Unable to find any more financial backers, officers of the Virginia Company turned to a lottery in 1612 to raise funds to keep their colony at Jamestown alive.

"[W]hile Londoners no longer wanted to invest their hard-earned money in Virginia, they did like the idea of gambling," historians Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith write in their lively history, subtitled "The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America."

That first lottery succeeded and was followed by several more. Jamestown had dodged another near-death experience.

The colony's early years included many such disasters as a New World settlement that was advertised as a new Eden turned out to be a violent, disease-ridden hell. The mortality numbers for the years after Jamestown's founding in 1607 are staggering. As many as 7,200 English colonists migrated to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. A 1625 census counted just 1,232 residents, the authors report.

How the Virginia settlements managed to hold on, and within a century become England's richest and most populous North American colony, makes a fascinating story.

Glover and Blake Smith, both professors of history, describe in detail just how hard life was everywhere in the 17th century, from overcrowded London, aboard sailing ships and the New World. They draw on contemporary letters, advertising pamphlets, memoirs and company reports to bring to life the challenges of surviving on the edge of an unexplored continent.

Their work is full of both familiar and little known characters and stories. Capt. John Smith, the Indian Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas interact with a large cast of merchants, preachers, barrel makers, sailors and farmers.

The shipwreck of the subtitle happened in 1609 when the Sea Venture, the lead vessel in a Jamestown relief expedition, was blown off course by a hurricane and wrecked on the coast of uninhabited Bermuda.

While Bermuda had a reputation as being a land of devils, the year that the ship's passengers and crew spent there was the best time of their lives for most of them. Food was abundant, the climate mild and fresh water sufficient.

Led by Thomas Gates, the crew built two ocean-going ships from scratch. After spending a year marooned on Bermuda, the castaways sailed those vessels across the remaining miles to Virginia.

What remains open to debate is whether their timely arrival "saved" the colony. While they offered some psychological comfort to starving Jamestown, they brought few supplies.

The real rescue arrived about two weeks later with another small fleet commanded by Thomas West, Lord De La Warr.

The adventures that Glover and Blake Smith describe are as gripping as those to be found in a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott or a thriller by Alan Furst.

Their book never loses sight of the bit players and the improbabilities amid the interaction of economic forces and the acts of the great and the good.