Module: Culture

Lecture: Jamestown Colony

In 1606, King James I granted a charter to a new venture, the Virginia Company, to form a

settlement in North America. At the time, Virginia was the English name for the entire

eastern coast of North America north of Florida; they had named it for Elizabeth I, the “virgin

queen.” The Virginia Company planned to search for gold and silver deposits in the New

World, as well as a river route to the Pacific Ocean that would allow them to establish trade

with the Orient.

Roughly 100 colonists left England in late December 1606 on three ships (the Susan

Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery) and reached Chesapeake Bay late the next April.

After forming a governing council—including Christopher Newport and Captain John Smith

—the group searched for a suitable settlement site.

On May 13, 1607, they landed on a narrow peninsula—virtually an island—in the James

River, where they would begin their lives in the New World.

Surviving the First Years

Known variously as James Forte, James Towne and James Cittie, the new settlement initially

consisted of a wooden fort built in a triangle around a storehouse for weapons and other

supplies, a church and a number of houses. By the summer of 1607, Newport went back to

England with two ships and 40 crewmembers to give a report to the king and to gather more

supplies and colonists.

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The settlers left behind suffered greatly from hunger and illnesses like typhoid and dysentery,

caused from drinking contaminated water from the nearby swamp. Settlers also lived under

constant threat of attack by members of local Algonquian tribes, most of which were

organized into a kind of empire under Chief Powhatan.

An understanding reached between Powhatan and John Smith led the settlers to establish

much-needed trade with Powhatan’s tribe by early 1608. Though skirmishes still broke out

between the two groups, the Native Americans traded corn for beads, metal tools and other

objects (including some weapons) from the English, who would depend on this trade for

sustenance in the colony’s early years.

After Smith returned to England in late 1609, the inhabitants of Jamestown suffered through

a long, harsh winter known as “The Starving Time,” during which more than 100 of them

died. Firsthand accounts describe desperate people eating pets and shoe leather. Some

Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism.

George Percy, the colony’s leader in John Smith’s absence, wrote:

"And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to

maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpse out of graves

and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows."

In the spring of 1610, just as the remaining colonists were set to abandon Jamestown, two

ships arrived bearing at least 150 new settlers, a cache of supplies and the new English

governor of the colony, Lord De La Warr.