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Christopher T. George is co-editor of Loch Raven Review. George was born in Liverpool, England in 1948 and now
lives in Baltimore, Maryland, near Johns Hopkins University, with his wife Donna and two cats. Chris works full-time as
a medical editor in Washington, DC. He has been writing and publishing poetry since he attended Loyola College,
Baltimore, and studied with Sister Maura Eichner at the College of Notre Dame, as well as with poets Elliot Coleman
and Marion Buchman. His poems have appeared in numerous publications in the United States and Great Britain. He is
also a published historian and a lyricist for a new musical,
Jack-The Musical, about Jack the Ripper.
George also is the Editor of
Desert Moon Review and an editor at
Writer’s Block Poetry Workshop.
Daniel Watkins is a novelist based out of San Francisco, CA. New World Burning is his second book. His family name can be found among the first colonists to arrive in Jamestown. |
Summer 2006 Table of Contents - Vol. II, No. 2 |
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Christopher T. George
Daniel Watkins, New World Burning, Two Mountains Press, ISBN 0-9768065-0-9, 438 pages, 2005, $13.95.
As a teenager, one of my earliest attempts at a novel was to scribble away at a projected book that I called “The Scarlet Banner” after I had become fascinated with the story of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. My book did not go further than a few longhand chapters. My interest in the colonial fracas had begun while on a visit to Williamsburg, where I purchased a mock parchment copy of Nathaniel Bacon’s “Declaration of the People”. This period document, written exactly a century before the American Revolution, gives the impression that Bacon’s rebellion was a precursor to the patriotic revolt that led to the independence of this nation in 1776. However, first impressions can be deceiving. In this lively historical novel, author Daniel Watkins does a good job at describing the revolt against the Royal rule of Sir William Berkeley by the contradictory and most probably unbalanced young landowner Bacon. We see that it was in effect a grab for power by a man who cared little for the people and more for himself. Bacon, by turns a brilliant military leader and a coarse and obscene buffoon, treated fellow colonists and Native Americans with contempt and cruelty. The uprising against Royal rule, while it might have been provoked partly by Berkeley’s overbearing character and the Crown’s attempt to control the lives of the colonists, lacked the underpinnings of desire for fair and democratic rule of the independence movement a century later. The American Revolution after all was informed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment with the new government led by exceptional thinkers such as Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin – albeit that, even then, what actually happened was that an American elite supplanted an absent British elite in handling the affairs of the people. As a National Park Service website concludes, Bacon’s Rebellion was “a power struggle between two stubborn, selfish leaders rather than a glorious fight against tyranny.” Daniel Watkins tells the tale of these stirring times of early America through the eyes of young Philip Corstair, an immigrant from Civil War era England in 1650, who quickly gets caught up in the harsh life of trying to make a life on the frontier. The novelist displays good understanding of the hardships of clearing land in wilderness and then trying to eke out subsistence from an unremitting land in a difficult climate, subject to mosquitoes and disease which threatened to wipe out the colony even if the Indians did not. Corstair soon finds that extra hands are needed to make a success of it in frontier Virginia. Although his wife is sterile, they are able to adopt children who have lost their parents, and this makes the difference between failure and starvation and relative success in agrarian early Virginia. Twenty five years after his arrival in the colony, and by now an older man for those times, Philip Corstair is inducted into the militia of Indian fighter Nathaniel Bacon as relations with the natives deteriorate. Again the hardships of frontier life are well portrayed by Watkins as the militiamen thrash around in the forest and swamps to hit out at the aboriginals. Bacon proves himself adept at slaughtering Indians as well as in confronting and mocking Governor Berkeley. Jamestown and the whole colony of Virginia are there for the taking, or perhaps would have been if Bacon’s contrary actions, madness, and illness from the “bloody flux” did not bring a preemptory end to the enigmatic commander’s grand schemes. In New World Burning, Daniel Watkins exuberantly captures the raw flavor of colonial America and carries his readers along in relating a tale that is as entertaining as it is informative. © Christopher T. George |
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