The Weight of Smoke

Four hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, the lives of Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas assume their true dimensions in this far-ranging saga of the beginnings of the British Empire. The English came to the New World to found a utopia. Instead they founded a slave state. The only English voice of reason and the first true American hero became an outcast - and then forgotten. George Robert Minkoff presents a rich, authentic tale about the disastrous first 18 months of the Jamestown Colony, 1607-1609. Entwined with the colony's fractious beginnings are the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, retold around the campfires by an old alchemist, Jonas Profit, who sailed the Spanish Main with Queen Elizabeth's favorite pirate. Appropriately, these tales are told in a language rich with metaphorical power, flavored with Elizabethan authenticity, and read with power and authenticity by Nigel Gore.