CHAMPLAIN — He worked for almost three years to put the writings of Jamestown’s explorers into a critically acclaimed book, “Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony.“

Now, Edward Wright Haile has distilled the impressions of that 915-page epic into a 64-page poem covering the decade from Sir Christopher Newport’s landing at Cape Henry in 1607 to the death of Pocahontas in 1617.

The self-published poem explores a dominant theme of the times, as Haile sees it: How two cultures — the English and the Indians they encountered — communicated and attempted, disastrously, to understand one another using their own sets of values.

Thus, in “Where None Before Hath Stood,“ Haile writes:

They told us where metal was got

We told them where money was made

They told us the length of the river the distance

Over Monacan’s country to the many-veined mountains Quirank

We told them the sea could hide the moon

But the round world could no longer brotherly love

“Nobody knows what gives in America,“ Haile said, explaining relations between colonists and Indians. “The Indians don’t know how the English are going to act and vice-versa.“

Haile lives in Essex County at the end of a huge green soybean field beside the forested banks of a vast tidal marsh that stretches to the Rappahannock River.

His home seems a good place for a poet and historian who often ponders the blurry intersection of past and present. On the high ground across the river is the Northern Neck. In a boat, Haile can point out the sites of three villages, Wecuppom, Pissack and Matchopick, from which Indians launched an attack upon Captain John Smith while he was sailing up the Rappahannock during his exploration of the Chesapeake Bay in 1608.

“Virginia is going through the same sort of displacement today that it went through 400 years ago,“ Haile said. “What do you call it when a whole culture disappears?“

He notes the country culture he grew up with now faces the “future shock” of population growth, the subdivision of familiar farms and declining quality of life because of water pollution.

“We’re all sort of like Powhatan,“ he said, referring to the Indian ruler who undertook to establish friendly relations with the English settlers.

Yet, the terms of the encounter would change. As an apprehensive Indian voice in Haile’s poem wonders about the explorers:

If the salt sea did not stop him with thunder

will the land stop him with may apples and springtime?

Haile set out to learn the 1,000 or so words left from the Powhatan language. His use of some of them in the poem challenges the reader, who is often deliberately confused with word play that communicates the difficulty the English and Indians faced in trying to understand one another.

But the werowance Arrohatteck

Here interruptingly seated again beside the Tanxpowhatan

Spoke cheisk chammay wingapo chemuz

Refreshing the formulas of country welcome to say

Scrub my soul . . .

The phrase “cheisk chammay wingapo chemuz” was a greeting meaning “all friends howdy one and all,“ Haile said. “That’s taken from Archer’s Relations,“ he said, referring to the account Gabriel Archer left of the 1607 founding of the Jamestown settlement.

Relations between the English and the Indians soured, as Haile’s poem shows, describing the Indian point of view:

We thought they were castaways at once we thought they came as bargain traders . . .

We thought they were theologians and bride seekers . . .

Well they are thieves they are locusts they are murder smoke and contagion.

Lawrence Latane III is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.