A Lion to Guard Us

Jamestown, named after King James I of England, was founded on May 14, 1607, and was the first permanent English settlement in North America. King James I granted a charter to the privately owned Virginia Company in London, which hoped to find gold and silver in North America and a river route to the Pacific Ocean for easier trade with Asia. From the outset, the colony faced major challenges that brought it to the brink of disaster in 1610, when the passengers from the Sea Venture (called the Sea Adventure in the novel) finally arrived.

In December 1606, three ships set out for North America—the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery—with approximately 105 colonists aboard. The ships arrived at Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607, and on May 14, they chose a settlement site on a peninsula in the James River that came to be known as Jamestown.

The colonists’ relationship with the Indigenous peoples—mainly from the Powhatan confederacy of Algonquian-speaking tribes—was at times friendly and at times contentious. In May 1607, the colony defended itself from a surprise attack and was only able to repel the Indigenous forces with cannon fire from the ships. When two of the ships left to return to England on June 22, the colonies’ leaders believed that they would continue to be successful. In August 1607, however, the colonists experienced a first wave of sickness and starvation.

New colonists arrived at Jamestown in January 1608, but shortly afterward, a fire destroyed all of the colony’s homes. Another ship arrived in September 1608 with the first women colonists—Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras. Because the Virginia Company was dissatisfied with the administration of the colony, they dispatched Thomas Gates aboard the Sea Venture to be the new governor, but the ship was blown off course in a storm and grounded on an island in the Bermudas. The ship’s 150 passengers survived and lived on the island for nine months.

In the autumn of 1609, the relationship between Chief Powhatan and the Jamestown colonists deteriorated, and the winter of 1609-1610 came to be known as the “Starving Time” when many of the colonists abandoned the colony, were killed, or died of starvation or disease. In the meantime, the survivors of the Sea Venture built two new ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, that left for Jamestown on May 10, 1610, and arrived on May 24.

Many of the secondary characters in A Lion to Guard Us are based on historical figures, and the author intermingles historical and fictional characters so that it isn’t always clear which is which. Some of the historical figures included in the novel are Sir Thomas Smythe (treasurer of the Virginia Company of London), Knight Admiral George Somers, Captain Christopher Newport, Governor Thomas Gates, John Rolfe (a passenger aboard the Sea Venture who would later marry Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas), Chris Carter, Robert Waters, and Stephen Hopkins (a passenger aboard the Sea Venture who would also later be a passenger on the Mayflower). His children in the novel—Anne and David—are fictional characters.