The Dragons of the Storm
by George Robert Minkoff
Summary
The second volume of George Robert Minkoff’s visionary epic about the founding of Jamestown reveals the desperate events in the lives of both Sir Francis Drake and Captain John Smith that will lead finally to a permanent settlement for the Elizabethans in the New World. While the London Company’s aristocrats broker the colony’s fate with their wealth and power, the colonists struggle an ocean away merely to survive in an unforgiving land. Famine, contagion, mutiny, and war with Powhatan threaten constantly. And the one man who might save Jamestown from itself, John Smith, will have to confront not only the venality of his enemies, and the legacy of his spiritual fathers, but also the mysteries of his destiny.
Excerpt
The night full upon us, winds swept in serpents through the trees, low clouds dragged convulsing smoke along the shore as veiled lightning forked thunder in the mist. Rains in bleeding sheets fell against us and our barge, soaking our clothes and our sails. We glistened in the torrents in the dark.
The wind drove us into the bay, the fleeting candles of the lightning illuminating the silhouette of the blackened coast. Combed by the wind, waves in white spray tossed the barge in violence. We tied ropes about our waists to hold us to our places. We trimmed our sails to save our mast. Jonas at the tiller screamed orders, his words lost in the wind, his gestures frozen in the flashes of lightning. His only words to reach our ears were hymns to Drake’s father, the timeless god of the sea.
Men wept, despairing of life. Through the breaks of lightning we could see an island’s low roll of grass and earth that might offer some protection. In careful wheel, our sails in proper trim, our helmsman set course for its rough plate.
The island’s gray shadow rose out of the dark, the winds in flow across its weeds, tossing them in waves, as if madness brushed them to their roots. Now there came a pair of clouds whose boiling strokes fled across the water’s reach. The sky cracked fire, displaying in its flash a cloud sculpted in the figure of a man, his arm held forward, pointing in the direction of his flight, his face turmoiled in the tempest, his lips laughing thunder. The old mariner stood from the tiller, screaming, “It’s Drake.… It’s Drake.… He beckons us onward.” Seizing on his passions, the old man now froze to his bone. The barge began to turn in helpless twist, coming sideways to the water’s rush, listing as she rose into capsize. Below the ocean-calling waters, the breakers festooned in our liquid mortuaries threw me against the gunnels of the barge. My rope snaps. I slip upon the rising deck, falling toward the hungry waters. I grab at air. I am caught by nothing. Held by an arm, I am pulled to the deck. Everywhere we are awash.
“We’ll founder,” cried Todkill, the barge heaving on the push of the water. I roll against the cabin. The mariner still holds me by the arm. I look at him.
“Death is a wound of sorts.” Tasting my own bravery, I smiled.
“I don’t want you dead, nor even harmed, you fool…you fool,” the mariner smoothed in anger. “Armor your words not against yourself. In London, Willoughby gave you his doubtless trust.”
“Lord Willoughby, what do you know…?” Cataclysms rode upon the storm. The barge overwhelmed, a surf grinning in a white death. “We’ll founder,” the cry almost lost among the wind’s howls. Together, Jonas and I grabbed the tiller as I heard the scrape of rocks against keel. We steered toward the blackness as a surge of water pressed us forward into a strange gliding calm of a sheltered cove.
© 2007 by George Robert Minkoff
Reprinted with permission
Reviews
"The Dragons of the Storm is a literary banquet best savored slowly like fine wine and just as intoxicating"--J.M. Cornwell, Authorlink
"Beautiful, riveting, and sweeping"--Walter Bode
"The Dragons of the Storm is as enthralling as The Weight of Smoke. I think John Smith and Francis Drake would rejoice in George Minkoff’s lively re-creation of them”—Edmund Sears Morgan
Author's Biography
George Robert Minkoff was raised on Long Island. He graduated from Clark University in 1965. For four decades he has been a noted antiquarian and rare book dealer living in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and New York City. The final volume of his trilogy about the founding of Jamestown will be released in November, 2008.
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