Big Chief Elizabeth
   Giles Milton
  2000 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY
   ISBN: 0374265011


The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. In an age of great naval exploration when captains would kill for maps & European monarchs were at each others' throats for a chance at longer borders, daring & often dreadfully ill-equipped men set sail for the setting sun in droves. Some never made it there, others never made it back. A happy few made the round trip & brought back strange people & wonderful treasures.

A joke our History Mistress would tell us as we learnt about this period in Our Island Story was what would have happened if we'd smoked the potato & eaten the tobacco that Sir Walter Raleigh brought back to Good Queen Bess? Miss Woodall was no comedian, however, Giles Milton is!

Big Chief Elizabeth is engaging, humorous, informative & rolls along on the swells of the fortunes of the first landfalls of the English mariners in the New World. If you think we've got it bad with Big Brother breathing down our napes - Big Chief Elizabeth would have lopped off your head in a New Amsterdam minute if you crossed her - & tell you she loved you to boot!

No one ever told these ancient mariners they couldn't do it, so they did - many meeting a watery grave in the process. They were, however, quick studies & in time the ships that left English ports began to come back again - with exotic cargoes; & that was the whole speculation!

When Walter Raleigh(who never once spelled his name that way), returned with Manteo on tow, a Native American replete with facial tattoos & otter-skin cloak, his queen promptly knighted him. Manteo set London on its ears & started a fad for which many men, women & children perished attempting to grab a toe hold in the New World.

America, however, proved fearsomely inhospitable. Our worthy ancestors brought with them all manner of unwieldy weapons & some, of the infectious kind, that wiped out entire tribes in less time than it took to sail home & back.

From Savages Among the Icebergs to The Jolly Tribesman; from Storms, Sprites, and Goblins to Smoke Into Gold; from The Unfortunate Master Coffin to One Bess For Another; from The King's Dearest Daughter to Mrs. and Mrs. Rolfe go to England, Giles Milton has gleaned from the Roanoke Voyages journals a delightfully entertaining tapestry of the original American gold rush.

Do read this one! It is a splendid way to osmosiphy history, adventure by misadventure; catastrophe by calamity; triumph by turf warfare. About who survived the unknown only to succumb to the executioner's blade back home & about who never made it there. About who made fortunes & who lost them. A fascinating read!

More from Giles Milton: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville & Nathaniel's Nutmeg: or The True and Incredible Adventure of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History.
(04/08/01)

Rebecca