The Struggle of Jamestown

Oh, the poor, damned site of the Colonial Jamestown settlement in Virginia. Here you see a recreation of the fort, originally built in 1607, less than a year that three ships set out with 104 men from England under a charter by the Virginia Company to colonize this part of the New World. Money-making and fear of Spanish attacks were foremost on the leaders’ minds, and so they chose Jamestown because it was defensible from overseas raiding.

It was not, however, supplied with good water, and it was in a brackish marsh. Additionally, the whole area was in the midst of a long-term drought. Though they brought surgeons and carpenters, the English ships did not have enough farmers. Their neighbors of concern were not the Spanish but about 14,000 Algonquin-speaking indigenous people under the strong leadership of a man named Powhatan.

And so, the English Jamestown settlers died. Or, mostly. By the late summer and early fall, half of the original settlers were gone — mostly the effects of disease, but also attacks by the American Indians. The settlement stumbled along, even managing to attract some new members from the motherland. But in 1609-10, food supplies were so scant, and the Algonquin people’s enmity so fierce, that the colony entered “the starving time,” when 75% of the population perished.

Even after ships brought resupplies that saved the English just as they had decided to leave, the cursed streak continued. John Rolfe,the future husband of the famed Pocahontas, delivered a new improved strain of tobacco seeds in 1610, which finally made Jamestown profitable. The cost of this profit, however, came at the expense of many human lives, because the English used the labor of Angolan-speaking African peoples to do it, importing and enslaving the first in 1619. Surviving off the misery and misfortune of others, Jamestown still failed to bring about enough profit, and leaders abandoned the site and relocated to nearby Williamsburg in 1699.