Jamestown Settlement (1607): First Permanent English Colony

The Jamestown settlement was founded on 14 May 1607 on an island in the James River in Virginia. Established by the Virginia Company of London, it nearly collapsed through disease, famine and conflict with the Powhatan peoples, but it became the first permanent English settlement in North America. Representative government, the tobacco economy and the first recorded arrival of Africans in English North America all have their roots there.

Background: England’s second try

England’s earlier attempt to settle North America, the Roanoke colony of the 1580s, had ended in failure and mystery. After peace with Spain in 1604, English merchants and investors renewed their interest in colonies.

On 10 April 1606 King James I granted a charter to two joint-stock companies, one based in London and one in Plymouth. The Virginia Company of London received rights to settle the southern part of the coast. Its investors hoped for gold, a passage to the Pacific, and goods such as timber, glass and silk that would reduce England’s dependence on foreign trade.

Voyage, landing and the Powhatan

On 20 December 1606 three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, left London under the command of Captain Christopher Newport. They carried about 105 men and boys; there were no women. Among them was the soldier John Smith, who was accused of mutiny during the voyage and held prisoner.

The fleet entered Chesapeake Bay in late April 1607 and landed at Cape Henry. Sealed orders were opened, naming a governing council that included Smith. The colonists explored the James River and chose a site about 60 kilometres upstream, on a peninsula that could be defended against Spanish ships. They came ashore on 14 May 1607 and named the settlement after the king.

The choice was poor in other ways. The land was low and marshy, mosquitoes were common, and the river water near the fort turned brackish in summer, contributing to disease. Many of the first colonists were gentlemen or their servants with little experience of farming or hard manual work, and the company’s instructions stressed searching for gold and a route to the Pacific over growing food.

Jamestown lay within Tsenacommacah, the land of the Powhatan, a paramount chiefdom of about 30 Algonquian-speaking peoples led by Wahunsenaca, known to the English as Powhatan. Its population is usually estimated at around 13,000 to 15,000 or more.

Relations were tense from the start. Warriors attacked the half-built fort on 26 May 1607, and the colonists completed a triangular wooden palisade within weeks. Yet the Powhatan also traded maize to the English, and Wahunsenaca seems to have hoped to bring the newcomers under his authority as a useful source of metal tools and weapons.

The early years and John Smith

By the end of 1607 disease, hunger and conflict had killed more than half of the original colonists. Quarrels on the council were constant, and the first president, Edward Maria Wingfield, was deposed.

In December 1607 Smith was captured while exploring and taken to Werowocomoco, Powhatan’s capital. He was released after several weeks. Years later he claimed that Powhatan’s young daughter, Pocahontas, had saved him from execution, a story historians still debate.

Smith became president of the council in September 1608. He traded and bargained, often forcefully, for corn and insisted that colonists who did not work would not eat. In October 1609 he was badly injured by a gunpowder explosion and returned to England.

The Starving Time

In 1609 the company sent a large fleet with about 500 new colonists, including women and children. Its flagship, the Sea Venture, carrying the new leaders Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, was wrecked on Bermuda in a hurricane. Many of the other settlers arrived at Jamestown sick and short of supplies.

Relations with the Powhatan collapsed, and in the winter of 1609-1610 the fort was effectively besieged. The colonists ate horses, dogs, rats and leather. Of roughly 240 to 300 people at the fort that autumn, only about 60 survived until spring. In 2013 archaeologists announced evidence that the remains of a teenage girl had been butchered, confirming accounts of cannibalism.

The Sea Venture survivors built two small ships in Bermuda and reached Jamestown in May 1610. Gates decided to abandon the colony, but in June 1610, as the settlers sailed down the river, they met the fleet of the new governor, Lord De La Warr, with fresh supplies. The colony was saved.

War, Pocahontas, tobacco and the royal colony

The First Anglo-Powhatan War lasted from 1610 to 1614. Under governors such as Sir Thomas Dale, the colony was run under harsh martial law. In 1613 the English captured Pocahontas and held her hostage. While in captivity she converted to Christianity, and in April 1614 she married the colonist John Rolfe, an event followed by a peace. Pocahontas travelled to England in 1616 and died at Gravesend in March 1617.

Rolfe had meanwhile found the key to the colony’s survival. Around 1612 he began growing a milder variety of tobacco from seeds obtained in the Caribbean, and the first shipments reached England in 1614. Tobacco became a booming export, and settlers spread along the rivers to plant it, though King James himself published a pamphlet attacking smoking in 1604. The habit had been spreading since tobacco reached Europe in the 16th century.

1619 and the end of the company

The year 1619 brought two lasting changes. On 30 July 1619 the General Assembly met in the church at Jamestown, the first elected representative legislature in English America. In late August a ship called the White Lion arrived at Point Comfort and traded “20 and odd” Africans, captured from a Portuguese slave ship, for food. They were the first recorded Africans in English North America.

The company also introduced the headright system, granting land to those who paid for settlers’ passage, and began sending women to encourage family life.

As the colony expanded onto Powhatan land, tensions grew. On 22 March 1622 the Powhatan, led by Opechancanough, attacked settlements along the James River and killed about 347 colonists, roughly a quarter of the English population. The company never recovered, and in 1624 James I revoked its charter and made Virginia a royal colony.

Myths and facts

Myth: Pocahontas and John Smith were sweethearts. This idea comes from 19th-century legend and modern films. Pocahontas was a child of about 10 or 11 when Smith met her in 1607-1608, and no contemporary source describes a romance between them.

Myth: Jamestown was the first European settlement in what became the United States. Spain had founded St. Augustine in Florida in 1565, and English colonists had already tried and failed to settle Roanoke Island in the 1580s. Jamestown was the first English settlement to last.

Fact: The colonists nearly gave up. In June 1610 the survivors had actually boarded their ships and were sailing away when they met Lord De La Warr’s fleet. Without that chance meeting the colony would probably have been abandoned.

Fact: The legal status of the first Africans is uncertain. The status of the Africans who arrived in 1619 is debated. Some appear in later records as servants who gained their freedom, but laws defining lifelong, hereditary slavery in Virginia developed gradually over the following decades, especially from the 1660s.

Key people

• John Smith (1580-1631): soldier, explorer and council president who mapped the Chesapeake and wrote influential accounts of the colony.
• Wahunsenaca (Powhatan) (c. 1547-1618): paramount chief of Tsenacommacah, who dealt with the English through trade, pressure and war.
• Pocahontas (c. 1596-1617): Powhatan’s daughter, captive and later wife of John Rolfe; she died in England.
• John Rolfe (1585-1622): settler who introduced commercial tobacco growing.
• Opechancanough (died 1646): Powhatan’s brother and later paramount chief, who led the attacks of 1622 and 1644.

Later history and rediscovery

Jamestown remained the capital of Virginia, but it never grew into a large town. During Bacon’s Rebellion in September 1676 rebels burned it. After the statehouse burned again in 1698, the capital moved to Middle Plantation, renamed Williamsburg, in 1699.

For centuries it was believed that the river had washed away the site of James Fort. In 1994 the Jamestown Rediscovery project, led by archaeologist William Kelso, began excavating and soon found the fort’s outline, along with more than a million artefacts and the graves of early colonists.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1606, 10 April: James I charters the Virginia Company.
• 1606, 20 December: Three ships leave London for Virginia.
• 1607, 14 May: The colonists land on Jamestown Island.
• 1607, December: John Smith is captured and taken to Powhatan.
• 1609-1610: The Starving Time reduces the colony to about 60 people.
• 1610, June: Lord De La Warr arrives just as the settlers are leaving.
• 1614, April: Pocahontas marries John Rolfe; first tobacco shipments reach England.
• 1619, 30 July: The first General Assembly meets; Africans arrive in August.
• 1622, 22 March: The Powhatan attack kills about 347 colonists.
• 1624: Virginia becomes a royal colony.

Why it matters

Jamestown established a lasting English presence in North America and set patterns, from representative assemblies to tobacco plantations and racial slavery, that shaped the later United States. It also began the long and often violent dispossession of the Powhatan and other Native peoples of Virginia.