Jamestown

Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys.- Christopher Columbus speaking of the Indians

After the failures of the Virginia Colony at Roanoke, King James of England granted proprietary land charters in 1606 to two competing branches of the Virginia Company, the Plymouth Company (New England) and the London Company (Virginia), in the hopes of establishing a permanent settlement. Immediately, the the Plymouth Company sent the ship, Richard, to the New World but it was captured by the Spanish near Florida. In 1607 the Plymouth Company tried again with two ships and 120 colonists. Called the Popham Colony, they settled the area of Phippsburg, Maine near the mouth of the Kennebec River. They lasted one year before sailing back to England.

In 1607 the London Company founded Jamestown, the first successful English settlement on the mainland of North America. It comprised three ships after a particularly long voyage of five months duration across the Atlantic. Many in the group were gentlemen unused to work, or their manservants, equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded for establishing a viable colony. Two-thirds of the settlers died before ships brought supplies and experts in 1608. In the "starving time" of 1609 - 1610, only 60 of the 500 colonists survived.

Jamestown’s relationship with neighboring Indians was a strained coexistence. Initially the Indians were friendly and we get the story of Pocahontas, the introduction of crops like corn and the origin of the Thanksgiving dinner. But after 15 years of mistreatment the Powhatan Confederacy attempted to eliminate the English colony in the Indian Massacre of 1622. The attack killed over 300 settlers, about a third of the English-speaking population.

The true miracle of Jamestown is that is survived at all. Between St. John’s in 1583 and Jamestown in 1607 there were no fewer than eighteen failed attempts at European colonization.

Despite a terrible beginning, Jamestown did survive and eventually Virgina would become the largest and most prominent of the 13 colonies; home to leading men like Washington and Jefferson. It’s also interesting to note that the territory claimed by the Virginia Colony was huge. It consisted of not just the Commonwealth of Virginia but also the entire states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, most of Ohio as well as disputed claims to the lands of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Bottom Line

In modern times we take survival for granted. Family members won’t die if the crop fails. We are not sickened by drinking the local water or by mosquitoes. Infant mortality is low and Indian attacks are rare.

We also take our tools for granted. Hammers, ovens, sewing machines, etc. Imagine a Robinson Carouse existence on a desert island when you have to get by with only what you can make yourself.

It’s hard for me to say if the early settlers were brave or ignorant or a little of both. Certainly courage was needed to move to the New World and endure the trials of the sea voyage and hunger. But there was also a lot of false optimism and failure to adequately plan and failure to anticipate the difficulties of building a settlement from scratch. When the second supply ship arrived in Jamestown, the company representives expressed anger that the colonists had not found gold or other means to pay for their supplies. The leader John Smith wrote back to the London Company,

"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty Carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided; than a thousand of such awe have [gentlemen speculators]: for except wee be able both to lodge them and feed them, the most will consume with want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."

It was the worst of times, but after Jamestown colonizers appear to have found the secret of successful colonization through trial and error.

1607 Jamestown, Virginia
1607 Sante Fe, New Mexico
1608 Quebec City, Canada
1610 Hampton, Virginia
1610 Kecoughtan, Virginia
1610 Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, Canada
1614 Albany, New York
1620 Plymouth, Massachusetts
1623 Portsmouth, New Hampshire
and so on with dozens more settlements in the early 1600’s.