Jamestown: America’s First Startup

If life had been better in England during the seventeenth century the first permanent English colony in North America would have most likely failed. But life wasn’t better, and for the waves of immigrants that followed the first Englishmen across the sea, a new beginning was worth the risk. It took more than a century, but the pursuit of a better life based on freedom and self-reliance changed the very nature of what it was to be a human being. That’s what makes Americans unique and it all started with Jamestown.

It’s often lost to pop-history that the Jamestown Colony began as a commercial venture. In December 1606, King James I awarded the Virginia Company of London a charter to settle territory on the mid-Atlantic coast of North America. In many ways, the entire project resembled a get-rich-quick startup from the late 1990s. From the beginning, the investors were solely focused on profit, regardless of what it cost in human lives. The emphasis on maximizing commercial gain impacted how the colony was equipped, who was chosen to lead, who volunteered to go, and how the entire venture was ultimately managed both on the ground and back in London.

Things were on shaky before they even left England. The mix of gentry, commoners, soldiers, and “rabble” from the docks in London, created bickering and factions that were in constant competition for control. In fact, if there was a common personality trait shared by everyone it was a willingness to place self-interest and greed above all else. The majority of the original colonists – they referred to themselves as “planters” – were not ready for the life they found. Most had little to no experience farming and of the 104 men on the roster, fifty were classified as “gentleman” who believed most manual labor was beneath them. This created a situation where not enough people worked to provide food, shelter, and security for the entire group.

Officials at the Virginia Company recognized how dysfunctional their selected gentlemen were and took the unusual step of keeping the names of the colony’s governing council secret out of fear that many would refuse to go if they weren’t selected for a leadership position. They placed the names, along with instructions on how the colony should be governed, in a sealed box with direct orders that the box not be opened until they arrived in Virginia.

After departing in late 1606 aboard three ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, the planters made their way to the Virginia coast by way of a southern route which allowed them to rest and re-provision in the West Indies before making their way north. On April 26, 1607, they spotted the Virginia coastline and went ashore. They were attacked by a local tribe before making it back to the ships the very first night. According to the journal of Master George Percey:

“The sixth and twentieth of April, about four o’clock in the morning, we descried the land of Virginia. The same day we entered into the bay of Chesapeake directly, without any let or hindrance. There we landed, and discovered a little way, but could find nothing worth the speaking of…. At night, when we were going aboard, there came the savages creeping on all fours, from the hills like bears, with their bows in their mouths, charged us very desperately in their faces, hurt Captain Gabriel Archer in both his hands, and a sailor in two places of the body very dangerous. After they spent their arrows, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the woods with a great noise, and so left us.”

Later that night aboard the Susan Constant the expedition’s senior captains unsealed the Virginia Company’s instructions. Company management named seven members to the governing council; Captain Christopher Newport, Captain John Ratcliff, Edward Wingfeld, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, Captain George Kendall, and Captain John Martin. As captains of the three ships Newport, Gosnold, and Ratcliff were natural selections. Having sailed with Sir Walter Raleigh years before as he attempted to establish a colony at Roanoke Island, Martin had experience in the area. Both he and Kendall also had political connections who wanted them in leadership positions. As per the company’s directions, a president was elected by the council, and Wingfeld won the position. Newport’s position as commander of the fleet created some contradictions as to who was in charge and when, so the two ended-up splitting command.

But there was a problem that threw a wrench into the council’s internal politics. The seventh council member was in the ship’s brig for allegedly conspiring to commit mutiny on the trip over. The prisoner’s name was Captain John Smith.

John Smith was a soldier, adventurer, and explorer whose brashness often provided insult to the entitled gentry who dominated the council. Smith was insolent and chafed under the command of men he considered incompetent. Newport hated him. Wingfeld considered Smith a vulgar commoner. Ratcliff and Smith were said to have loathed each other. However, given the company’s orders, they decided to free Smith from the brig but deny him his seat on the council. Smith’s confidence – some might say arrogance – had a reasonable foundation. Born in rural England to a yeoman farmer, like many young men throughout history, he sought a better life far from home. At age 16, he ran away and served as a soldier of fortune for the Dutch in their war with Spain, and then for the Austrians against the Turks. These years provided life experiences that taught Smith how to fight on land and sea, negotiate with hostile foes when his life depended on it, and summon uncommon bravery. After five years of soldiering, he had led a unit of 250 Austrian horsemen in battle and individually dueled three Turkish soldiers in as many days with a pistol, battle-axe, and sword, killing all three. He was later captured by the Turks and sold into slavery but killed his master, escaped to Russia, and made his way back to England. It was after his return to London that he became involved in the early stages of the Virginia Company. Smith was one of those leaders who men followed not because they necessarily liked him, but because they knew he could fight, make hard decisions, not take grief from incompetent fools, and survive. So, at the core of Smith’s conflict with the gentlemen was the fact that he achieved status not by birth, but by his actions.

After exploring several of the tributaries and rivers around the southern part of the Chesapeake Bay, on May 13th, Newport and Wingfeld selected a final site for the colony. They could not have made a worst choice. Jamestown was built on an island that the local Indians deemed unsuited for a permanent village. Given that there were over thirty tribes living in thriving communities scattered along the Chesapeake Bay, it apparently didn’t occur to Wingfeld and Newport to ask why this one island had been left vacant. Jamestown fort was surrounded by areas of swamp and marshland that were natural breeding grounds for mosquitoes. At least half of the island was unusable for habitation or cultivation. There were no freshwater springs, and even though the fort was bordered on one side by the “sweet” James River, during high tide in the bay, the already brackish water became salty and nearly undrinkable. While it is true that the site provided an excellent defensive position if the Spanish ever chose to send a fleet up the James, for nearly every other consideration it was a death trap.

A week after construction began, Newport led twenty-three men, including Smith who was still technically under arrest, on a voyage up the James River, determined to discover its source. He expected to find gold, but was disappointed. Nevertheless, he and his men enjoyed the hospitality of a local village and declared the mission a success. What he did not know, however, was that while he and his men were making friends, an alliance of five tribes from the same confederacy was attacking the rest of the colony back at the fort. The Indians came right up to the camp and fired arrows directly through the tents, killing two and wounding another ten settlers. After an hour of fighting the attack was beaten off when the ships, still anchored in the river, fired their cannons with “murderous effect”. When Newport learned of the attack, he ordered the settlement fortified with a sturdy palisade in the shape of a triangle and three bulwarks in the corners where cannons could be placed. By the third week of June, with construction complete and a feeling that things had reached a relatively steady state, Newport set sail for England, promising to return in December with more colonists and supplies.

Men started dropping dead barely a month later. It was the water. Smith recalled that, “Being left to our own fortunes, …barely ten days scarce ten among us could either go, or well stand – such extreme weakness and sickness oppressed us.” According to Percy’s journal:

“Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases as swellings, fluxes, burning fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly…. There was never an Englishman left in a foreign country in such misery as we were in this new discovered Virginia…. Our food was but a small can of barley sod in water to five men a day; our drink cold water taken out of the river, which was at flood very salty, at low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.”

The colony was teetering on the brink of total collapse. Events came to a head on September 10th when Smith, Ratcliff, and Martin charged Wingfeld with everything from hoarding food to maliciously charging Smith and many others with crimes they did not commit. He was deposed and confined to one of the ships at anchor in the James. Later, he was even fined £200 for slandering Smith. John Ratcliff was elected president and together with Smith and Martin, formed a triumvirate to manage the colony. They attempted to appease the different factions, but Ratcliff had his own agenda and discord continued to cause huge problems.

For his part, John Smith understood that the key to the colony’s short-term survival was securing adequate food supplies for the winter. He immediately began visiting local villages and gave them the choice of trading for food, or having it taken from them by force. Through these efforts, he was able to establish a “peace” with the Indians and bring in just enough food to keep things going.

Around this time, Smith noted in his journal that many of the colonists’ hardships were ultimately Newport’s fault, but each man made his own decision to join the expedition so there was little room for complaint:

“And now where some affirmed it was ill done of the Council to send forth men so badly provided, this uncontradictable reason will show them plainly they are to ill advised to nourish such ill conceits. First, the fault of our going was our own. What could be thought fitting or necessary we had, but what we should find, or want, or where it should be, we were all ignorant. And supposing to make our passage in two months – with victuals to live, and the advantage of spring to work – we were at sea five months, where we both spent our victuals and lost the opportunity of the time and season to plant, by the unskillful presumption of our ignorant transporters [the ship’s captains] that understood not at all what they undertook.”

In December 1607, as they searched for more food and treasure, Smith and a small group of colonists were set upon by a party of Pamunkey Indians while exploring the Chickahominy River. Smith writes that before his capture, the Indians had taken a member of his crew, George Cassen, alive and tortured him to death by, “causing him to be tied to a tree, and with mussel shells, the executioner cuts off his joints, one after another, ever casting what they cut off into the fire. Then, do they rip his belly and so burn him with the tree and all”.

During Cassen’s torture, he identified John Smith as one of the colony’s leaders. This probably saved Smith’s life. After being surrounded by 200 Pamunkey warriors (probably an exaggeration), Smith wrote later that he killed two but became helplessly caught in a bog and had no choice but to surrender. Over a three-week period, he was shuttled between various villages but was well treated.

The Pamunkey’s were part of the Powhatan Confederacy. The Powhatans ruled an alliance of about thirty different tribes in tidewater Virginia known as the Tsenacommacah. Through wanton violence, ambushes, deceit, treachery, and intimidation, Wahunsonacock, the Powhatan chief, built an empire that included nearly 15,000 people along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Just like any prince or king in Europe, he would go to any lengths to assert Powhatan dominance. Historian James Horn credits John Smith with a story that describes Wahunsonacock’s methods:

“In 1608, Wahunsonacock mounted a surprise attack on neighboring Piankatanks, who lived along the north bank of the river of the same name. First, he sent some of his men to lodge among them, then he surrounded their village and, at an appointed time, launched a swift and deadly attack. Two dozen men were slain. The women and children, along with the chief, were captured and presented to Wahunsonacock so that they could ‘doe him service’; and to intimidate visitors, the scalps of warriors were hung between two trees at Wahunsonacock’s residence at Werocomomoco.”

The Powhatans were a people organized for war and the arrival of the English only added one more group to Wahunsonacock’s long list of people he desired to either absorb or destroy.

After his capture on the Chickahominy, Smith was eventually brought before Wahunsonacock, but only after a strange ceremony where his position as a leader for the English was confirmed by four Pamunkey priests. In a letter written to Queen Anne of England ten-years later, Smith tells the now fabled story where, after being brought before the Powhatan chief, Wahunsonacock ordered Smith be put to death for invading his country and making war on his people. But just as he was being held down to have “his head smashed in”, Powhatan’s 12-year-old daughter, Pocahontas, rushed over to save him.

With a stay of execution and Pocahontas’ friendship, Smith soon formed a relationship of mutual respect with Wahunsonacock. Demonstrating the same underhanded strategy he would often use to expand the Powhatan empire, Wahunsonacock offered Smith land and his own village if he helped defeat the other English settlers at Jamestown. Smith was able to diplomatically refuse the offer and remain on Wahunsonacock’s good side after promising friendship and a couple cannons in exchange for his release. Wahunsonacock agreed and Smith was escorted back to the fort along with two warriors tasked with hauling the weapons back. Once at Jamestown, Smith offered the warriors cannons that weighed two tons each. After trying to move the guns, the warriors gave-up and accepted a couple hatchets and other trinkets instead. The peace with Wahunsonacock held.

The relationship between John Smith and Wahunsonacock opened trade between the colony and the Tsenacommacah. Not surprisingly, upon returning to Jamestown, Smith’s political enemies used his new relationship with the Powhatan to raise suspicion that he and his new friends planned to overthrow the colony’s leadership. He was thrown in jail a second time but was soon freed.

In January 1608, Captain Newport returned with the first resupply mission and 100 new colonists but not nearly enough food to keep everyone alive. Newport made some ham-handed attempts to negotiate a permanent truce with Wahunsonacock, but only succeeded in making himself and the English look like fools. The uneasy, quasi-peace with the Powhatan continued, but Smith saw the writing on the wall that everything could fall apart with little notice.

Newport also set about trying to find a way to make Jamestown a profitable venture. He took a group exploring up different rivers in search of a “gold mountain” the natives spoke of, while others harvested timber, made tar, glass, and soap ash to show investors the settlement’s commercial potential. As colonists were loading the ships with worthless iron pyrite (fools gold), someone carelessly let a fire get out of control and nearly burned the entire colony to the ground. Ratcliff was blamed for the disaster and removed as president in July 1608. Newport returned to England for supplies (Ratcliff went with him), and leadership fell to Smith. He left his friend, Matthew Scriviner, in charge and set out, once again, to find desperately needed food along the Chesapeake Bay. Using his now standard method of threatening local tribes to trade for food or face destruction, he was able to return with several hundred bushels of corn.

In September 1608, Smith was officially elected Jamestown’s third president and implemented strict rules to set things on a proper path. Every man was required to work if he wanted to eat. As historian John Thompson notes, as one of the last surviving members of the original council and the man with the most knowledge and experience dealing with the Powhatans, Smith was the only leader capable of keeping the colony from ruin.

The first order of business was to rebuild the buildings destroyed by the fire. Ratcliff had previously ordered the construction of a large house for the sitting council president, and Smith immediately ordered construction stopped. He also instituted a training plan to build a capable group of soldiers who could guard the fort, and as a deterrent, regularly demonstrated the colony’s firepower to local Powhatans.

“Now the building of Ratcliffe’s palace stayed as a thing needless. The church was repaired, the storehouse recovered, buildings prepared for the supplies we expected, the fort reduced to a five-square form, the order of the watch renewed, the squadron trained. The whole company every Saturday exercised in the plain by the west bulwark… where sometimes more than 100 savages would stand in an amazement to behold: how a file would batter a tree, where he would make them shoot at.”

In October 1608, Newport returned with another group of settlers including Jamestown’s first women, but once again failed to bring enough food. Under Smith’s leadership he found conditions improving though, and by the spring of 1609, Jamestown was starting to flourish. But in April, tragedy struck again when a large infestation of rats along with damp conditions destroyed all the colony’s stored corn. This reduced everyone to another period of starvation. At this point, Smith learned the Virginia Company had given Newport strict orders that he was not to return to England until he found either a route from the Chesapeake Bay to the Pacific, large deposits or gold upriver, or evidence of what happened to Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost expedition from Roanoke Island in 1585. As another indication that company officials were either misinformed about conditions in Virginia, or simply delusional, Newport was also provided with a bizarre copper crown and ordered to place it on Wahunsonacock’s head, making him a subject of King James.

When he learned about Newport’s orders, Smith lost it. Over the previous year-and-a-half, he had gone on two lengthy explorations of the Chesapeake and knew the folly of the elusive gold mountain and passage to the Pacific. There were scattered stories of Europeans living with remote tribes, but Smith had found no clear evidence of any Roanoke survivors.

Under protest, he helped facilitate the disastrous crowning of Wahunsonacock, which not only insulted the Powhatan chief and set the stage for a series of protracted wars that lasted for the next 35 years. Angry, frustrated, and recognizing that things could not go on as they were, Smith wrote a lengthy, blunt letter to the Virginia Company’s leadership where he detailed Newport’s incompetence, the theft of provisions by sailors on Newport’s ships, mismanagement by the cronies the company installed as leaders, and London’s inability to understand that Jamestown could not become a profitable venture if more than half of every shipload of settlers died from starvation and disease within months after their arrival. The final paragraph of the letter presents the facts as Smith saw them:

“For in overtoiling our weak and unskilled bodies to satisfy this desire for present profit, we can scarce ever recover ourselves from one supply to another. And I humbly entreat you hereafter, let us know what we should receive, and not stand on the sailors’ courtesy to leave us what they please, else you may charge [provide] us with what you will, but we not you with anything. These are the causes that have kept us in Virginia from laying such a foundation that ere this might have given much better content and satisfaction. But as yet, you must not look for any profitable returns. So humbly I rest.”

After failing all three of his assigned critical tasks, Newport left with his ship’s hold partially filled with tar and lumber. Believing there were simply too many mouths to feed in one location, Smith sent groups of settlers to fish and gather shellfish downriver, but they came back empty-handed and said they’d all have to survive on the meager provisions. This infuriated Smith and he ordered them to trade their personal possessions to the Powhatans for food or be banished from the colony.

Several weeks later, slight relief from the corn shortage came when a ship arrived under the command of Samuel Argall. The Virginia Company was being reorganized, he said, and new settlers were on their way. Smith bought food and wine from Argall on credit, but was shocked in August when 300 men, women, and children arrived from London. His letter had either been ignored or lost along the way. As far as food was concerned, the colonists were once again in a very tough spot.

Smith tried to negotiate with Wahunsonacock for “victuals”, but after months of strained relations with the English and Newport’s ridiculous efforts to bring them under the rule of King James, the Powhatans recognized they had an opportunity to rid themselves of the English once and for all. Wahunsonacock tried to convince some of Smith’s own men to murder him at the fort. When that failed, he sent warriors to ambush Smith at Werocomomoco as they were negotiating for food. Not knowing that a price had been put on his head, Smith just narrowly avoided being assassinated thanks to an early warning from Pocahontas. He and his men escaped in darkness and made their way back to Jamestown. John Smith never came face-to-face with Wahunsonacock again.

In September 1609, while on another foraging expedition, Smith was severely injured when his powder bag caught fire and exploded. The circumstances surrounding the incident suggest that someone might have been trying to murder him. Suffering from painful burns, he was forced to return with Argall to England and recuperate. After his departure, Wahunsonacock officially ended the truce and ceased trade with the colonists. Ratcliff who had chosen to stay after Newport’s last departure, went to Powhatan and attempted to negotiate a new treaty but was instead taken prisoner, tortured, and burned to death. By the time winter arrived at the end of 1609, the Powhatans had laid siege to Jamestown. Wahunsonacock planned to starve them all to death.

The winter of 1609-1610 later became known as the Starving Time. Given that starvation had been a constant almost since the beginning, it’s worth noting that this particular period is remembered as the worst. It was truly horrific. Confined to the settlement and unable to hunt or trade with the Indians, the settlers ate horses, dogs, cats, and rats. They also resorted to using their houses and portions of the colony’s palisade for firewood. Hundreds of them died slow, painful deaths. Percy recorded the nightmarish circumstances:

“Then, having fed upon the horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin, as dogs, cats, rats, and mice. All was fish that came to net to satisfy cruel hunger, as to eat boots, shoes, or any other leather some could come by. And those being spent and devoured, some were enforced to search the woods and to feed upon the serpents and the snakes… where many of our men were cut off and slain by the savages, And now, famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face… nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves to eat them, and some have licked-up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows. And amongst the rest, this was most lamentable: one of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb, and threw it into the river, and after, chopped the mother to pieces and salted her for his food. I adjudged him to be executed.”

Of the 500 colonists on the rolls in the fall of 1609, only sixty lived to see spring. After the Powhatans lifted their siege to attend to their spring planting, on May 23, 1610, a single ship from the Virginia Company, the Sea Venture, arrived to find Jamestown’s sick and dying survivors living in the dilapidated ruins of the settlement. They assessed their situation and decided to give up on the colony. As the Sea Venture set sail down the James River on June 7, a new fleet of ships under the command of Thomas West, with hundreds of new colonists and supplies, met them before they entered the Chesapeake Bay. Because they more or less had no other choice, the sixty survivors agreed to stay. The entire fleet made its way back up the river to Jamestown and the colony continued its precarious existence.

From that point forward, Jamestown began to expand, but war and conflict with the Powhatans lasted for another thirty-five years. Chief Powhatan died in April 1618, but he and the Algonquin leaders who followed fought no less than three separate full-scale wars with the English between 1610 and 1646. On March 22, 1622, almost a quarter of Jamestown’s population was massacred in a sneak attack led by Wahunsonacock’s brother, Chief Opechancanough. When reports of the massacre reached London, King James launched a short investigation and ordered the Virginia Company investors to accept greater royal control. They refused. On May 24, 1624, he summarily dissolved the company by decree and took full control of all holdings. Jamestown became a royal colony. This was a turning point in the history of English settlement in Virginia.

John Smith never returned to Virginia but did explore parts of what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1614. During an attempt to return to America in 1615, he was taken prisoner by French pirates but escaped. He never set foot in the colonies again and died in 1631.

Pocahontas led a more tragic life. In 1613 she was tricked into boarding Samuel Argall’s ship during the First Anglo-Powhatan War and held for ransom. Her father refused to pay and she remained in captivity with the English for over a year. While in captivity she converted to Christianity and took the name of Rebecca. After her release, she was no longer welcomed by the Powhatan, so she fully embraced English customs and remained in Jamestown. In April 1614, when she was 17 or 18, she married an English planter named John Rolfe and they had a son named Thomas.

Due to the popularity of John Smith’s book about his time in Virginia, and some shameless promotion by the Virginia Company, Pocahontas became a celebrity of sorts and eventually traveled to England with Rolfe and their son in 1616. In January 1617, she met King James. Rolfe was not allowed into the ceremony due to his status as a yeoman planter.

Shortly after her audience with the king, Pocahontas and Rolfe spoke with John Smith for the first time since he left Virginia. According to the only record of their conversation, provided by Smith himself, when Pocahontas saw him, “Without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented.” The rest of the conversation is described as fragmented, but Smith did write that Pocahontas reminded him of, “the courtesies she had done,” saying, “You did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he like to you”.

Several weeks later, Pocahontas, John, and Thomas boarded a ship bound for Virginia. Both she and Thomas fell seriously ill from pneumonia before ever reaching the sea. The entire family disembarked at Gravesend and she died shortly after. John Rolfe left Thomas with family in England to regain his strength and returned to Virginia. Recognized as a princess, Pocahontas was buried in the Parish of St. George’s on March 21, 1617.

While it is true that Pocahontas’ intervention on Smith’s behalf, if it happened as he described to Queen Anne, helped preserve Jamestown for a while, contrary to popular culture, it is not accurate to say that she saved the English in America. After Smith left, Wahunsonacock was only too happy to let the colonists starve, and continued to wage war against them for decades to come. In the calculus of war, this made perfect sense. The Powhatans were not some nomadic band of peaceful dupes who knew nothing of war before the English arrived. It’s an insult to them to even suggest such a thing. They were fierce warriors who had built a sophisticated nation and whose leaders had territorial and material ambitions of their own. War and conquest was as much a part of the Powhatan culture as it was the Europeans’. Both sides practiced warfare as it was known in the seventeenth century.

But bows and arrows were no match for European muskets, and Powhatan underestimated the colonists’ willingness to endure suffering and death in the name of exploration, imperial ambitions, greed, and the pursuit of a better life. From that perspective, the war between the English and Powhatans was no different than wars fought around the world in that period by other nation-states competing for the same geography and resources. Did the English invade Powhatan land? Yes, but during this period of human history, conquest was part of every major culture around the world, and this was true of nearly all the major Indian confederations across the eastern seaboard. The fact is that, even if Europeans had never set foot in the New World, the Powhatans would have been waging war against someone. It was their way of life. If they had been equipped with the same armor and black-powder weapons as the English, the history of America might have been dramatically different. Even without firearms, they came very close to forcing the English colonists back into the sea. Very close. But in the end, the Powhatan Confederacy simply did not have the military strength needed to win the wars it actively waged against the English.

But there was more to the permanence of Jamestown than simply declaring it all little more than a form of natural selection. No human being endures starvation, disease, corruption, isolation, and massacres unless they feel there’s something that makes it all worthwhile. Life in early Jamestown was horrific, especially by today’s standards. But ultimately, colonization came down to one thing, and that was hope. After the first waves of speculators and get-rich-quick artists died or returned to England, those who came after left behind an existence in England they believed offered little to no prospects for a better life. In a dangerous land, where everyone had to work to stay alive, the social hierarchy that placed limits on what a person could become was slowly dismantled as gentlemen and commoner lived and died together. This is what eventually brought thousands to the Virginia colony. The willingness to endure terrible suffering for a better future, for freedom, soon produced an independent spirit and toughness that set Americans apart from English citizens back home. American became used to beating the odds.

One-hundred-fifty-nine-years later, in 1766, when entirely different forces were threatening Great Britain’s position in North America, Parliament opened a floor debate about repealing the hated Stamp Act. During the hours-long session, members rose to criticize their American cousins across the sea who dared question the Crown’s governance. Just as things seemed settled, a veteran who had spent years fighting alongside Americans during the French & Indian War, Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Barre, stood and gave his peers a rebuke and prescient warning:

“They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America. They fled your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country…. And yet, actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with what they suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who should have been their friends…. And believe me, remember I this day told you so, the same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still.”

American independence started when the first Jamestown settlers boarded the first ship to Virginia. Permanence was realized once people understood what was possible if they stayed.

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Endnotes

The instructions provided by the Virginia Company to the colonists were heavily influenced by one of its council members and investors back in London named Richard Hakluyt. They show clear guidance for the prioritization of producing a profitable return for investors as soon as possible. See Hakluyt’s original instructions in: Southern, Ed, The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony 1605-1614. Pages 8-12. Note that Southern’s work contains several original colonists’ journals into a single volume, and attempts to make them more understandable by correcting spelling errors while staying true to the words the original authors’ used.

Thompson, John. The Journals of Captain John Smith, (2007), The National Geographic Society, pg. 7.
From the journal of Master George Percy. Ibid, pg. 23.
Horn, James. A Land as God Made it. (2005). Perseus Books. Pg. 47.
Ibid. Newport had gone so far as to have gallows constructed to hang Smith while in the West Indies but was dissuaded by the expedition’s pastor. There were still plans to carry out the execution in Virginia.
Southern, Ibid.
Southern, Ibid.
Thompson, pg. xv.
Horn, pg. 52
Thompson, pg. 11
Southern, pg. 34.
Even though Smith had technically been under arrest since being charged with mutiny on the voyage over, his military and organizational skills proved too valuable. Newport absolved Smith of all crimes before he left in June 1607. Thompson, pg. 10.
Thompson, pg. 12.
Ibid, pg. 17.
Horn. Pg. 13.
Ibid, pg. 64.
Thompson, from the Journals of Captain John Smith, pg. 193.
Ibid, pg. 31.
Ibid, pg. 91.
Ibid. pg. 91
Ibid, pg. 97.
Ibid. pg. 104.
Southern, quoted from the Journals of George Percy, pg. 153.
Horn, pg. 152.
Thompson, pg. 138.
Horn, pg. 169.
Southern, quoted from the Journals of George Percy, pg. 158.
Horn, pg. 176.
Ibid, pg. 177.
Ibid, pg. 255.
Ibid, pg. 277.
Southern, pg. 225.
Thompson, from the Journals of Captain John Smith, pg. 196.
Horn, pg. 232.
Anderson, Fred. The Crucible of War (2000). Vintage Books. pg. 643.
Canon, John, The Oxford Companion to British History, p. 405 under the heading “Gentry” (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Author: Zac Northup
Publisher: StandWatch.org, Inc. (2021)
Number of Pages: 26
Nonfiction, History
Subject: Jamestown, U.S. History

The History of Early America is the History of England

From the very beginning, the American colonies were overwhelmingly influenced and governed by Britain. This only increased after 1763 when Britain gained possession of the entire eastern seaboard of North America from Florida to Nova Scotia and all French settlements in the interior of Canada after the Seven Years War. With the Treaty of Paris, the British Empire’s domain extended from the coast past the Great Lakes and down into the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. The history of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the history of Great Britain.

English Nobility’s Rude Awakening

At the beginning of the 17th century, England had a population of approximately 4.1 million people. Of those, only 291 were titled members of the nobility, or “peers”. These included dukes, marquess, earls, viscounts, and barons. Below the peers, roughly 1000 baronets, knights, and esquires lived as landed gentry. Jamestown’s “gentlemen” were mostly members of the gentry who lacked an inheritance. Even though they were members of “lesser nobility,” and thus one step removed from true nobles, the Jamestown gentlemen considered farming and manual labor beneath their status. More than half died within months after setting foot in the New World.

How Did the Settlers Purify Water?

They didn’t. At first, they simply drank directly from the James River, stagnant ponds, or swamps surrounding the settlement. In the first few months, drinking unsafe water killed more colonists than conflict with the Indians. There is even one unproven theory that the Spanish poisoned Jamestown’s water supply with arsenic to keep the English out of North America. Shortly after assuming a leadership position, John Smith had wells dug so the colony could access safer drinking water without leaving the fort, but waterborn parasites and bacteria continued to take a toll on colonists for years.

17th Century Warfare

War in the seventeenth century was incredibly brutal by modern standards. There were no rules that governed armies and conducting wars of anhilation was the norm. The Powhatans regularly tortured prisoners, burned them alive, and abducted women and children as slaves. The English committed their own atrocities, regularly decapitating prisoners and placing their heads on spikes. Later, it was common to sell captured native women and children into slavery. Both sides often practiced what today would be called ethnic cleansing by killing every man, women, and child and then burning the villages to the ground.

Weapons in Early American Conflicts

The Indian’s main weapons were war clubs, the bow and arrow, spears, and knives made out of stone or shells. Though extremely deadly at close range, these proved less effective than the matchlock muskets and cannons used by the English. But the muskets had their own issues. They were slow to load and became worthless when wet. After 1622, the Virginia Company tried to address the matchlock’s shortcomings by purchasing 400 English longbows and 800 sheaves of arrows for the Jamestown colonists. The longbow is considered a major advancement in bow design and is often credited with providing English armies a decisive advantage throughout history. In the end though, the Virginia Company decided to keep the longbows in Bermuda out of fear that the Indians would gain possession and improve their bow design.

Thomas Jefferson and Jamestown’s History

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, died in 1826. So, one might ask, what role could he have possibly played in the history of Jamestown? As it turns out, T.J. is responsible for rescuing many of Jamestown’s original documents from the ash heap of history. In an attempt to preserve as much of Virginia’s past as possible, Jefferson purchased hundreds of Virginia Company records from Payton Randolph around 1796. Because they were in terrible condition, he bound them in volumes and kept them in his personal library. After his death, they ended-up in the Library of Congress, and in 1906, Dr. Susan M. Kingsbury was hired to transcribe the papers and publish transcripts into four separate volumes entitled, Records of the Virginia Company of London. It took Kingsbury almost thirty years to complete the work.

Enter the Tobacco Wives

In 1619, a majority of the settlers at Jamestown were men who would return to England after seeking fortune and never return to the colony. Virginia Company officials believed that if they could convince more single women to make the journey, they would marry and entice more men to stay. The company began recruiting young women with an offer of new clothes, a plot of land, and free transportation across the ocean with the understanding that, if they married, their new husbands would compensate the company with 120 to 150 pounds of good leaf tobacco. By 1621, 146 women signed on and immigrated to Jamestown. They were referred to as Tobacco Wives.