The first English settlers who landed at Jamestown in 1607 came dressed and armed for battle. In the best European tradition of the day, they carried not only firearms but pikes, poleaxes and swords. Across the chest they wore breastplates; to protect their legs they had light metal skirts, and on their heads sat iron pots. To the red men who watched them furtively from the fringing forests off the beach, these heavily appareled pale men must have presented a strange appearance indeed.

They were in fact a traveling exhibit of the art of war as practiced in Europe in the early Seventeenth Century. It was an age only 200 years removed from the Middle Ages, when cavalry and the lance dominated warfare. The longbow and the gun had unhorsed the plumed knight and wrought a revolution in the military arts, but the vestiges of an earlier age were still evident.

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