‘Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607 and the Settlement of America’, HarperCollins, $27.50.It’s one of the most sexually charged episodes in the founding of the country.

English explorer meets Indian king, talks, feasts, talks some more and is suddenly seized by two warriors who put his head on a block and prepare to beat his brains out. The king’s 12-year-old daughter — “a nonpareil, her features and proportions exceeding all the rest of her people” — rushes to his rescue. The king relents.

The story of John Smith and Pocahontas has survived better than anything else about the founding of the settlement Smith represented — Jamestown, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate next month. In ‘Savage Kingdom’, the British journalist Benjamin Woolley seeks to redress that situation.

When we think about the beginnings of the nation, the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock in 1620 are what usually come to mind. They represent American exceptionalism, the idea that America is different from other nations — what the Puritan John Winthrop described to his followers a decade later as “a city upon a hill”.

Jamestown predated Plymouth by more than a decade. “The story of England’s attempt to colonise America is much closer to that of Prospero and Caliban than the pious Pilgrims,” Woolley writes. (In fact, “The Tempest” may have been partly inspired by Jamestown.)

“Its master narrative.” he continues, “is not the Biblical tale of the elected saints finding a promised land — though some at the time hoped it might be. It is about flawed, dispossessed, desperate people trying to reinvent themselves. It is about being caught in a dirty struggle to survive, haunted by failure, hungering for escape, dreaming of riches and hoping for redemption.”

More than simply a narrative history, this is a big book about big subjects: the Reformation, the decline of the Spanish Empire, the settlement of Bermuda, the stirrings of representative government in the New World and, decades later, the revolt of Parliament against the doomed Charles I.

That’s a lot for any historian to bite off, but Woolley ties all these disparate elements together (if sometimes loosely).

One minute we’re departing Jamestown for England with the meagre evidence that the colony will somehow pay off. The next we’re in the Tower of London with Sir Walter Raleigh learning about tobacco, the non-native crop that would prove Jamestown’s salvation.

Or we’re in Angola, on the west coast of Africa, where a new Portuguese governor throws in his lot with the Imbangala, who traffic in captives. A few pages later, a Dutch man-of-war is depositing the first slaves in Virginia.

And then there’s the Virginia Company’s monopoly on the sale of provisions to the Jamestown settlers — the origins of the system that kept generations of Southern planters (including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) in thrall to English suppliers, especially of luxury goods.

The book could have used a timeline, not to mention a table of pronunciation, since among Woolley’s immense cast of characters are the indigenous people, the “savage kingdom” of the title. Opitchapam, Opechancanough, Uttamatomakkin, Machumps — how do you say their names? Moreover, who were they?

They’re a shadowy bunch, although Woolley does everything he can to reclaim them. Hunting and fishing, which they did with “astonishing efficiency,” supplied only a third of their needs — which is why they resorted to planting corn and beans (and why the new settlers, who had expected to live off the land, were always starving).

Woolley does his best to lay out the Indians’ pantheistic, often bewildering cosmology — their chief god was the Great Hare. Coexistence with the English was decidedly uneasy, alternating between friendly feasts and casual murders. (Pocahontas’s father, Powhatan, liked to greet the white settlers in bed, with a young girl on either side.) John Smith seems to have been the first to realise that if the English planned to inherit the earth they were going to have to dispatch its original residents.

There were no happy endings — least of all for Smith or for Pocahontas, who eventually married a planter named John Rolfe. On a visit to England years after their first encounter, she gave Smith hell for not welcoming her at the dock. She died a few weeks later.