A Candle in the Wind: Jamestown, the 1st 4 Years

A depiction of the First Assembly in Jamestown, Va., in 1619, by Thomas Armstrong, published in "Cassell's History of England, Vol. 3." The instructions in the early Virginia Company documents made clear that the colony would flourish only with God's blessing. Public Domain

In the summer of 1973, on a European excursion with my siblings and parents, our family spent part of a day at Germany’s Dachau concentration camp. In 1980, my wife and I visited her sister in Hawaii, where we spent some time at a coastal park on the Big Island looking at petroglyphs, images etched into the lava stone centuries earlier. The following year found us on the grounds of the Lost Colony in Manteo, North Carolina.

What do historical sites as different as Dachau, Hawaii, and the Lost Colony have in common?

These three places exuded the silence and sacredness sometimes found in an empty church. To be conscious that those who had lived and died there had imprinted the stones, earth, grass, and trees with their spirits. Thousands met their deaths at Dachau, either from illness or execution. The graven lava stones in the middle of the Pacific were messages from men, women, and children who had returned to dust long ago. The settlers of the Lost Colony had simply disappeared into the wilderness they’d come to conquer.

That brings us to the history-haunted grounds of Jamestown, Virginia.

A reconstructed church at the historic Jamestown, Va. settlement. Kathy Clark/Shutterstock

Re-creations of the three ships that brought English colonists to Virginia in 1607: the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock

Aboard were 104 men who would remain behind when the ships returned to England. Recruited by the Virginia Company of London, their mission was to establish a colony and bring profits to the company and so to Britain. They selected a location for their settlement, built a fort, and watched as two of the ships sailed away.

To imagine their thoughts and the isolation these men must have felt as they bade goodbye to those vessels is difficult. They had already suffered a Native American attack that had killed one of their number and wounded 11, but even so, they surely failed to anticipate the horrible disasters that loomed ahead. Scarce food, contaminated drinking water, a region in drought, skirmishes with the natives, and disease took their toll on this company. By year’s end, only 38 of them were still alive.

Several events in 1608 injected new life into the moribund colony. In January, approximately 100 new settlers arrived. Best known today for his claim that the young Pocahontas had rescued him from execution, adventurer and soldier of fortune John Smith survived captivity with the native peoples. In the process, he made the acquaintance of Powhatan, the region’s most powerful chieftain. For a brief time, relations between the colonists and Powhatan’s people were so improved that Thomas Savage, an English youth, agreed to live with the natives to learn their language and customs, while a member of that tribe, Namontack, did the same with the colonists. In September, 70 more settlers arrived at James Towne, as it was then called, including several makers of glass and the colony’s first two women.

"The Coronation of Powhatan," 1835, John Gadsby Chapman, Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, S.C. The Jamestown colonists offered Powhatan a crown as a measure of friendship and business partnership. Public Domain

Perhaps most significantly, in that same month, John Smith became the president of the governing council. This no-nonsense leader strengthened the colony’s fort and famously decreed that “he that will not work shall not eat.”

The Starving Time

In June 1609, a nine-ship expedition with more than 500 prospective colonists and a load of provisions set out for Jamestown. Slammed by a hurricane, one ship sank, and the fleet arrived at its destination with just 300 people, including women and children. Provisions in the colony were already running low, tensions were growing between the Native Americans and the settlers, and John Smith returned to England in the fall.

It was at this point that the wavering candle of the Jamestown colony was nearly extinguished.

Relations with Chief Powhatan had deteriorated, and in November, the Native Americans laid siege to Fort James, trapping about 300 of the colony’s members inside the walls. As winter set in, so did starvation. Records of the time show the colonists ate rats, dogs, cats, horses, and even shoe leather. Recent evidence has also confirmed that some cannibalized the dead. In 2012, among the remains of butchered animal bones, archaeologists found skeletal parts identified as those of a 14-year-old girl, code-named “Jane.”

The 1622 Powhatan uprising was a series of attacks by the Powhatan Confederacy against English colonists. Public Domain

The horror and desperation of that winter can be witnessed in numbers alone. Of the 300 men, women, and children in the fort in November, only 60 survived until spring.

On June 7, 1610, lacking supplies and manpower, Sir Thomas Gates ordered the end of the Jamestown experiment. The colonists packed up their meager belongings on two ships and set sail the following day, only to meet the resupply flotilla of Lord de la Warr, whom King James I had designated the colony’s new leader.

De la Warr ordered the colonists to return to Jamestown, where they repaired buildings, built some new houses, and inflicted several defeats on the natives in the summer months. Over the next few years, more colonists arrived and settled along the river.

Gold in a Leaf

Jamestown’s original settlers had never found the golden nuggets they’d originally hoped for, and though Jamestown had shipped various goods and raw materials such as pitch and glass to Britain, these were trifles when compared to the cost of financial investments and human lives in the endeavor. It didn’t look good for the survival of the colony.

But then Jamestown finally found a lucrative niche market.

In 1611, the newly arrived John Rolfe experimented with growing tobacco. He wanted to produce a plant superior to that smoked by the local Native Americans. Europeans were growing acquainted with the pleasures of pipe smoking, but Spain’s growing empire in South America largely grew and controlled the supply of tobacco. But Rolfe’s experimentation worked, and by 1617, Jamestown shipped 20,000 pounds of tobacco to England. By 1630, tobacco production had skyrocketed to 500,000 pounds exported to the mother country.

Tobacco cultivation as portrayed in an 1878 textbook, "A School History of the United States, from the Discovery of America to the Year 1878," by David B. Scott.  Public Domain

It’s ironic that King James despised the crop that saved the Virginia colony. In his essay “A Counterblast to Tobacco,” he described smoking as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Meanwhile, Rolfe further contributed to the stability of the colony by marrying Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan. Though she died in 1617 after traveling with Rolfe to England, their union helped bring a temporary end to the conflict between the newcomers and the natives.

"The Marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe," 1860s, by Anton Hohenstein. The marriage between the Englishman and the Native American woman brought temporary peace to Jamestown. Fæ/CC BY-SA 4.0

The Way to Prosper

The early colonists, many of whom died in and around Jamestown, came to a new land in search of the dreams of greater freedom and prosperity. The Virginia Company enticed them with books and pamphlets promoting the colony, often concealing the hardships they would face, but the colonists’ motivations were similar to those who have immigrated to our shores ever since. 

In addition, the royal charters and instructions regarding the Virginia Company directly influenced our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Men such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both Virginians, would have been well aware of these documents that had promised, among other things, that colonists would retain the full rights of Englishmen.

A depiction of the First Assembly in Jamestown, Va., in 1619, by Thomas Armstrong. It was published in "Cassell's History of England, Vol. 3." Public Domain

At the end of one of these early Virginia Company documents, “Instructions for the Virginia Colony,” we find a principle that guided those early settlers. After a series of quite specific directions and suggestions, the author of these “Instructions” concludes: “Lastly and chiefly the way to prosper and achieve good success is to make yourselves all of one mind for the good of your country and your own, and to serve and fear God the Giver of all Goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out.”

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