized decades later by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Without the company contract binding them, Hopkins said, everyone was free. Each man could choose for himself if he would submit to Gates’ authority, strike out on his own, or head into the woods in a cooperative venture with other settlers.

Before the great escape to a nearby island had fully developed, two spies denounced Hopkins. Governor Gates again gathered everyone together so they could watch Hopkins, chained and condemned, beg for his life. His humiliation was a lesson for every discontented settler, and when Gates felt they had learned the lesson, he granted Hopkins clemency.

The ship was finished and launched in May 1610. Gates called it the Deliverance, but the settlers must have considered the name ironic. They did not board willingly.

A week’s sailing brought them to the Chesapeake Bay, and when they came up the James River on the tide, they found the little English fort of Jamestown had become a ghost town. The parapets were unguarded, the gates were off their hinges, the palisade was riddled with gaps, and ghostly forms of emaciated men came out of the houses crying, “We are starved!”

The arrival of the Bermuda castaways saved the lives of the last remnant of the Jamestown, about 60 souls who survived the “Starving Time.”

While the arrival of the ship saved those who remained in Jamestown, in the months to come, the place became a replica of the penal camp in Bermuda. “Discontents” fled constantly to the Native Americans. The Virginia Company executed those they caught, sometimes in grotesque ways, to terrorize the other prisoner-settlers. One man, for instance, was chained to a tree and left to starve to death in plain view of his friends, who dared not bring him a morsel.

Strachey’s tale, complete with Stephen Hopkins’ mutiny, humiliation, and defeat, was sent back to England, where it made the rounds of drawing rooms and salons. (Some months later, Strachey followed his manuscript back to England, where he compiled the laws of the colony and wrote a history rich with anthropological detail about the Algonquians.)

Shakespeare, apparently, read the True Reportory with fascination, because he borrowed several scenes and themes for The Tempest, which premiered at the Blackfriars Theatre in London in the fall of 1611. The play’s mutineer was a drunken butler named Stephano, an allusion to the villain in Strachey’s tale, the unschooled political theorist named Stephen Hopkins. The wealthy theatergoers watched Shakespeare ridicule the idea that common people might take responsibility for their own government. At about the same time that they were guffawing at Stephano’s revolution, the Virginia Company executed settlers it had caught in a mass escape attempt.

Stephen Hopkins kept his head down, did his time, and eventually made his way back to London. We do not know what he did for a living, but he was a solid, middle-class, head of household, with wife, children, and the contracts of two young menservants.

In 1620, Hopkins took ship again, this time in a little vessel that was going to land settlers on the Hudson River. But the Mayflower landed farther north, near Cape Cod, beyond the Virginia Company’s land grant. Someone—who could it have been other than Hopkins?—argued that as soon as the settlers set foot ashore, they would be free of their contract, free to determine for themselves their own government.

Under the sway of this idea, the famous Mayflower Compact created government, a “civil body politic,” through the mutual consent of the 41 men who signed the new contract. It seems almost preposterous that for 400 years no one has credited Hopkins with the idea—if not the language—of that document.

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