Q: What is a “culture of disaster?”
A: A predictable, almost ritualized, series of responses to a calamity that causes death and destruction for a community or communities. Any culture of disaster is a product of its time and place. In other words, understandings of disasters and responses to them were different in, say, seventeenth-century England and nineteenth-century China—different from each other and from what we do in twenty-first-century America.
In the modern U.S., when disaster strikes, the media quickly provides basic information to people outside the affected area. Soon, these brief quantitative reports of losses of lives and property are supplemented by moving human-interest stories. Meanwhile, government and humanitarian groups arrive at the site of the disaster to provide relief and maintain order. Once the immediate crisis has passed—or has at least passed out of the public’s consciousness—the more affluent survivors file their insurance claims, while the authorities consider regulations or other initiatives that might prevent future disasters or limit their effects. However, they typically reject proposed regulations or initiatives as too expensive or inconvenient. Then, another disaster comes along, and the entire process begins all over.
Q: What is striking about the Jamestown colony’s trials and calamities in comparison to other disasters your book examines?
A: Famines and disease were rampant in Jamestown’s early years, killing the overwhelming majority of settlers. There was also at least one serious fire and a major hurricane. Today, these disasters would be widely publicized and give rise to both official and non-governmental relief efforts. However, at the time, virtually no one knew about the horrific situation in Jamestown; there were no newspapers, and the colony’s London-based corporate sponsors did everything they could to keep the situation quiet. The only disaster relief for Jamestown was to send more people and hope they didn’t die, though most of them did. In fact, roughly five out of six settlers died between the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and 1624, when the king revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and made Virginia a royal colony.
So, in the book, the Jamestown experience is my baseline. In my first chapter, I examine bad things that happened in early Jamestown, a time and place that was not yet enmeshed in a culture of disaster.