small camps - a former Virginia Company salter and his "Jamestown bride;" a recently arrived captain with hired tenants from the crush at Kicotan; ten tenants for the Secretary's Land - pave the way for English settlement on a remote Virginia peninsula. Separated from Virginia's mainland by twenty miles of the ocean-like Chesapeake Bay, the isolated life in these outposts was interrupted when other colonists streamed in on their flight from the mayhem of an Indian attack that killed a quarter of Virginia's mainland European population. Sir George Yeardley and Thomas Savage negotiated with "the Laughing King" for more land on this safe, bountiful peninsula. The confusion of these days would later result in an "uncertaine rumor" about who owned what on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

An "Uncertaine Rumor" of Land reveals a fresh, intriguing view on this little-known facet of colonial Virginia history.