Marooned

With the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown behind us and the four hundredth anniversary of Plymouth Plantation just ahead, competing stories about American origins remain in circulation. Joseph Kelly enters the conversation with a new answer: the origins of American history can be found with the colonists who were marooned on the island of Bermuda in 1609. Kelly argues that when the Sea Venture, the flagship of the “third supply” to Jamestown, broke upon that deserted island, the wreck inaugurated a new social order. The consensus around who was to rule and who was to be ruled broke along with the ship. Marooned men began to engage in mutinous thoughts and actions, declaring their intentions toward autonomy and self-determination. These social and political claims were entirely new in the context of a world defined by seemingly immovable divisions between gentlemen and the common sort. England's entrenched class system was amplified in the colonies, with plantations becoming, in Kelly's estimation, no better than labor camps made up of captives and tyrants, prisoners and jailers. In that unforgiving environment, dissolution turned to dissent, and dissent turned into nascent forms of democracy. Abandoned, lost, and marooned, men decided the imported system of government that held them in bondage should have no authority over them. Continually, they split themselves off. In bids for self-creation, they ran away. In bids for the creation of an alternative polity, they pledged themselves to compacts of mutual consent. Kelly sees that the experience of being marooned, cast away on distant shores, and within reach of what was to them a wilderness, had the effect of making men feel “profoundly and dangerously free” (p. 332). Thus they had the temerity to resist despots and imagine collectives that Kelly sees as newly, and truly, American

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