I'm planning this as a 15 week series, with maybe a few gaps because of midterms and spring break and the like, because when I teach American history I find myself newly fascinated (or at least exercised about) by material I've taught before, mostly because something in current politics sets me off while I'm teaching it. Lots of things this week (Roanoke Island led to VDare.com, the founding of St. Augustine as a way of eliminating a nest of French heretics and pirates), but especially, this week, 1607. Why? Because the national discourse seems to think the first permanent British settlement in what's now the United States (or at least the first that's worth talking about) was established in 1620 (and 1620 itself has issues, but that's for another diary).
Fact is, James I granted a patent to two companies, one based in London and the other in the port of Plymouth, to colonize North America between Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine and the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The Plymouth Company would colonize the northern part, and the London Company, the southern part. Both of them sent out a colonizing party in 1607, but only one resulted in a permanent settlement.
The permanent settlement first. Because the London Company (soon to be renamed the Virginia Company) thought that the second settlement on Roanoke Island had been kidnapped by Spanish pirates, they instructed the settlers to go at least 60 miles up the James River.
This was a hazardous post anyway, because the settlement was established next to a broad swamp. Although the Virginia Company instructed the colonial leaders never to let Indians see English dying (they might learn the colonists were “common men”), disease brought by mosquitoes (malaria) and stagnant water of swamp (dysentery, typhoid fever) killed 66 of the original 104 settlers within the first nine months, and the Virginia Company had trouble keeping ahead of the continuing deaths. In fact, between 1607 and 1622 some 10,000 people were transported to the colony but only 20% of them survived – in Virginia, it wasn’t just the Indians who were prone to disease and epidemics
Here's a rendering of the site, sans gravestones:
"
(James Fort construction, May-June 1607; National Park Service, Colonial National Historical Park)
Of course, all anyone knows about the settlement is the Pocahontas story, including the fact she ended up married to John Rolfe, not to John Smith. In case you think that Disney is responsible for the framing of the Pocahontas story, this was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1840:
(Baptism of Pocahontas, John Gadsby Chapman.The Architect of the Capitol: Paintings)
I always show my students the Disney version, complete with John Smith, even though he has very little to do with the Jamestown story:
(http://www.mouseplanet.com/...)
What really happened: The colonists were an unstable mix of gentlemen-adventurers from England who had been screened by birth from manual labor, vagrants rounded up in London and forcibly sent to Virginia who had learned to survive by begging and stealing, none of whom knew much about agriculture (before 1620 most of these were either unwanted orphans or criminals being punished for vagrancy or petty theft). These colonists had a stalemate with the Algonquians from 1607 until 1613 when English captured Powhatan’s favorite daughter, Pocahontas, who, indoctrinated by her captors, accepted Christian conversion, took the name Rebecca and married John Rolfe, a colonist, in 1614. Rolfe had brought a West Indian strain of tobacco to Virginia in 1612, and it flourished, and it turned out to be VERY profitable.
Profitable enough that the Virginia Company though it would be a really good idea to bring the Rolfes to England as an attempt to get people to come to Virginia, even though the mortality rate was still a problem. It is from this trip that we actually have an image of Pocahontas drawn from life:
(Pocahontas, Simon van der Passe, 1616; illustration in Bazilioologia: A Booke of Kings [London, Compton Holland, 1618])
Not what you expected, I bet. Not what they expect either. Pocahontas died in 1617, succumbing to a European disease like so many of the natives of North America had done shortly after their first encounter with Europeans. What DID get settlers to brave the wilds of Virginia? Private property. The Company, in an attempt to attract migrants, gave up their control of the land and the laborers and permitted colonists to own and work land as private property. It adopted a “head-right” system for men who could pay for their own passage (and that of others). The settler received 100 acres and an additional 50 for each servant or relative brought with them; servants also promised 50 acres if and when they survived their terms of indenture. The Company also approved a system of representative government, although the company could nullify its acts. This brought settlers, who as private property owners showed much greater effort and initiative in cultivating the land.
Incidentally, the first shipment of African slaves arrived in 1619, after the Virginia Company figured out that they couldn't enslave the Indians.
Now, the Plymouth Company. It, too, sent a group to North America. I'll let the Christian Science Monitor, in an article commemorating the 400th anniversary of this effort, tell the story, since I just throw up a map.
Two ships carrying 125 people arrived at Popham Beach in what is now Phippsburg, Maine, on Aug. 19, 1607, just three months after the foundation of Jamestown. They built a fortified village, at least a dozen cabins, a storehouse, chapel, and a modest sailing vessel, the Virginia, the first European vessel built in what is now the United States.
But when spring came, the colonists loaded their goods aboard the Virginia and a supply ship and sailed back to England, abandoning the settlement. Their leader, George Popham, had died during the winter, while his successor, Raleigh Gilbert, had offended the colonists' native American neighbors, possibly triggering some sort of fight within the fort. Morale collapsed, taking the colonial project with it.
(and here's the map)
It was such a disaster that the Plymouth Company sent for the best PR man it could find, and, in return, they received the rebranding of their territory as "New England." Here's the frontispiece of Description of New England (1616):
Yes, that's John Smith, also from life. In the book, he wrote “Of all the foure parts of the world that I have yet seene not inhabited, could I have but meanes to transport a Colonie, I would rather live here than any where.” And who did that attract? 40 separatist Puritans who had already decamped for Leyden in the Netherlands and who were beginning to worry that their children would forget they were English.
And yet. Despite the individualism and private property rights in Jamestown (and at a time before "property" invariably meant "slaves"), we are still stuck with the implicit belief of 19th century historians that mainline American political cultural development ran from Plymouth rather than from Jamestown, which was in part an effort to sweep the development of American slavery under the rug, compounded by the fact that until very recently (last ten years) comparatively little attention was paid to the history of the South before the region became self-consciously Southern.
8:23 AM PT: Thanks for republishing this, and an extra credit question. Does anything in this diary point to American exceptionalism? I have serious doubts about that.
12:43 PM PT: I figured that the Kossack community would probably have members who had physical ties to any event in American history, and I'm VERY happy you're all sharing the ties you have to these! Next diary, early next week, will be about why the two groups of Puritans who settled New England are considered different from each other, when they really aren't.