Jamestown: Virginia Do Over

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Jamestown: Virginia Do-Over

A group of English merchants created the Virginia Company of London to make money from the colonies.

In 1607 settlers founded the first permanent English Settlement after reaching the Chesapeake Bay.

They called the land they settled on Jamestown, they also named the river it was next to James River.

The reason for its name was because they named it in honor of James I who became king when Queen Elizabeth I died.

There were many things that they encountered that made their settlement very hard.

They settled near a river, but the river’s water was dry and undrinkable.

The temperatures during the winter and summer were harsh and the land was full of mosquitos with chances of them carrying diseases.

Most of the settlers spent their time searching for gold instead of fulfilling essential needs such as building homes or planting food.

More than half of the settlers were able to survive after the first winter in Jamestown.

Jamestown was in dire need of someone to help them to create a sustainable lifestyle.

That, someone, was a man named John Smith.

Captain John Smith decided to take charge and help the people of Jamestown.

He commanded them to build and plant as opposed to looking for gold.

John Smith created an alliance based relationship with the Native American chief of that land.

His name was chief Powhatan, his tribe helped to teach the settlers how to plant crops so that they would not starve.

It worked out until John Smith had an injury and went back to England.

More settlers started to come and they started to be unable to feed everyone.

This time was called the Starving Time, only about 60 people made it through that time and they had to live off of whatever they could eat including each other.

Eventually, it got so bad that London sent them another governor to try and fix what had happened.

The governor was named Lord De La Warr, he was eventually honored with the naming of the Delaware state.

Eventually, a settler named John Rolfe cultivated tobacco to export it and was the first one to do so.

Eventually, tobacco became hugely profitable and made Jamestown a lot of money.

In 1614 John Rolfe and Pocahontas got married and it improved the alliance of the settlers and the Native Americans.

Eventually, the Powhatan tribe was concerned about the amount of land the English were using to grow tobacco.

Then when the tribe received the news that the Englishmen had killed a member of their tribe they waged a “war” of sorts on the English.

They raided the town and killed a quarter of the town’s population.

Eventually, the fighting became so brutal that the town had to promise to cut back on the number of tobacco fields they grew.

Eventually, the town becomes a royal colony under the rule of a king.