Jamestown — First Permanent English Settlement in America
The Virginia Company landed 104 men and boys on a marshy peninsula in the James River on 14 May 1607, founding the first permanent English settlement in North America. The site was chosen for defence against the Spanish rather than for living on. It had no fresh water source, brackish tidal water that carried disease, and mosquitoes. The company was a joint-stock venture and its investors expected gold, a passage to the Pacific, or both. The settlers included a large proportion of gentlemen unwilling to do manual work and very few farmers, and the first years were spent digging for gold that was not there. By January 1608 fewer than forty were alive. John Smith imposed the rule that those who would not work would not eat, and the colony survived on trade, extortion and gifts from the Powhatan confederacy of some twenty thousand people, whose paramount chief regarded the English as a subordinate tributary group. The winter of 1609–10 is called the Starving Time. Of about 300 people, perhaps sixty survived; forensic evidence has confirmed at least one case of cannibalism. The survivors abandoned the settlement in June 1610 and met a relief fleet coming upriver. What saved it was tobacco. John Rolfe planted a sweeter Caribbean strain in 1612, and by the 1620s the colony had an export and an appetite for land and labour. The first Africans arrived in 1619, the same year as the first representative assembly. Relations with the Powhatan collapsed into war, and the confederacy was broken by 1646. Of roughly 6,000 people sent to Virginia in its first fifteen years, some 4,800 died.
- Year: 1607 CE
- Category: Political
