Four hundred years ago, a band of English adventurers landed on Virginia's shores. Dreaming of riches while pleading Utopian intent, they came fast upon an unimaginable world. Within weeks disaster beset them from every quarter -- factional intrigue, avarice and corruption, violent war with indigenous peoples, dreadful disease, and fear of starvation. Against these fateful harbingers stood one soldier opposed, a commoner steeled in battle and ambitious beyond his station, Captain John Smith. Yet the greatest threat for Smith at every turn would be temptation -- the lure to overstep his authority, or to relinquish his self-possession, or to yield to his desire for Powhattan's favorite daughter, Pocahantas... At Jamestown also there was a former alchemist, Jonas Profit, an old sailor driven by a furious guilt, who decades before had been Sir Francis Drake's right arm when that scourge of the Spanish Armada was Queen Elizabeth's pirate of choice. As Jonas Profit recounts around the Jamestown campfires Drake's bold challenge to the Spanish rule of the Caribbean seas, John Smith hears the unmistakable ring of personal prophesy: how his own acts in this brave new world will be measured not by his immortal glory, but by degrees of desperation. George Robert Minkoff's unprecedented three-volume historical fiction, In the Land of Whispers, is a visionary witnessing of the birth of the British empire. The Weight of Smoke is only the first volume, and follows Drake and Smith through their transformative initiations, suspending them on the precipice of their hopes.