jamestown story essay

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Origins (1606–07)

First years (1607–09).

• The Starving Time and near abandonment (1609–11)
• Peace and the onset of the tobacco economy (1613–14)
• Representative democracy and slavery (1619)
• Dissolution of the Virginia Company (1622–24)
• Modern developments

• How did Pocahontas become famous?
• When did Pocahontas get married?
• What is Pocahontas remembered for?

Jamestown Colony

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Jamestown Colony , first permanent English settlement in North America, located near present-day Williamsburg , Virginia. Established on May 14, 1607, the colony gave England its first foothold in the European competition for the New World, which had been dominated by the Spanish since the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century.

The colony was a private venture, financed and organized by the Virginia Company of London. King James I granted a charter to a group of investors for the establishment of the company on April 10, 1606. During this era, “ Virginia ” was the English name for the entire East Coast of North America north of Florida . The charter gave the company the right to settle anywhere from roughly present-day North Carolina to New York state. The company’s plan was to reward investors by locating gold and silver deposits and by finding a river route to the Pacific Ocean for trade with the Orient.

A contingent of approximately 105 colonists departed England in late December 1606 in three ships—the Susan Constant , the Godspeed , and the Discovery —under the command of Christopher Newport . They reached Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. Soon afterward the captains of the three ships met to open a box containing the names of members of the colony’s governing council: Newport; Bartholomew Gosnold , one of the behind-the-scenes initiators of the Virginia Company; Edward-Maria Wingfield, a major investor; John Ratcliffe; George Kendall; John Martin; and Capt. John Smith , a former mercenary who had fought in the Netherlands and Hungary . Wingfield became the colony’s first president. Smith had been accused of plotting a mutiny during the ocean voyage and was not admitted to the council until weeks later, on June 10.

After a period of searching for a settlement site, the colonists moored the ships off a peninsula (now an island) in the James River on the night of May 13 and began to unload them on May 14. The site’s marshy setting and humidity would prove to be unhealthful, but the site had several apparent advantages at the time the colony’s leaders chose it: ships could pull up close to it in deep water for easy loading and unloading, it was unoccupied, and it was joined to the mainland only by a narrow neck of land, making it simpler to defend. The settlement, named for James I, was known variously during its existence as James Forte , James Towne, and James Cittie.

Most Indian tribes of the region were part of the Powhatan empire, with Chief Powhatan as its head. The colonists’ relations with the local tribes were mixed from the beginning. The two sides conducted business with each other, the English trading their metal tools and other goods for the Native Americans ’ food supplies. At times the Indians showed generosity in providing gifts of food to the colony. On other occasions, encounters between the colonists and the tribes turned violent, and the Native Americans occasionally killed colonists who strayed alone outside the fort.

On May 21, 1607, a week after the colonists began occupying Jamestown, Newport took five colonists (including Smith) and 18 sailors with him on an expedition to explore the rivers flowing into the Chesapeake and to search for a way to the Pacific Ocean. On returning, they found that the colony had endured a surprise attack and had managed to drive the attackers away only with cannon fire from the ships. However, when Newport left for England on June 22 with the Susan Constant and the Godspeed —leaving the smaller Discovery behind for the colonists—he brought with him a positive report from the council in Jamestown to the Virginia Company. The colony’s leaders wrote, and probably believed, that the colony was in good condition and on track for success.

The report proved too optimistic. The colonists had not carried out the work in the springtime needed for the long haul, such as building up the food stores and digging a freshwater well. The first mass casualties of the colony took place in August 1607, when a combination of bad water from the river, disease-bearing mosquitoes, and limited food rations created a wave of dysentery , severe fevers, and other serious health problems. Numerous colonists died, and at times as few as five able-bodied settlers were left to bury the dead. In the aftermath, three members of the council—John Smith, John Martin, and John Ratcliffe—acted to eject Edward-Maria Wingfield from his presidency on September 10. Ratcliffe took Wingfield’s place. It was apparently a lawful transfer of power, authorized by the company’s rules that allowed the council to remove the president for just cause.

Shortly after Newport returned in early January 1608, bringing new colonists and supplies, one of the new colonists accidentally started a fire that leveled all of the colony’s living quarters. The fire further deepened the colony’s dependence on the Indians for food. In accord with the Virginia Company’s objectives, much of the colony’s efforts in 1608 were devoted to searching for gold. Newport had brought with him two experts in gold refining (to determine whether ore samples contained genuine gold), as well as two goldsmiths. With the support of most of the colony’s leadership, the colonists embarked on a lengthy effort to dig around the riverbanks of the area. Councillor John Smith objected, believing the quest for gold was a diversion from needed practical work. “There was no talke, no hope, no worke, but dig gold, refine gold, load gold,” one colonist remembered.

During the colony’s second summer, President Ratcliffe ordered the construction of an overelaborate capitol building. This structure came to symbolize the colony’s mismanagement in the minds of some settlers. With growing discontent over his leadership, Ratcliffe left office; whether he resigned or was overthrown is unclear. John Smith took his place on September 10, 1608. To impose discipline on malingering colonists, Smith announced a new rule: “He that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled).” Even so, the colony continued to depend on trade with the Indians for much of its food supply. During Smith’s administration, no settlers died of starvation, and the colony survived the winter with minimal losses. In late September 1608 a ship brought a new group of colonists that included Jamestown’s first women: Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras.

In London, meanwhile, the company received a new royal charter on May 23, 1609, which gave the colony a new form of management, replacing its president and council with a governor. The company determined that Thomas Gates would hold that position for the first year of the new charter. He sailed for Virginia in June with a fleet of nine ships and hundreds of new colonists. The fleet was caught in a hurricane en route, however, and Gates’s ship was wrecked off Bermuda . Other ships of the fleet did arrive in Virginia that August, and the new arrivals demanded that Smith step down. Smith resisted, and finally it was agreed that he would remain in office until the expiration of his term the following month. His presidency ended early nonetheless. While still in command, Smith was seriously injured when his gunpowder bag caught fire from mysterious causes. He sailed back to England in early September. A nobleman named George Percy , the eighth son of an earl, took his place as the colony’s leader.

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History Resources

A Jamestown settler describes life in Virginia, 1622

A spotlight on a primary source by sebastian brandt.

This 1622 letter from Jamestown colonist Sebastian Brandt to Henry Hovener, a Dutch merchant living in London, provides a snapshot of the colony in flux. Brandt, who likely arrived in 1619 in a wave of 1,200 immigrants, writes of his wife’s and brother’s deaths the previous year almost in passing. He mentions that, due to his own illness, he “was not able to travell up and downe the hills and dales of these countries but doo nowe intend every daye to walke up and downe the hills for good Mineralls here is both golde silver and copper.” Most of Brandt’s letter is devoted to its real purpose: putting in orders for cheese, vinegar, tools, spices, and other assorted goods from the London Company that were not available in Virginia. Interestingly, he promises to pay in tobacco and furs—not in the gold and copper he’s looking for.

We know little about Brandt. He does not appear in any known existing official records, and historians presume he died not long after writing this letter. The glimpse he offers into early Jamestown serves as a tantalizing example of the challenges and thrills of studying colonial American history.

A full transcript is available.

Well beloved good friend Henry Hovener

My comendations remembred, I hartely [wish] your welfare for god be thanked I am now in good health, but my brother and my wyfe are dead aboute a yeare pass’d And touchinge the busynesse that I came hither is nothing yett performed, by reason of my sicknesse & weaknesse I was not able to travell up and downe the hills and dales of these countries but doo nowe intend every daye to walke up and downe the hills for good Mineralls here is both golde silver and copper to be had and therefore I will doe my endeavour by the grace of god to effect what I am able to performe And I intreat you to beseeche the Right Hon: & Wor: Company in my behalfe to grant me my freedome to be sent either to me I dowbte not to doo well & good service in these countries humbly desyringe them also to provyde me some [appointed] fellowe & a strong boye to assiste me in my businesse, and that it may please the aforesaid Company to send me at my charge a bed wth a bolster and cover and some Linnen for shirtes and sheetes. Sixe fallinge bands wth Last Size pairs of shoes twoo pairs of bootes three pairs of cullered stockings and garters wth three pairs of lether gloves some powder and shott twoo little runletts of oyle and vinnegar some spice & suger to comfort us here in our sicknesse abowte ffyftie pounds weight of holland and Englishe cheese together, Lykewyse some knyves, spoons, combes and all sorts of cullerd beads as you knowe the savage Indians use Allso one Rundlett wth all sortes of yron nayles great and small, three haire sives, two hatchetts wth twoo broad yrons and some Allum And send all these necessaries thinges in a dry fatt wth the first shippinge dyrected unto Mr. Pontes in James Towne here in Virginia And whatsoever this all costes I will not onely wth my moste humble service but allso wth some good Tobacco Bevor and Otterskins and other commodities here to be had recompence the Company for the same And yf you could send for my brother Phillipps Sonne in Darbesheere to come hether itt [were] a great commoditie ffor me or suche another used in minerall workes And thus I comitt you to the Almighty. Virginia 13 January 1622.

Questions for Discussion

Read the document introduction and transcript and apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer these questions.

• Carefully view the printable image of the document. Describe the skills an archivist needs to transform an original document into a format we can understand.
• In the very first sentence of Sebastian Brandt’s letter he mentions that his “brother and . . . wyfe are dead aboute a year” and does not mention them again. How does this matter-of-fact statement help us understand conditions faced by settlers in Virginia in the early 1600s?
• What conclusions can you draw about Brandt knowing that he continued to search for precious metals after most Jamestown settlers were involved in agriculture?
• Make a list of what you think you would need to survive a year in Jamestown. Compare it with the shopping list Brandt sent to the merchant in London.

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2c. Jamestown Settlement and the "Starving Time"

The first joint-stock company to launch a lasting venture to the New World was the Virginia Company of London . The investors had one goal in mind: gold. They hoped to repeat the success of Spaniards who found gold in South America.

In 1607, 144 English men and boys established the Jamestown colony, named after King James I.

The colonists were told that if they did not generate any wealth, financial support for their efforts would end. Many of the men spent their days vainly searching for gold.

As a consequence, the colonists spent little time farming. Food supplies dwindled. Malaria and the harsh winter besieged the colonists, as well. After the first year, only 38 of the original 144 had survived.

First Virginia Charter

James, by the grace of God [King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith], etc.

Whereas our loving and weldisposed subjects ... and divers others of our loving subjects, have been humble sutors unto us that wee woulde vouchsafe unto them our licence to make habitacion, plantacion and to deduce a colonie of sondrie of our people into that parte of America commonly called Virginia, and other parts and territories in America either appartaining unto us or which are not nowe actuallie possessed by anie Christian prince or people, scituate, lying and being all along the sea coastes between fower and thirtie degrees of northerly latitude from the equinoctiall line and five and fortie degrees of the same latitude and in the maine lande betweene the same fower and thirtie and five and fourtie degrees, and the ilandes thereunto adjacente or within one hundred miles of the coaste thereof;

And to that ende, and for themore speedy accomplishemente of theire saide intended plantacion and habitacion there, are desirous to devide themselves into two severall colonies and companies, the one consisting of certaine Knightes, gentlemen, marchanntes and other adventurers of our cittie of London, and elsewhere, which are and from time to time shalbe joined unto them which doe desire to begin theire plantacions and habitacions in some fitt and conveniente place between fower and thirtie and one and fortie degrees of the said latitude all alongest the coaste of Virginia and coastes of America aforesaid and the other consisting of sondrie Knightes, gentlemen, merchanntes, and other adventurers of our citties of Bristoll and Exeter, and of our towne of Plymouthe, and of other places which doe joine themselves unto that colonie which doe desire to beginn theire plantacions and habitacions in some fitt and convenient place betweene eighte and thirtie degrees and five and fortie degrees of the saide latitude all alongst the saide coaste of Virginia and America as that coaste lieth;

Wee, greately commending and graciously accepting of theire desires to the furtherance of soe noble a worke which may, by the providence of Almightie God, hereafter tende to the glorie of His Divine Majestie in propagating of Christian religion to suche people as yet live in darkenesse and miserable ignorance of the true knoweledge and worshippe of God and may in tyme bring the infidels and salvages living in those parts to humane civilitie and to a setled and quiet govermente, doe by theise our lettres patents graciously accepte of and agree to theire humble and well intended desires;

April 10, 1606

"Work or Starve"

The colony may well have perished had it not been for the leadership of John Smith . He imposed strict discipline on the colonists. "Work or starve" was his motto, and each colonist was required to spend four hours per day farming.

The twenty of April. Being at work, in hewing down Trees, and setting Corn, an alarum caused us with all speed to take our arms, each expecting a new assault of the Savages: but understanding it a Boat under sail, our doubts were presently satisfied with the happy sight of Master Nelson, his many perils of extreme storms and tempests, his ship well as his company could testify, his care in sparing our provision was well: but the providence thereof, as also of our stones, Hatchets and other tools (only ours excepted) which of all the rest was most necessary: which might inforce us to thinke either a seditious traitor to our action, or a most unconscionable deceiver of our treasures.

– John Smith, "A True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents in Virginia" (1608)

An accidental gunpowder burn forced Smith to return to England in 1609. After his departure, the colony endured even more hardships. A new boatload of colonists and supplies sank off the coast of Bermuda on its way to help the hungry settlement. The winter of 1609-10, known as the " starving time ," may have been the worst of all.

Disease and hunger ravaged Jamestown. Two desperate colonists were tied to posts and left to starve as punishment for raiding the colonies' stores. One colonist even took to cannibalism, eating his own wife. The fate of the venture was precarious. Yet still more colonists arrived, and their numbers included women.

Despite the introduction of tobacco cultivation, the colony was a failure as a financial venture. The king declared the Virginia Company bankrupt in 1624.

About 200,000 pounds were lost among the investors. The charter was thereby revoked, and Virginia became a royal colony, the first in America to be ruled by the Crown.

Investments in permanent settlements were risky indeed. The merchants and gentry paid with their pocketbooks. Many colonists paid with their lives. For every six colonists who ventured across the Atlantic, only one survived.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 6, 2023 | Original: November 12, 2009

English soldier and explorer Captain John Smith was born in Lincolnshire and had an adventurous life as a soldier, pirate, enslaved person, colonist and author—though many historians question the details of his life. He claims to have had his life saved by Pocahontas, a Native American woman who allegedly fell in love with him. Smith played a key role in the founding of Jamestown , the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Early Life and Military Exploits

Born around 1580 in Willoughby, a town in Lincolnshire, England, Smith left home at age 16 after his father’s death. He sailed to France, where he joined volunteer forces fighting for Dutch independence against Spain.

He later served on a pirate ship in the Mediterranean Sea before heading to Austria in 1600 to join the forces of the Holy Roman Empire in their fight against the Ottoman Empire . His valor earned him the rank of captain, which he would wear with pride the rest of his life.

While fighting in Transylvania in 1602, Smith was wounded, captured by the Turks and sold into slavery. He managed to escape by killing his owner, and traveled across Russia, Poland, Europe and North Africa before returning to England in 1604.

As a commemoration of his feats in battle, Smith had a coat of arms engraved with three heads (representing three Turkish officers he had killed) and the motto Vincere est Vivere , Latin for “to conquer is to live.”

Founding of Jamestown

In 1607, Smith’s military reputation helped earn him a spot in the group of men assembled by the Virginia Company to form an English colony in North America . With a charter from King James I in hand, 104 settlers sailed from England aboard three ships in December 1606. During the four-month sea voyage, expedition leaders arrested Smith for planning a mutiny and imprisoned him below decks in shackles.

When the ships reached Virginia in April 1607 and the settlers opened a box containing a list of men that the Virginia Company had appointed as a governing council for the new colony, Smith’s name was on the list. He was released and allowed to assume his council seat to lead Jamestown, established in May 1607 on the banks of the river they named for King James.

John Smith and Pocahontas

The new colony struggled with food shortages and disease, and in the fall of 1607 Smith began conducting expeditions to Native American villages to secure food. That December, a Powhatan hunting party captured Smith during one of these trips and brought him before Wahunsenacawh (commonly known as Chief Powhatan), the leader of most of the indigenous tribes in the Chesapeake Bay region.

According to Smith, the chief’s young daughter, Pocahontas , saved him from execution; historians have questioned his account. In any case, the Powhatan released Smith and escorted him back to Jamestown.

By January 1608, only 38 of the original 104 settlers were still alive. Though Chief Powhatan sent food and more settlers arrived from England with supplies, the extreme winter cold led to the death of many of the new settlers.

That spring, Smith began leading explorations of some 2,500 miles of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, including the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. He used his findings to map the area, including locations of Native American villages and other important information.

Leadership of Jamestown

In September 1608, Smith was elected president of Jamestown's governing council. He instilled greater discipline among the settlers, enforcing the rule "He who will not work shall not eat." Under Smith's guiding hand, the colony made progress: The settlers dug the first well, planted crops and began repairing the fort that had burned down the previous winter.

The English settlers had a rocky and often violent relationship with the Powhatan. The colonists continually raided Powhatan villages for food and Powhatan warriors attacked the fort at Jamestown. In October 1609, Smith was forced to return to England after sustaining a serious injury in a gunpowder explosion.

Anglo-Powhatan Wars

In the months after his departure, Chief Powhatan ordered his men to attack the Jamestown fort, beginning the first of the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, and Jamestown endured the so-called "starving time" over the winter of 1609-10, during which several hundred colonists died.

Though Smith wanted to return to Jamestown, the Virginia Company refused to send him back. In 1614, Smith made another voyage, exploring and mapping the shores of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts and naming the region "New England."

He wanted to return and form a colony there, but on the way back in 1615 he was captured by French pirates and imprisoned for several months.

Later Life and Death

When he was released, Smith was unable to find anyone in England to back further voyages across the Atlantic. He focused on writing about his experiences, published works such as The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) and The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630).

Though Smith was known to exaggerate his own exploits, and many have questioned the veracity of his claims—especially those about his rescue by Pocahontas —modern scholars have verified at least some of his information about the Jamestown colony.

Smith was approached to serve as military leader for the Pilgrims in 1620, but the group selected Miles Standish instead; they did, however, use Smith's maps of New England. Smith died in London in June 1631, at the age of 51.

Bill Warder. Captain John Smith. National Park Service . Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarous Years - The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012) John Smith. Jamestown Rediscovery: Historic Jamestowne . 

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Everyday Life in the Jamestown Colony

Few of the 104 English men and boys who set sail from England knew what to expect from their new home when they disembarked from their ships, the Susan Constant , the Godspeed , and the Discovery on May 14, 1607. Under a charter granted by King James I, these first English colonists to Virginia named their settlement Jamestown after their king, and the nearby river the James. Though this world was certainly new to them, these places already had names—the Algonquian-speaking tribes who inhabited the area knew the land as Tsenacomoco and the river, the Powhatan (named after the paramount chief of the Powhatan Indians). These English settlers would soon encounter the Powhatan and later, men and women from West Central Africa. All would have critical roles to play in everyday life in the Jamestown settlement as what began as a military outpost soon grew into a more stable colony with the introduction of the cash crop, tobacco.

Who lived in Jamestown?

When the Virginia Company of London sent the first settlers to Jamestown in 1607, they only included English men and boys. Many of the first settlers were wealthy English gentlemen, but the list of first settlers also included laborers, bricklayers, carpenters, a blacksmith, barber, tailor, and a preacher. The first two English women arrived in 1608. More women, children, and family groups began arriving in 1609. As soon as the English arrived, they encountered the Powhatan Indians. Archaeologists have discovered evidence that Powhatan women visited the fort and brought food, goods, and supplies to the colonists in the first year of settlement. In 1619 the first “20 and odd” Africans arrived at Jamestown. These first Africans were captured by the Portuguese in Angola in West Central Africa, and sold into slavery. Once in Jamestown, the wealthier merchants and planters bought them for their households. The March 1620 muster of the inhabitants listed 32 Africans in Virginia (17 women and 15 men), with 892 European colonists. Even with the looming threat of warfare with the Indians, these numbers continued to grow, especially as tobacco—a labor-intensive crop—demanded the labor of indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

Throughout the earliest years of European settlement at Jamestown, mortality rates were high. Sickness and disease were a constant threat and plagued the English settlers heavily. Historians have identified both environmental factors and malnutrition as contributing factors to the high death rate among the early colonists. The water around Jamestown Island, where the first colonists settled, is an oligohaline zone, where the mix of fresh and salty water come together to trap contaminates. The resulting water is high in salinity, and also delivered colonists low doses of naturally occurring arsenic, iron, and sulfur.  The colonists also inadvertently further contaminated their drinking water with their own waste. The first settlers planned to rely on the local Powhatan Indians for much of their food needs, and so did not plan ahead for their own nutritional needs. A long and devastating drought from 1606-1612 may have contributed to the early colonists’ malnourishment. Even as environmental conditions improved and colonists settled near better water supplies, sickness continued to spread. One colonist wrote home to his parents in 1623 of the pervasiveness of disease in Virginia, “…the nature of the Country is such that it Causeth much sicknes, as the scurvie and the bloody flix, and divers other diseases, wch maketh the bodie very poore, and Weake, and when wee are sicke there is nothing to Comfort us.”

Early Settlement

Soon after their arrival, the first English settlers constructed a fort to defend themselves. The first fort, which was finished on June 5, 1607, included “bulwarkes at every corner, like a halfe moone, and four or five pieces of artillerie mounted in them.” Because the English faced the threat of attack and violence from the Powhatan, they constructed many necessities inside the fort walls, such as a well and a church. Inside the fort, the first settlers also constructed a barracks and other houses. The early colonists constructed these buildings in a style known as “mud and stud,” a traditional building technique that the colonists knew from home in England. When the first men and boys arrived at Jamestown, most of them lived together in the barracks, while after 1611 were built “two fair rows of houses, all of framed timber, two stories, and an upper garret, or corn loft.” The governor of the colony likely lived in one of those row homes.

Eventually, the colonists outgrew the fort, and as more women and families arrived in Virginia the colony expanded. As English colonists expanded outside of James Fort, a small community began to take shape called New Towne, which later grew into “James Cittie.” As the century progressed wealthier colonists used brick to construct their homes in this larger settlement, where wharves, warehouses, and a tavern also appeared to support the growing population. The majority of the colonists continued to live in the more modest frame, not brick, dwellings, with only one or two rooms which served a variety of functions and housed all the family members. Household inventories from later in the 17 th century reveal that some families had very little—perhaps just bare necessities for cooking and farming—while other families had tables, beds, chests, chairs, mattresses, and a variety of pots—not necessities, but comforts and luxuries.

Initially, English colonists sought to rely on trade with the Powhatan Indians for corn and meat. The first colonists were also preoccupied with searching for gold, so they did not spend adequate time planting corn or other crops to become self-sufficient without help from the Indians. Colonist George Percy recorded that shortly after their arrival the Indians “(relieved) us with victuals, as Bread, Corne, Fish, and Flesh in great plenty, which was the setting up of our feeble men, otherwise wee had all perished.” Archaeologists have found numerous brass and iron fishhooks at Jamestown, indicating that colonists looked to the river to supplement their diet. Sturgeon became an especially important part of early colonists’ diet. In 1609 Captain John Smith wrote “we had more sturgeon than could be devoured by dog and man.”

Historians sometimes refer to the winter of 1609/10 as “the starving time.” During this period, tensions between the English and the Powhatan escalated. Trade with the Powhatan ceased and the colonists were confined to their fort, unable to hunt. Colonist George Percy wrote that outside the fort, “Indians killed as fast as Famine and Pestilence did within.” Percy also wrote that those colonists who left the fort in search of “serpents and snakes” to eat, were “cut off and slayne” by the Indians. A severe draught which impacted the region from 1606-1612 complicated the situation, with even the Powhatan likely having to compensate for this environmental factor. Desperate colonists resorted to boiling shoe leather and starch before turning to their horses, dogs, cats, and mice. Percy also wrote of survival cannibalism, which has been corroborated by archaeological evidence. Due to the severe feminine and resulting disease, only 60 colonists survived by spring 1610, but ships arriving from England brought supplies.

The following years saw more supply ships arriving from England, bringing pigs, goats, and cattle. In addition to meat the colonists used cows for milk, butter, and cheese, the production of which increased with the immigration of women to Virginia (dairying tasks were traditionally women’s work). Colonists transplanted fruit trees which Captain John Smith noted “prosper(ed) exceedingly.” Fruit like apples and figs could be distilled into hard cider and other alcoholic beverages, which was often safer to drink than the local water supply. Through most of the 17 th -century salt was not prevalent in Jamestown, meaning that colonists had few options to preserve meat and fresh fruits and vegetables.

Work and Daily Life

In the early years of the colony, many men and boys spent their days searching for Virginia’s natural resources to benefit England, building her a trading empire to both rival and free the country’s dependence upon Europe. Shirking all other needs such as planting and building projects, John Smith wrote that the colonists were distracted by the prospect of finding gold in Virginia: “There was no talk, no hope, no work but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold.” In additional to procuring raw materials, the crown had also encouraged the colonists to experiment with industrial pursuits to benefit England, sending skilled craftsmen and laborers to the colony to support that effort. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of metallurgy (such as testing for gold or other metals) as well as glassmaking, and other colonists tried their hands at silk production with the area’s mulberry trees. None of these ventures proved successful or economically sustainable.

With the colony in disarray after the Starving Time in 1610, officials implemented a set of rules to order the lives of settlers in Jamestown. These “lawes divine, morall and martiall” dictated the colonists’ church attendance (two times every Sunday), ordered housing and bedding to be kept clean, and directed trade and the everyday work lives of both men and women in the colony. Some of the laws (such as the law against doing “the necessities of nature” within a quarter mile of the well) were clearly meant to correct the mistakes of the early years of the colony. Under this code of conduct, colonists were forbidden to gamble, church attendance was mandatory, and blasphemy, treason, robbery, stealing from Indians, and trading without permission were all punishable by death. More minor offenders were whipped in public or endured other physical punishments.

These laws ceased to be enforced after 1619, but by then a new venture had taken hold in Jamestown which ordered the lives of the colonists—planting tobacco. After John Rolfe’s successful experiments with the crop tobacco quickly became the profitable export England was hoping for from the Jamestown venture. Tobacco production, however, was labor intensive. Men, women, and even children contributed to the cultivation of their family’s tobacco crop—clearing fields of trees, planting the tobacco seeds, weeding the crops and “topping” the plants, and removing the tobacco worms that threatened to destroy the crop. Harvesting the leaves to prepare them for export involved even more time and labor.

Threat of Violence and Warfare

European colonists and Powhatan Indians constantly navigated changing relationships, which were sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent. A series of smaller attacks spurned what some historians refer to as First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609, which lasted through 1614. The colonists’ increasing demands on the Powhatan for food and support reached a climax when colonists attempted to take control of the town of Powhatan (hometown of the paramount chief Powhatan). Shortly thereafter, under the guise of trading for corn Powhatan invited colonists to visit his new capital, but the colonists were ambushed. This attack drove surviving colonists into the safety of James Fort where, without help or food from the Powhatan Indians, they endured the Starving Time. Once food, supplies, and more colonists arrived in 1610, the war picked up in momentum with fighting occurring throughout Virginia. In 1613, the English captured Pocahontas, daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan, and held her for ransom. Pocahontas stayed with the English and, after announcing her intention to marry one of the colonists, John Rolfe, paramount chief Powhatan called off the attacks on English settlements. This peace was short-lived. In March 1622 Opechancanough, younger brother of paramount chief Powhatan, instigated the Second Anglo-Powhatan War with his attack on the dispersed English settlements up and down the James River. The ten year war that ensued devastated both the English and Powhatan, and the sides merely agreed to “a peace” in 1632.

Further Reading

• The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700   By: Warren Billings
• Jamestown, the Truth Revealed   By: William M. Kelso
• A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America   By: James Horn
• 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy   By: James Horn 

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Introduction

The Jamestown Colony was the first permanent English settlement in America. It was founded on May 14, 1607, on a peninsula of the James River in what is now the state of Virginia . The colony was named after King James I of England . In Jamestown the first representative government in America was begun and the first black people were brought to the American colonies.

In the spring of 1606, King James granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London. The charter granted to the company the rights to settle, explore, and govern parts of Virginia. At the time Virginia was the English name for the entire East Coast of North America north of Florida. The charter therefore gave the company the right to settle anywhere from roughly present-day North Carolina to New York state. The company’s plan was to reward investors by locating gold and silver deposits and by finding a river route to the Pacific Ocean for trade with Asia.

On December 20, 1606, an expedition of about 105 colonists, all men, sailed from London, England. Captain Christopher Newport was the commander. The expedition reached Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. The leaders spent the following days searching for a settlement site. On May 13 the expedition arrived at a marshy peninsula (now an island) on the James River. The men anchored their three small ships—the Godspeed , the Discovery , and the Susan Constant —and landed on May 14.

The site’s marshy setting and humidity would prove to be unhealthful. However, the site had several advantages at the time the colony’s leaders chose it. The ships could pull up close to it in deep water for easy loading and unloading. It was also unoccupied. Finally, the site was joined to the mainland only by a narrow piece of land, making it simpler to defend. The settlement was known variously during its existence as James Forte, James Towne, and James Cittie.

First Years

The land on which the Jamestown Colony was established was part of the territory of the Powhatan empire. The empire included some 30 Native American tribes over which Chief Powhatan ruled. The relations between the colonists and the local tribes were mixed. The English traded their metal tools and other goods for food. At times the Indians readily provided gifts of food to the colony. On other occasions, encounters between the colonists and the tribes turned violent. The Native Americans occasionally killed colonists who strayed alone outside the fort.

Within a few months of landing, the colonists’ future looked grim. A combination of bad water from the river, disease-carrying mosquitoes , and limited food rations caused serious illnesses in August 1607. Numerous colonists died. In early January 1608 new colonists and supplies arrived. However, one of the colonists accidentally started a fire that destroyed all of the colony’s living quarters. The fire further deepened the colony’s dependence on the Indians for food. Instead of working to ensure basic survival, though, the colonists spent much of the year searching for gold.

Many colonists grew discontented with their leaders. When Jamestown’s president left office in September 1608, John Smith took his place. He was strict, demanding that everyone work hard. Under his direction the colonists dug a well and built houses and outlying forts. They fished regularly and planted crops. Even so, the colony continued to depend on trade with the Indians for much of its food supply. During Smith’s administration no settlers died of starvation. More colonists joined the colony, including Jamestown’s first women.

In London, King James gave the Virginia Company a new royal charter in May 1609. It allowed the company to install a governor as the leader of Jamestown. The company chose Thomas Gates. He sailed for Virginia in June with nine ships and hundreds of new colonists. However, a hurricane in Bermuda wrecked most of the ships, including Gates’s. Two months later some of those travelers reached Virginia. They demanded that Smith step down. Although he refused, that September he was injured and subsequently sailed back to England.

The Starving Time

In the autumn of 1609, Chief Powhatan began a campaign to starve the English out of Virginia. The tribes under his rule stopped bartering for food and attacked English parties that came in search of trade. Hunting became dangerous, as the Powhatan Indians also killed colonists they found outside the fort. Long reliant on the Indians, the colony found itself with far too little food for the winter.

As the food stocks ran out, the settlers ate the colony’s horses, dogs, and cats. They then turned to eating rats, mice, and shoe leather. In their desperation, some practiced cannibalism , eating other colonists who had already died. The winter of 1609–10, commonly known as the Starving Time, took a heavy toll. Of the 500 colonists living in Jamestown in the autumn, fewer than one-fifth were still alive by March 1610. Of those, 60 were still in Jamestown, and another 37 had escaped by ship.

On May 24, 1610, two ships arrived carrying Gates and the other colonists who had wrecked on the Bermuda Islands. They assumed that they would find a thriving colony. Instead they found starving survivors. Since Gates had brought only a small food supply, he decided to abandon the colony. On June 7 all the colonists boarded four small ships to head home. However, on their way out of Chesapeake Bay they encountered three ships under Thomas West, Lord De La Warr (also spelled Delaware). He ordered the ships to turn around. West brought 150 new settlers and provisions for the colony. Under orders from the Virginia Company, he became governor and captain-general of Virginia.

West demanded that Chief Powhatan return the stolen English tools and weapons. He also wanted Powhatan to turn over the person who had recently murdered a colonist. Powhatan refused, and the exchange brought about a state of war. West struggled with various diseases and left Virginia in March 1611. However, the hostilities between the Indians and the English continued.

Peace and Growth

After West’s departure, English sailor Samuel Argall hatched a plan to kidnap Pocahontas , the daughter of Chief Powhatan. He wanted to ransom her for the English prisoners that the Powhatan Indians had captured and for the weapons and tools that they had taken. Argall seized Pocahontas and brought her to Jamestown. He sent a messenger to Chief Powhatan with his demands. Powhatan freed the seven Englishmen he had held captive. However, he did not return the weapons and tools. Negotiations eventually broke down.

The colonists took Pocahontas to an English outpost called Henricus, near present-day Richmond, Virginia. Over the following year, she converted to Christianity . She also became friends with an Englishman named John Rolfe , a pioneering planter of tobacco . Rolfe asked for and received permission from the colony’s leaders to marry Pocahontas. The wedding took place in April 1614. The marriage brought peace between the Powhatan and the English for almost eight years.

Rolfe’s experiments with tobacco quickly transformed the settlement. Rolfe replaced native Virginia tobacco with plants from the West Indies. The resulting product became a mainstay in the British market. After seeing Rolfe’s success, other colonists began to grow and ship tobacco. By the end of the decade, the colony’s economy revolved around that industry.

In the summer of 1619, two significant changes occurred in the colony that would have lasting influence. First, the Virginia Company introduced representative government in English America. Voters in each of the colony’s four cities, or boroughs, elected two officials to represent them. The residents of each of the seven plantations did the same. These changes brought the beginning of democracy to America. The second development was the arrival in the colony of the first Africans in English America. Although records are limited, historians assume that the colonists had the Africans work on the tobacco harvest. The colonists may have treated the Africans at first as indentured servants (having to work for a specified period of time) rather than as slaves .

Royal Colony

In the early 1620s King James and Virginia Company officials began to clash politically. The king’s advisers urged the company to accept a new charter that gave the king greater control over its operations. The company refused. On May 24, 1624, King James dissolved the Virginia Company and made Virginia a royal colony, under his control.

A rebellion against the government of the royal governor, William Berkeley, swept Virginia in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon, leader of the rebellion, attacked Jamestown and burned it ( see Bacon’s Rebellion ). Colonists rebuilt the town, but in 1698 another fire destroyed the statehouse. In 1699 the government was moved to Williamsburg .

Modern Developments

Since 1893 Preservation Virginia has worked to preserve the historic site of Jamestown Colony. The association owns a 22.5-acre (9-hectare) tract of land on Jamestown Island. In 1934 the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) took possession of the other 1,500 acres (600 hectares) of the island. Today Preservation Virginia and the NPS work together to administer the island, which is now known as Historic Jamestowne. It is part of Colonial National Historical Park.

In 1994 Preservation Virginia and its affiliates began the Jamestown Rediscovery project. Archaeologists soon discovered the original site of the 1607 Jamestown fort. By the early 21st century, they had excavated almost the entire original three-sided fort and about half of the expanded five-sided fort built in 1608. Among the other discoveries were more than two million artifacts, many of which are displayed in an on-site museum. Nearby is a historical park, Jamestown Settlement, founded in 1957. Jamestown Settlement includes reproductions of the colonists’ fort and buildings and a Powhatan village, as well as full-size replicas of the ships that made the first Jamestown voyage.

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Jamestown Colony: Facts & history

The 17th-century colony where Pocahontas met John Smith.

Colonization of the Americas

• Disastrous early years

Pocahontas & John Smith

• "Starving time"

Forcing 'colonists' to Jamestown

• Improving fortunes

Slavery in Jamestown

First representative assembly, all the single women, an attack too late, rediscovery of the original fort, additional resources, bibliography.

Jamestown, founded in 1607, was the first successful permanent English settlement in what would become the United States. The settlement existed for nearly 100 years as the capital of the Virginia colony, but it was abandoned after the capital moved to Williamsburg in 1699. 

The history of Jamestown (sometimes spelled Jamestowne) includes human cannibalism, enslaved people forcibly brought from Africa and children kidnapped off the streets of London and taken to the colony. Jamestown is the "creation story from hell," wrote Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a professor of history at New York University, in her book " The Jamestown Project " (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

A preservationist group took over the site in the late 1800s, and today what's left of Jamestown is part of a national historic park with tours, museums and ongoing archaeological digs that continue to reveal new findings. However, rising sea levels caused by climate change may pose a threat to the site, research suggests . There are plans to reinforce a seawall to try to save the site the Washington Post reports . 

Jamestown was not the first successful permanent European settlement in what would become the United States; that distinction belongs to St. Augustine, in Florida, which the Spanish founded in 1565.

At the beginning of the 17th century, England's attempts to colonize the Americas lagged behind other European nations' endeavours. Spain controlled a vast empire in the Western Hemisphere that included much of South and Central America, Mexico, part of the Caribbean and a settlement in Florida. The Spanish were also moving into what is now the American Southwest.

Meanwhile, the French were exploring Canada's northeast and, in time, would establish a highly profitable fur trade in the region.

In the 16th century, the English had attempted to found Roanoke colony , but the venture ended in disaster; the colonists disappeared and were never heard from again, Kupperman wrote. This colony was located in what is now the Outer Banks area of North Carolina, and the colonists may have left to live with local Native American people, a number of scholars have suggested.

In addition to the Roanoke colonists, other European adventurers had sailed along the eastern coast of North America, some of whom ended up living with the Native Americans they encountered, Kupperman wrote. So it's possible that England's Jamestown colonists met the generations of Europeans who came before them.

"It does not seem too fanciful to assume that some colonists in Jamestown, founded twenty years after the last Roanoke colony, might have encountered descendants of earlier transatlantic migrants without knowing it," she wrote.

Jamestown's disastrous early years

The founding of Jamestown had the blessing of England's King James I , and the settlement and nearby James River were named in his honor. However, the settlement was financed and run by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company that King James I chartered. This company, in turn, was financed by private investors, who expected the colonists to discover a valuable commodity, or a route to East Asia, which would make the enterprise profitable and offer a return on their investment.

The investors in London hoped that some of the "vanished" Roanoke colonists (or their descendants) were still alive and, with knowledge they gained about the area, could guide the Jamestown colonists to minerals and a passage to East Asia, Kupperman noted.

Unfortunately, the company chose to build its settlement on "a disease-ridden, bug-infested swampy island with no source of fresh water," Jerome Bridges, a park ranger and Historic Jamestowne tour guide, told Live Science. Located about 60 miles (94 kilometers) up the James River from the Atlantic Coast, the site was chosen because the settlers had orders from their investors not to take any land that was occupied by the Indigenous people, Bridges said. This policy did not last for long as Jamestown expanded after being established, creating tensions with the Indigenous people living in the area.

Additionally, the colonists' selected spot may have been considered more defensible than other locations that had been scouted, Joseph Kelly, professor and director of Irish and Irish American studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, wrote in the book " Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin " (Bloomsbury, 2018). 

The Indigenous people in the area were the Powhatan and were led by Wahunsenacawh, whom Europeans often called "Chief Powhatan: His realm was known as "Tsenacommacah" and it encompassed about 15,000 people who lived in several communities, Historic Jamestowne noted .

When the English landed there in May 1607, they divided themselves into three groups: One group was to build fortifications, a storehouse and some simple houses; the second group was to plant crops; and the third party was to explore the area in search of minerals and a passage to East Asia.

It did not take long for the colonists to run into trouble. Within a few weeks, a force of several hundred Powhatans attacked the settlement. The colonists had not even unpacked their muskets, and so they relied on naval gunfire from the ships that were still off the coast to repel the attackers. "Had the ships not fired their ordnance, the colony would have been overwhelmed," Kupperman wrote. 

In the following few weeks, the settlers focused on building a fort, which was a triangular palisade with three bulwarks, or raised platforms, for cannons.

Before long, the colonists started dying. Of the 104 men and boys who landed, only 38 were still alive by January 1608, according to the National Park Service . Research revealed that the colonists' drinking  water was salty and contained arsenic . Additionally, food ran out, famine set in, and a particularly harsh winter compounded the misery of the colonists.

"Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases as swellings, fluxes [also called dysentery], burning fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meer famine," wrote George Percy, one of the survivors, in a report on the colony. "There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were in this new discovered Virginia."

In that first year, the bodies were buried in unmarked graves to prevent the Powhatans from finding out that so many of the settlers had died, according to Bridges. Excavations by William Kelso, director of archaeology for Jamestown Rediscovery at Historic Jamestowne, and his team revealed 29 burial shafts close to the west palisade wall inside the fort. The team thinks these graves likely hold many of the colonists who died in 1607.

Two of the excavated grave shafts contain two bodies each. According to the Historic Jamestowne website, the colonists likely resorted to double burials because so many men were dying in a short timespan. Twenty individuals died in August 1607 alone, and multiple burials saved energy and time. 

The body of a boy, who was around 14 years old, was found with a small arrowhead next to his right leg, which suggests he had been shot shortly before he was buried. Percy recorded that a boy was slain during combat with Powhatans in the first month of the settlement, and it's possible that these remains belong to that boy.

The well-known story of how Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain John Smith's life very likely did not happen, at least not the way most people have heard it (and most certainly not the way the 1995 Disney animated movie told it), Bridges said. 

Smith, who was elected president of the colony's council in 1608 after most of the councillors died or became incapacitated, wrote that the colony depended on trade with friendly Powhatan tribes to survive. Powhatan's people often visited the settlers when they weren't fighting the colonists, according to Bridges. The chief's daughter, about 10 years old at the time, was a frequent visitor to Jamestown, delivering messages from her father and bringing food and furs to trade for hatchets and trinkets, Bridges said.

She also liked to play, and would spend time turning cartwheels with the boys of the colony. Her name was actually Matoaka, and Pocahontas was a nickname meaning "Little Wanton" in Algonquin, according to Historic Jamestowne's website . 

Smith later wrote in his book "The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles," published in 1624, that at one point during an expedition in December 1607, he was captured and brought to Powhatan. He was first welcomed and offered a feast. Then he was grabbed and forced to stretch out on two large, flat stones. People stood over him with clubs as though ready to beat him to death if ordered. Suddenly, Pocahontas rushed in and took Smith's "head in her arms and laid her owne upon his to save him from death," Smith wrote .  The girl then pulled him to his feet. Powhatan said that they were now friends, and he adopted Smith as his son, or a subordinate chief. 

Smith's tale has become legend, and he romanticized it in later writings, Historic Jamestowne noted. Smith told the story only after Pocahontas converted to Christianity in 1614. And if Smith's story is true, this mock "execution and salvation" ceremony was traditional with Powhatan tribes, and Pocahontas' actions were probably one part of a ritual, according to Historic Jamestowne . 

Jamestown's "starving time"

Although the colony had been resupplied, along with 100 new settlers, in January 1608, the settlers hit another low during the winter of 1609 to 1610 — a period that became known as the "starving time," according to Historic Jamestowne. By this time, Smith had been forced to return to England due to gunpowder injuries, and the colony's new governor, Thomas Gates, had been shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda along with essential supplies.

By this point, relations with the Powhatans had deteriorated to the point where trade was impossible and the Jamestown fort was under siege. When the colonists ran out of food, they "fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin, as dogs, cats, rats and mice," Percy wrote. Recent research has confirmed that dogs were eaten at Jamestown and that these dogs were at least partly native to North America . Historical records indicate that boots, shoes and leather were also consumed, and archaeological evidence confirms that some colonists resorted to human cannibalism to survive. 

In May 1610, Gates made his way from Bermuda to the colony on makeshift ships made partly from wood found on Bermuda. Finding only 60 survivors at Jamestown, he gave the order to abandon the settlement but not to burn it. As the group set out to sea, however, they encountered a fleet led by English merchant and politician Lord De La Warr, with fresh supplies and new colonists, so they returned to Jamestown and repaired the fort. (The state of Delaware was later named after De La Warr.)

During the colony's early years, it was difficult to convince new settlers to go to Jamestown; as a result, some people, including prisoners and those living on the streets, were sent against their will, British writer Jennifer Potter wrote in her book " The Jamestown Brides: The Story of England's 'Maids for Virginia '" (Oxford University Press, 2019). The city of London even raised money to send London's homeless to Virginia, wrote Potter, noting that King James I was in favor of it. Many of the homeless sent were males. 

In 1618, the Virginia Company became particularly interested in getting homeless children to the colony as children were believed to be "more pliable than adults," Potter wrote. Instructions were issued to London's constables to apprehend street children and take them to a place where they would wait to be taken overseas. Poor families were also coerced to send children they couldn't support to Jamestown, Potter noted. 

Jamestown's improving fortunes

In the following decade Jamestown's situation improved. Martial law was imposed, solving, however harshly, some of the discipline problems — such as people ignoring orders — experienced during the first three years of the colony, according to Historic Jamestowne.

Until this point, the colonists had failed to find a marketable commodity that would help fund the settlement and develop its economy, but this problem was solved in 1612, when a settler named John Rolfe experimented with tobacco seeds ― possibly from Trinidad ― and developed a marketable crop that could be exported to England. King James I later gave the Virginia Company a monopoly on tobacco, making the trade even more profitable. He even allowed the company to set up a lottery to provide additional funds for the Jamestown venture, according to Historic Jamestowne.

In April 1613, Pocahontas was captured and brought to Jamestown. Although her captors intended to use her to barter for English prisoners, she turned into a catalyst for peace. She married Rolfe in April 1614 in the Jamestown church, converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca Rolfe. Her father, Powhatan, reached a peace agreement with the English that allowed the colony to expand its cultivated territory and set up new settlements, including Henrico and Bermuda Hundred.

Now, "after five years' intestine [frequent] war with the revengeful, implacable Indians, a firm peace (not again easily to be broken) hath been lately concluded," Gov. Thomas Dale wrote in 1614.

Pocahontas, Rolfe and their infant son traveled to London in 1616, where she became something of a celebrity. However, she died of an unspecified illness in 1617 while the three of them were preparing to return to Virginia. Rolfe headed to Virginia alone, leaving their son in the care of an English family.

In August 1619, a Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown and traded food supplies for the ship's cargo of around 20 enslaved people, who were originally from Angola. "Slavery as it was later defined did not yet exist in the Chesapeake, and some of these Africans lived to achieve their freedom," Kupperman wrote. They worked as indentured servants (as many English newcomers did), but were forced to labor for longer terms. Indentured servants normally had to work for the company for a certain time to pay for their passage and goods given them. 

While people from Africa had been brought to the Americas as slaves to work in Central and South America in the 16th century, 1619 marked the first time that Africans were brought to North America to work as slaves at an English colony. 

Today, 1619 is regarded as the beginning of a new period in American history. "The unequal social status of African Americans begins with the 246-year period from 1619 to 1865, when slavery was a critically important economic and social institution in American life," a team of researchers wrote in a 2019 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health . As the colony expanded, more slave were brought into Virginia. 

In 1619, Sir George Yeardley, a former colonist who had been appointed governor in 1618, returned to Jamestown from England with instructions from the Virginia Company to create "a laudable form of government" that would create "just laws for the happy guiding and governing of the people there," according to historical documents that can be accessed on Encyclopedia Virginia. 

In July of that year, 30 men met for the first time in Jamestown to discuss issues facing the growing colony. "This assembly was the first expression of English representative government in North America," Kelso wrote in his book, " Jamestown: The Buried Truth " (University of Virginia Press, 2006).

In 1619, the Virginia Company created a program that encouraged single women to travel to Jamestown, which in its early years had been a predominantly male settlement. The company hoped that more women in the colony would encourage the Jamestown men to settle down, rather than return to England after making some money.

The Virginia Company set a "bride price" of 150 pounds (68 kilograms) of tobacco to be paid by a man to the company who married one of the women, Potter wrote in her book. 

Potter tracked down the origins of the women who traveled to Jamestown in 1621 and found that 1 in 6 of the women were daughters of gentry (members of the aristocracy). The rest "represented a microcosm of 'middling' England, with fathers, brothers, uncles, working in respectable trades," Potter wrote, noting that people who knew the women had to attest to their good character, and the women had to go voluntarily, although some may have been coerced by relatives. 

After the death of the peacemaker Chief Powhatan in April 1618, war seemed inevitable, Kupperman wrote. With the English colony growing, and the settlers using more land and making more aggressive attempts to convert Powhatan people to Christianity the stage was set for a showdown.

Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan's successor, felt threatened by the growing English presence, which by that time consisted of more than 1,000 people on several plantations. In 1622, he launched a surprise attack in an attempt to wipe out the colony.

The Virginia Company claimed the attack killed 347 people, Kupperman wrote, although the actual death toll was likely higher. The English were forced to abandon some plantations and cluster closer together.

Although the attack succeeded in killing many English, it failed in its aim of pushing them out of the region. More settlers arrived to work on the plantations, and the attack gave the English an excuse to wage war against Opechancanough's people, sparing only the children so that they could be converted to Christianity and forced to work on the English plantations, according to Kupperman.

This war was a take-no-prisoners affair, Kupperman wrote. "In [May] 1623 they [the colonists] invited Indian leaders to a peace parley where they served poisoned wine and then fired on the disabled Indians." 

From the start of the Jamestown colony, the settlers held a number of military advantages over the Native American tribes in the region. They had gunpowder weapons, equipment made of steel and iron, as well as armor that could offer some protection from arrow hits, Kelly wrote in his book. The Powhatans, on the other hand, had bows and arrows and melee weapons that may have included clubs, knives and spears.

As the Virginia colony grew, Jamestown developed into a thriving port town. Thousands of colonists either passed through to start tobacco plantations farther inland, or settled in Jamestown, which expanded by developing a suburb of sorts called New Towne, situated east of the original fort.

Representative government took hold in the 1620s, and inns and taverns were soon established. The tobacco trade, meanwhile, required warehouses and piers along the shore. Jamestown's well-to-do residents built English-style cottages and houses along New Towne's main road.

With new settlers flowing in, the English gained control of the Chesapeake Bay area and launched new colonies (including Plymouth in 1620) along the Eastern Seaboard of the future United States. In May 1624, the Virginia Company was formally dissolved, and Jamestown became a crown colony with a governor appointed by the king.

With the growth of new settlements in Virginia, and the English colonists' improving military situation in the region, the original Jamestown fort site became redundant. Jamestown remained the capital of Virginia until 1699 — a fire destroyed Jamestown's statehouse in 1698, so the capital moved to Williamsburg, according to Historic Jamestowne .

In 1994, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) began archaeological work to look for ruins from the original Jamestown fort, Kelso told Live Science. It was widely believed at the time that the fort had been washed away into the James River.

Excavations revealed holes where the triangular palisade had once stood, along with the remains of three bulwarks used to strengthen its defenses. The archaeologists also found the remnants of five churches (one built on top of the remains of the preceding church); row houses, including a structure that appears to be the governor's house; a blacksmith shop; and barracks, among other features. 

In 2015 archaeologists uncovered the  burial sites of four Jamestown leaders who had been buried in one of the churches. In 2018, archaeologists digging in a church in Jamestown found a  headless body that might be that of Yeardley. They are hoping to match DNA from the skeleton and teeth found nearby with DNA from Yeardley's living descendants.

To help visitors learn more about what Jamestown was like, replicas of the triangular fort, a barracks and the original church have been built on their original plots. Some reproductions have been built using similar bricks. 

Originally published on July 24, 2018. Additional reporting by Tim Sharp. 

Historic Jamestowne's website contains a sizable amount of information about the settlement's artifacts and records. Jamestown is part of a national historical park, and the National Park Service has information on how to visit it . Slavery in the United States has a long history, and recent research has revealed more information about the Underground Railroad that led some people to freedom. 

Jamestown timeline

May 1607 : Jamestown, named after King James I of England, is founded and consists of 104 men and boys.

August 1607 : In this month alone, 20 of the colonists die.

December 1607 : John Smith is captured and brought to Chief Powhatan. Smith claims that Pocahontas saves his life, although this is likely not true.

January 1608 : Only 38 of the 104 original colonists are still alive; poor water and food shortages contribute to the high mortality rate. 100 new colonists are brought in from England during this month. 

Winter 1609-1610 : The "starving time" sees some colonists resort to human cannibalism. 

May 1610 : Governor Gates, who had been shipwrecked on Bermuda, makes his way to Jamestown on makeshift ships. Finding only 60 colonists alive, he gives orders to abandon Jamestown. But while leaving, the settlers encounter a relief fleet led by Lord De La Warr that has fresh supplies and new colonists.

1612 : While experimenting with tobacco seeds, John Rolfe finds that tobacco grows well in Virginia, giving the colony a marketable product.

April 1613 : Pocahontas is captured and brought to Jamestown.

April 1614 : Pocahontas marries John Rolfe, and the two leave for England where Pocahontas becomes something of a celebrity. A peace agreement of sorts is reached between Jamestown and Chief Powhatan.

March 1617 : Pocahontas dies in England at around age 21.

April 1618 : Chief Powhatan dies; relations between the Powhatans and Jamestown's colonists decline.

1619 : A program is launched encouraging women to migrate to Jamestown and marry colonists. 

July 1619 : First meeting of the colony's assembly

August 1619 : A Dutch ship brings more than 20 enslaved people from Africa to Jamestown.

1622 : Opechancanough, the successor of Powhatan, launches a surprise attack on Jamestown; more than 300 English people are killed and all-out war breaks out.

May 1623 : After agreeing to a peace parley, several Native American leaders in the area are killed after drinking poisoned wine.

May 1624 : The Virginia Company is dissolved and Jamestown becomes a crown colony. English settlement in Virginia continues to expand, with Jamestown as the legislative center. 

1699 : After a fire burns down the legislative building at Jamestown, Virginia's capital moves to Williamsburg. Jamestown itself becomes abandoned. 

Kelly, J. (2018) "Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin" Bloomsbury,

Kelso, W. (2006) "Jamestown: The Buried Truth" University of Virginia Press

Kupperman, K. (2007) "The Jamestown Project" The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

LaVeist, T. A., Fullilove, M., & Fullilove, R. (2019). 400 Years of Inequality Since Jamestown of 1619.  American journal of public health ,  109 (1), 83–84. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304824  

Potter, J. (2019) "The Jamestown Brides: The Story of England's 'Maids for Virginia'" Oxford University Press

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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University. 

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most miserable and poore creatures; and those were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish: . . . yea, even the very skinnes of our horses. Nay, so great was our famine, that a Salvage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him, and so did divers one another boyled and stewed with roots and herbs: And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne, for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved.

Subsequent commanders De La Warr, Gates, and Dale created a set of strict laws and draconian punishments to try to prevent such terrible starvation and disease. A quick glance at the laws reveals other concerns, too:

No man shall ravish or force any woma[n], maid or Indian, or other, upon pain of death. . . No man of what condition soever shall barter, trucke, or trade with the Indians, except he be thereunto appointed by lawful authority, upon paine of death. There shall no man or woman, Launderer or Launderesse, dare to wash any uncleane Linnen, drive bucks, or throw out the water or suds of fowle cloathes, in the open streete, within the Pallizadoes, or within forty foote of the same, nor rench, and make cleane, any kettle, pot, or pan, or such like vessell within twenty foote of the olde well, or new Pumpe: nor shall any one aforesaid, within lesse then a quarter of one mile from the Palllizadoes, dare to doe the necessities of nature, since by these unmanly, slothfull, and loathsome immodesties, the whole Fort may bee choaked, and poisoned with ill aires, and so corrupt (as in all reason cannot but much infect the same) and this shall they take notice of, and avoide, upon paine of whipping and further punishment. . . Every man shall have an especiall and due care, to keepe his house sweete and cleane, as also so much of the streete, as lieth before his door. . . No man or woman, (upon paine of death) shall runne away from the Colonie, to Powhathan, or any savage Weroance else whatsoever. Whatever man or woman soever, Launderer or Laundresse appointed to wash the foule linnen of any one labourer or souldier, or any one else as it is their duties so to doe, performing little, or no other service for their allowance out of the store. . .and shall from the said labourer or souldier, or any one else, of what qualitie whatsoever, either take any thing for washing, or withhold or steale from him any such linnen committed to her charge to wash or change the same willingly and wittingly, with purpose to give him worse, old and torne linnen for his good. . .she shall be whipped for the same, and lie in prison till she make restitution for such linnen, withheld or changed. (4)

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996.

Brown, Kathleen M. "In Search of Pocahontas," in Nancy Rhoden and Ian Steele, eds., The Human Tradition in Colonial America, pp. 71-96. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

Lebsock, Suzanne. "A Share of Honour": Virginia Women, 1600-1945. Richmond: The Virginia Women's Cultural History Project, 1984.

Ransome, David R. "Wives for Virginia, 1621." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., XLVIII (1991):3-18.

Sluiter, Engel. "New Light on the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., LIV (1997):395-398.

Thornton, John. "The African Experience of the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., LV (1998):421-434.

1 Kathleen M. Brown, "In Search of Pocahontas," in Nancy Rhoden and Ian Steele, eds., The Human Tradition in Colonial America, (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999), pp. 71-96; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), p. 67.

2 John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624) in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 3 vols., (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), II:232-233.

3 Carville V. Earle, "Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society & Politics, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979), pp. 96-125.

4 "Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martiall for the Colony of Virginia," in Peter Force, ed. Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, 4 vols., (Washington, D. C.: 1836; reprint, Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1963), III:9-19.

5 Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, p. 85.

6 H.R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 2nd ed. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1979), pp. 15-18, 100-109.

7 David R. Ransome, "Wives for Virginia, 1621," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. XLVIII (1991):3-18.

8 Ransome, "Wives for Virginia."

9 Engel Sluiter, "New Light on the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. LIV (1997):396-398; John Thornton, "The African Experience of the '20 and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia in 1619," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., LV (1998):421-434.

10 Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, pp. 107-116.

11 Ibid., pp. 108-136.

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Rethinking Jamestown

America’s first permanent colonists have been considered incompetent. But new evidence suggests that it was a drought—not indolence—that almost did them in

Jeffery L. Sheler

To the english voyagers who waded ashore at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on a balmy April day in 1607, the lush Virginia landscape must have seemed like a garden paradise after four and a half months at sea. One ebullient adventurer later wrote that he was “almost ravished” by the sight of the freshwater streams and “faire meddowes and goodly tall trees” they encountered when they first landed at Cape Henry. After skirmishing with a band of Natives and planting a cross, the men of the Virginia Company expedition returned to their ships—the Susan Constant , Godspeed and Discovery — and the 104 passengers and crew continued up the Powhatan River (soon to be renamed the James in honor of their King, James I) in search of a more secure site.

They thought they had found it on a marshy peninsula some 50 miles upstream—a spot they believed could be defended against Indians attacking from the mainland and that was far enough from the coast to ensure ample warning of approaching Spanish warships. They set about building a fortress and clearing land for the commercial outpost they had been sent to establish and which they called “James Cittie.” They were eager to get down to the business of extracting gold, timber and other commodities to ship back to London.

But Jamestown proved to be neither paradise nor gold mine. In the heat of that first summer at the mosquito-infested settlement, 46 of the colonists died of fever, starvation or Indian arrows. By year’s end, only 38 remained. Were it not for the timely arrival of British supply ships in January 1608, and again the following October, Jamestown, like Roanoke a few years before, almost certainly would have vanished.

It is little wonder that history has not smiled on the colonists of Jamestown. Though recognized as the first permanent English settlement in North America and the setting for the charming (if apocryphal) tale of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith, Jamestown has been largely ignored in colonial lore in favor of Massachusetts’ Plymouth Colony. And what has survived is not flattering, especially when compared with the image of industrious and devout Pilgrims seeking religious freedom in a new land. In contrast, the Jamestown settlers are largely remembered as a motley assortment of inept and indolent English gentlemen who came looking for easy money and instead found self-inflicted catastrophe. “Without a trace of foresight or enterprise,” wrote historian W. E. Woodward in his 1936 A New American History , “ . . . they wandered about, looking over the country, and dreaming of gold mines.”

But today the banks of the James River are yielding secrets hidden for nearly 400 years that seem to tell a different story. Archaeologists working at the settlement site have turned up what they consider dramatic evidence that the colonists were not ill-prepared dandies and laggards, and that the disaster-plagued Virginia Colony, perhaps more than Plymouth, was the seedbed of the American nation—a bold experiment in democracy, perseverance and enterprise.

The breakthrough came in 1996, when a team of archaeologists working for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities ( APVA ) discovered a portion of the decayed ruins of the original 1607 Jamestown fort, a triangular wooden structure many historians were certain had been swallowed by the river long ago. By the end of the 2003 digging season, the archaeologists had located the fort’s entire perimeter on the open western edge of the heavily wooded 1,500-acre island; only one corner of it had been lost to the river. “This was a huge find,” William Kelso, chief archaeologist at the site, said shortly after the discovery. “Now we know where the heart is, the center of the colonial effort, the bull’s-eye. We know exactly where to dig now, and we will focus our time and resources on uncovering and analyzing the interior of the James Fort.”

Since then, Kelso and his team have excavated the ruins of several buildings inside the fort’s perimeter, along with thousands of artifacts and the skeletal remains of some of the first settlers. Only a third of the site has been excavated, and many of the artifacts are still being analyzed. Yet the evidence has already caused historians to reconsider some longheld assumptions about the men and the circumstances surrounding what YaleUniversity history professor emeritus Edmund S. Morgan once called “the Jamestown fiasco .” “Archaeology is giving us a much more concrete picture of what it was like to live there,” says Morgan, whose 1975 history, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , argued that Jamestown’s first years were disastrous. “But whether it turns the Virginia Company into a success story is another question.”

The large number of artifacts suggests that, if nothing else, the Virginia Company expedition was much better equipped than previously thought. By the end of the 2003 season, more than half a million items, from fishhooks and weaponry to glassmaking and woodworking equipment, along with the bones of game fish and assorted livestock, had been recovered and cataloged. Many are now on display at the Jamestown Rediscovery project headquarters, a clapboard Colonial-style building a few hundred yards from the fort. “All of this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that the colonists were underfunded and illequipped, that they didn’t have the means to survive, let alone prosper,” says Kelso. “What we have found here suggests that just isn’t the case.”

In a climate-controlled room down the hall from Kelso’s sparsely decorated office, Beverly Straube, the project’s curator, sorts and analyzes the detritus of everyday life and death in the Virginia Colony. Some of the more significant artifacts are nestled in shallow open boxes, labeled and carefully arranged on long tables according to where the items were found. From one box, Straube picks up a broken ceramic piece with drops of shiny white “frosting” attached to its surface. “It’s part of a crucible,” she explains. “And this,” she says, pointing to the white substance, “is molten glass. We know from John Smith’s records that German glassmakers were brought in to manufacture glass to sell back in London. Here we have evidence of the glassmakers at work in the Jamestown fort.” From another box, she takes a broken ceramic piece with a cut-out hole and an ear-like protrusion. She compares it with a sketch of a ceramic oven, about the size of a toaster, used by 16th-century craftsmen to make clay tobacco pipes. Nearby are fragments of a glass alembic (a domed vessel used in distilling) and a ceramic boiling vessel, known as a cucurbit, for refining precious metals. “These artifacts tell us that the colonists weren’t just sitting around,” Straube says. “When they were healthy enough to work, this was an industrious place.”

In another room, Straube opens a drawer and pulls out a pitted piece of iron—round, with a point protruding from its center. It is a buckler, she explains, a shield used in handto- hand combat. It was found in a trench surrounding the fort’s east bulwark. By 1607, she says, bucklers were considered largely obsolete as tools of war in Europe—which would seem to fit the traditional view that the Jamestown expedition was provisioned with castoff weapons and equipment. “But we believe these were deliberately chosen,” Straube says, “because the settlers knew they were more likely to face guerrilla-type combat against Indian axes and arrows than a conventional war against Spanish firearms. So the buckler would have come in handy.”

In the cellar of what had been a mud-walled building that extends outward from the eastern palisade wall, archaeologists have found pottery shards, broken dishes and tobacco pipes, food remains, musket balls, buttons and coins. The cellar had been filled with trash, probably in 1610 during a massive cleanup of the site ordered by the newly appointed governor, Lord de la Warre, who arrived at Jamestown just in time to prevent the starving colonists from abandoning the settlement and returning to England. Establishing the date helps show that the cellar’s contents, which included the glassmaking and distilling equipment on display at the APVA headquarters, dated to the colony’s critical first years. It is from such early artifacts that Kelso and Straube are revising the colony’s history.

Sifting through cellars and trenches in and around the fort, Kelso and his team recently uncovered a surprisingly large quantity of Indian pottery, arrowheads and other items. These suggest that the colonists had extensive dealings with the Natives. In one cellar, an Indian cooking pot containing pieces of turtle shell was found next to a large glass bead that the English used in trade with the Indians. “Here we believe we have evidence of an Indian woman, inside the fort, cooking for an English gentleman,” Straube says. While such arrangements may have been rare, Kelso adds, the find strongly implies that Natives occasionally were present inside the fort for peaceful purposes and may even have cohabited with the Englishmen before English women arrived in significant numbers in 1620.

What is known from Virginia Company papers is that the colonists were instructed to cultivate a close relationship with the Indians. Both documentary and archaeological records confirm that English copper and glass goods were exchanged for Indian corn and other foods, initially at least. But the relationship didn’t last long, and the consequences for both the English and the Indians proved deadly.

As grim as the first year was at Jamestown, the darkest days for the colonists were yet to come. In 1608, the set tlement was resupplied twice with new recruits and fresh provisions from London. But when nearly 400 new immigrants arrived aboard seven English supply ships in August 1609, they found the colonists struggling to survive. In September, the former president of the colony, John Ratcliffe, led a group of 50 men up the PamunkeyRiver to meet with Wahunsunacock—better known as Chief Powhatan, the powerful leader of the Powhatan Indians—to bargain for food. The colonists were ambushed, Ratcliffe was taken prisoner and tortured to death, and only 16 of his men made it back to the fort alive (and empty handed).

That fall and winter in Jamestown would be remembered as “the starving time.” Out of food, the colonists grew sick and weak. Few had the strength to venture from their mudand- timber barracks to hunt, fish or forage for edible plants or potable water. Those who did risked being picked off by Indians waiting outside the fort for nature to take its course. Desperate, the survivors ate their dogs and horses, then rats and other vermin, and eventually the corpses of their comrades. By spring, only 60 colonists were still alive, down from 500 the previous fall.

The starving time is represented by debris found in a barracks cellar—the bones of a horse bearing butchery marks, and the skeletal remains of a black rat, a dog and a cat. To the west of the fort, a potters’ field of hastily dug graves—some as early as 1610—contained 72 settlers, some of the bodies piled haphazardly on top of others in 63 separate burials.

In the conventional view of Jamestown, the horror of the starving time dramatizes the fatal flaws in the planning and conduct of the settlement. Why, after three growing seasons, were the men of Jamestown still unable or unwilling to sustain themselves? History’s judgment, once again, has been to blame “gentlemen” colonists who were more interested in pursuing profits than in tilling the soil. While the Virginia “woods rustled with game and the river flopped with fish,” according to The American Pageant, a 1956 history textbook, the “soft-handed English gentlemen . . . wasted valuable time seeking gold when they should have been hoeing corn.” They were “spurred to their frantic search” by greedy company directors in London who “threatened to abandon the colonists if they did not strike it rich.”

But Kelso and Straube are convinced the fate of the colony was beyond the control of either the settlers or their London backers. According to a landmark 1998 climate study, Jamestown was founded at the height of a previously undocumented drought—the worst seven-year dry spell in nearly 800 years. The conclusion was based on a tree-ring analysis of cypress trees in the region showing that their growth was severely stunted between 1606 and 1612. The study’s authors say a major drought would have dried up fresh-water supplies and devastated corn crops on which both the colonists and the Indians depended. It also would have aggravated relations with the Powhatans, who found themselves competing with the English for a dwindling food supply. In fact, the period coincides perfectly with bloody battles between the Indians and the English. Relations improved when the drought subsided.

The drought theory makes new sense of written comments by Smith and others, often overlooked by historians. In 1608, for example, Smith records an unsuccessful attempt to trade goods for corn with the Indians. “(Their corne being that year bad) they complained extreamly of their owne wants,” Smith wrote. On another occasion, an Indian leader appealed to him “to pray to my God for raine, for their Gods would not send any.” Historians have long assumed that the Powhatans were trying to mislead the colonists in order to conserve their own food supplies. But now, says archaeologist Dennis Blanton, a co-author of the tree-ring study, “for the first time it becomes clear that Indian reports of food shortages were not deceptive strategies but probably true appraisals of the strain placed on them from feeding two populations in the midst of drought.”

Blanton and his colleagues conclude that the Jamestown colonists probably have been unfairly criticized “for poor planning, poor support, and a startling indifference to their own subsistence.” The Jamestown settlers “had the monumental bad luck to arrive in April 1607,” the authors wrote. “Even the best planned and supported colony would have been supremely challenged” under such conditions.

Kelso and his co-workers are hardly the first archaeologists to probe the settlement. In 1893, the APVA acquired 22.5 acres of JamestownIsland, most of which had become farmland. In 1901, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a sea wall to protect the site from further river erosion; a few graves and the statehouse at the settlement’s western end were excavated at the time as well. In the 1950s, National Park Service archaeologists found footings and foundations of 17th-century structures east of the fort and hundreds of artifacts, though they couldn’t locate the fort itself; since the 1800s it was widely assumed to lie underwater.

Today, the site of the original colonial settlement is largely given over to archaeological research, with few visual links to the past. Kelso and a full-time staff of ten work almost year-round, and they’re assisted by some 20 student workers during the summer. Tourists wander the grassy site snapping pictures of Kelso’s team toiling behind protective fences. Bronze statues of Smith and Pocahontas stand along the James River. There’s a gift shop and a restored 17th-century church. And a $5 million “archaearium”—a 7,500-square-foot educational building that will house many of the colonial artifacts— is to be completed for the 2007 quadricentennial.

The surge in research at the original Jamestown can be traced to 1994, when the APVA , anticipating the colony’s 400th anniversary, launched a ten-year hunt for physical evidence of Jamestown’s origins and hired Kelso, who had excavated 17th-century sites near Williamsburg and was then conducting historical research at Monticello.

Kelso is unmistakably pleased with the revisionist spin his findings have given to the Jamestown saga. Yet rewriting history, he says, was not what he had in mind when he began the work. “I simply wanted to get the rest of the story,” he says. Most of what is known of Jamestown’s grim early years, he notes, comes from the writings of Smith—clearly the most prolific of the colony’s chroniclers—and a handful of his compatriots, along with a few sketchy records from the Virginia Company in London. Such documents, Kelso says, are a “deliberate record” and often are “written with a slant favorable to the writer.” Smith’s journal, for example, frequently depicts many of his fellow colonists as shiftless and inept. But Smith’s journal “is obviously slanted,” says Kelso. “He comes out the star in his own movie.”

An example is the tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas, which Smith first related in his writings in 1624, some 17 years after the incident. Because the story was never mentioned in his earlier writings, some historians now dismiss it as legend—though Pocahontas did exist.

Not that Jamestown’s archaeological evidence is beyond question. Some archaeologists argue that it’s nearly impossible to date Jamestown’s artifacts or differentiate the founding colonists’ debris from what later arrivals left behind. Retired Virginia archaeologist Ivor Noël Hume, the former director of archaeology at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, notes that the fort was occupied until the 1620s and was rebuilt several times. “It’s hard to pin down what the original settlers brought with them and what came later,” he says.

But Kelso and Straube say they can accurately date most of the artifacts and draw reasonable conclusions as to when certain structures were built and abandoned. “If we find a piece of broken pottery in a trash pit, and another piece of the same vessel in a nearby well,” Straube explains, “we know these two structures existed at the same time.” Moreover, she says, the appearance of certain imported items from Portugal, Spain or Germany indicate a period after the Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624 and the colony’s management was turned over to England’s Crown. “It’s really a different Jamestown in the later period,” she says.

Some historians still have their doubts. “What they are finding may require some adjustment to the views of historians relying solely on documents,” Yale’s Morgan concedes. But the reputation of Jamestown as a failure will be a hard one to shake, he adds: “It will take a lot more than a half million artifacts to show that the Virginia Company learned from its mistakes and made a go of it in the colonies.”

Kelso is convinced that much more colonial history lies buried in the island’s soil. During the 2004 digging season, excavators uncovered the footprint of a long and narrow building inside the fort. The presence of unusually fancy glassware and pieces of Chinese porcelain buried inside suggests to Straube that it was a place of high-style dining and entertaining, perhaps the governor’s home, which written records indicate was built in 1611. In the cellar of another structure, a student volunteer uncovered wine bottles, intact but empty, that are believed to date to the late 1600s, when Jamestown was prospering as a tobacco and trade center.

“Were there gentlemen at Jamestown?” says Kelso. “Of course. And some of them were lazy and incompetent. But not all. The proof of the matter is that the settlement survived, and it survived because people persisted and sacrificed.” And what began as an English settlement gradually evolved into something different, something new. “You look up and down the river as the settlement expanded and you find it is not like England. The houses are different—the towns, the agriculture, the commerce. They were really laying the roots of American society.” Despite the agony, the tragedy, and all of the missteps, says Kelso, “this is where modern America began.”

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• The Starving Time
• History of Jamestown /

“The starving time” was the winter of 1609-1610, when food shortages, fractured leadership, and a siege by Powhatan Indian warriors killed two of every three colonists at James Fort. From its beginning, the colony struggled to maintain a food supply. Trade relations with the Virginia Indian tribes were strained because a severe seven-year drought stressed food supplies for everyone in the region. Captain John Smith had some success trading European goods for corn in the first two years of the settlement, but his strongarm tactics also angered the tribal communities.

Aware of the food shortages, the Virginia Company sent a fleet of nine ships in July 1609 with new colonists and enough supplies to last through the winter. But the fleet was scattered and damaged by a hurricane. The largest ship, the Sea Venture , was shipwrecked on the Island of Bermuda with much of the supplies and leaders such as Captain Christopher Newport, Sir George Somers, and Sir Thomas Gates. In mid-August some of the ships arrived at Jamestown with 300 colonists and few supplies.

Smith was badly injured by a mysterious gunpowder explosion and forced to return to England in October. George Percy became President of the Council and faced the lethal combination of dwindling food supplies and an order by Chief Powhatan that his warriors should attack any colonists or livestock found outside the fort. Percy later wrote that “ Indians killed as fast without [the fort] as Famine and Pestilence did within .” Percy calculated that meager rations of half a can of meal a day would get them only halfway through the winter. He wrote that to satisfy their “ Crewell hunger ,” some went into the woods looking for “ Serpents and snakes, and to digge the earthe for wylde and unknowne Rootes, ” but those people “ weare Cutt off and slayne by the Salvages. ”

Starvation weakened the colonists and led to sicknesses such as dysentery and typhoid. The colonists ate shoe leather and butchered seven horses brought from England the summer before on the ill-fated fleet. Percy wrote, “ Then, having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin, as dogs, cats and mice.” There were charges of cannibalism: Starving settlers dug up “ dead corpses outt of graves ” to eat them, and others “ Licked upp the Bloode which ha[d] fallen from their weake fellowes .” Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists in 2012 uncovered the first forensic evidence of survival cannibalism in a European colony in North America.

The Sea Venture survivors arrived from Bermuda in May 1610 to find only 60 colonists still alive in the fort. Thomas Gates realized there would be further starvation within a few weeks; on June 7, 1610, he announced the colonists would abandon Jamestown and sail for England. But their path home was blocked by the arriving ship of the new governor of the colony, Lord De la Warr, who insisted they return and rebuild Jamestown.

explore the artifacts

“[N]othing was spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things w[hi]ch seame incredible….” – George Percy

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Collection Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827

The jamestown records of the virginia company of london: a conservator's perspective.

Library of Congress senior paper conservators Sylvia R. Albro and Holly H. Krueger tell the remarkable story of how Library conservators rescued Thomas Jefferson’s colonial Jamestown records from disintegration.

The Jamestown Records of the Virginia Company of London, part of the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, uniquely illuminate a critical era of early American history. Jefferson incorporated them into his own papers because he recognized their great historic value. This essay by Sylvia R. Albro and Holly H. Krueger, Senior Paper Conservators at the Library of Congress, tells the remarkable story of how these records were rescued from disintegration and suggests some of the many ways in which the physical conservation of historic documents is vital to the acquisition and preservation of historical knowledge. In this online presentation, the original Jamestown Records may be seen in Volumes 16 and 17 of The Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 8 . (Winter 2000)

Introduction | Physical Condition of the Jamestown Records in 1994 | History of the Jamestown Records | Paper Used in the Records | Ink Used in the Records | Discoloration Patterns in the Records | Treatment of Silked Documents: Weighing the Options | Mylar Treatment and Other Alternatives to De-Silking | The De-silking Option | De-silking the Jamestown Records | Repairing the De-silked Documents by Leafcasting | Treatment of Unsilked Pages | Future Treatment of the Jamestown Records | Notes

Introduction

The Jamestown Records of the Virginia Company of London trace the activities of the English settlers who founded the Jamestown colony in the Tidewater area of Chesapeake Bay. Dating from the early seventeenth century, the records are the earliest manuscript sources in the Library of Congress dealing with English settlements in the New World. The ultimate success of the Jamestown colony led to the establishment of the colony of Virginia, the largest and arguably the most important colony in British North America, and for that reason the records are a critical primary source for early American history.

The story told by the Jamestown Records, presented to the general public for the first time through The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress , is an important one. Another story, no less important, tells how the Library acquired these papers and the efforts it has made to restore and preserve them. This essay describes the history of the Jamestown Records themselves and explains how they were treated by the Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Physical Condition of the Jamestown Records in 1994

When they were brought to the attention of the Conservation Division in 1994, the Jamestown Records were in poor physical condition. There were two bound volumes and two hundred loose leaves dating from the early seventeenth century, all of which had been part of the personal library of Thomas Jefferson. For seventy years the collection had been stored in poor-quality acidic boxes, with the loose sheets interleaved with brittle paper and woodpulp board and tied up with string. The seventeenth-century script was difficult for an untrained eye to read and the papers displayed alarming damage from the conditions of their storage. They were soft and moldy, the ink had blurred and in some cases gotten wet, most of the sizing had deteriorated, and any original bindings had disappeared.

In such a state the papers could not be safely handled. A microfilm made in 1956 was available to readers, but the originals languished. The Manuscript Division requested that the condition of the papers be evaluated for their long-term preservation and that the stability of the collection be improved for limited handling by scholars and for exhibition use.

History of the Jamestown Records

It is a wonder that any originals from Jamestown survived at all given the continual conflicts the settlers experienced with Native Americans and the fact that both the palisade fort and the church where other papers and books were kept burned to the ground several times during the seventeenth century 1 . Yet this precious collection of papers, fragments though they are, was saved by a series of prominent Virginian political figures.

The earliest surviving information about their condition is a description written by William Stith, an early historian of Virginia who wrote of these same papers in 1746: ". . . they were so carelessly kept, are so broken, interrupted, and deficient, have been so mangled together in single Leaves and sheets in Books out of the binding that I foresee it will cost me infinite pains and labour to reduce and digest them. . . ." 2

Stith was able to persuade the government of Virginia to make transcripts of the papers as a preservation measure (these transcripts are also in the collections of the Library of Congress) but seems not to have treated the original papers. In 1825, Thomas Jefferson, who had purchased the loose Jamestown papers as part of the library of Peyton Randolph and the two bound Court Books from the collection of William Byrd, said that "I found the leaves so rotten as often to crumble into dust on being handled; I bound them, therefore together, that they might not be unnecessarily opened; and thus have preserved them forty-seven years." 3

Not all of the papers were bound, however, when they passed into the collections of the Library of Congress shortly thereafter. During the nineteenth century, a series of prominent scholars of early American history tried to persuade the federal government to publish and care for the papers, but to no avail. A memorandum written in 1901 to the Librarian of Congress by John C. Fitzpatrick, assistant chief of the Library's Manuscript Division, describes the papers as "tattered, worn with age, and rotted with mildew," and asks that the "privilege of consulting them be withheld in every case but the most exceptional one." 4 Soon afterwards, the "exceptional one" was found in the person of Susan M. Kingsbury, a professor of economic history trained at Columbia University who was hired by the Library to transcribe and publish the papers. In an ambitious and painstaking project that occupied the next thirty years, Kingsbury edited the four-volume Records of the Virginia Company of London, 1606-1626 (1906-35), which transcribes both the Library's papers and many others relating to the Jamestown settlement in public and private collections in England.

Some of Jefferson's bindings were evidently taken apart during this time, and the two volumes of the Court Book were rebound into buckram-covered library-style bindings retaining only the leather title from the previous covers. In her introduction to the first volume of The Records of the Virginia Company of London , Kingsbury writes that ". . . the papers after a century in the Capitol were in a still more deplorable state in 1901 than that described by William Stith, but [now] the loose pages have been carefully and skillfully repaired. . . ." 5 She was referring to the silking treatment that many though not all of the loose sheets had received at the hands of William Berwick, an expatriate Englishman and skilled manuscript restorer at the Library of Congress.

The Librarian of Congress at the time, Herbert Putnam, said of Berwick that he was "undoubtedly the foremost expert in the country and one of the leading experts of the world in work of this character." 6 A number of the papers were silked between 1901 and 1906 through a technique similar to that introduced to the international library field by the Vatican Library in the late nineteenth century. The annual report of the Librarian of Congress in 1901 describes the silking process in the following manner:

The paper is first dampened . . . then dried between boards and submitted to heavy pressure. Mending is then done using handmade paper, beveling and scraping the edges. The patch is held in place with flour paste and the manuscript is then pressed again. A covering of fine silk (crepeline) is pasted on each side of the manuscript and the manuscript is pressed again and mounted for filing. 7

In a later article, Berwick outlines an additional washing step that required the document to be immersed in warm water and heavily pressed before silking. 8 Unfortunately, no records specifically regarding the treatment of the Virginia Company papers have been located.

It is curious that only about half the loose papers were silked; other pages remained in the precarious state described so aptly two hundred years earlier, and the Court Book volumes were not silked. Berwick died in 1920, before Kingsbury's last two volumes of Virginia Company papers were published. Because the unsilked loose sheets come from this last published group, it is certainly possible that Berwick restored the papers in groups in response to deadlines for transcription and publication. The Manuscript Division correspondence of the time refers to the overwhelming body of work to be done and the very small staff available to do it. 9

Despite these efforts, the condition of the Jamestown Records evidently remained a concern. A note in the storage box by manuscript curator Thomas P. Martin, dated 1941, indicates that manuscripts were not to be sent to the Photoduplication Service for routine reproduction because of the fragility of the documents and their great value to the Library.

Thus, the Jamestown Records arrived at the Conservation Division for evaluation in 1994. The division was determined to complete the task of preserving the papers before the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown settlement in 2007. Their first task was to examine the documents' physical condition.

Paper Used in the Records

Conservation staff found that the paper used in the Virginia Company Records is almost exclusively of one type. It is a fine quality writing paper, uniform in fiber distribution and relatively free of clumps and inclusions. In the undamaged central portions of a few documents, the paper is still a creamy white. Fiber analysis confirms the paper to be composed primarily of linen. The water mark is a grape cluster with initials very similar to those found in papers made in the central region of France at the end of the fifteenth century. The outside dimensions of the papers are consistent with the French Grand Raisin: 46 x 61.3 cm. Each page currently measures half of this folio-size sheet, taking into account the trimming received over the years during binding and rebinding. These findings are consistent with what is known about English importation of foreign papers, especially from France, during the first half of the seventeenth century. 10

Ink Used in the Records

In contrast to the consistency of the paper, several distinct inks are evident in this set of records. Seventeenth-century writing relied almost exclusively on irongall inks. 11 The appearance and subsequent testing of all the inks on the Jamestown documents bear this out. 12 The inks vary in intensity and color but all are more brown than black. The color of an irongall ink is, in part, a function of variables in the original formula. Those inks that turn brown have been shown to indicate an original formulation that contains too much iron II sulfate in proportion to the gallic acid. 13 Most of the ink recipes surviving from the period in which the Jamestown Records were penned contain roughly the proportions demonstrated by this Elizabethan recipe: "Take four ounces of gum arabick, beat small, two ounces of gall beat gross. One ounce of copperas, and a quart of the commings off strong ale. Put all these together and stirr them 3 or 4 times a day--about 14 dayes then strein it through a cloth." 14

Clues to the proportions in the original recipe lie not only in the present color of an ink but in the degree of its deterioration. William Barrow found in his study of American colonial inks that a black color was a good indicator of an ink's destructive power on paper. He observed that those "inks which remained black are far more acidic than those which had turned brown." 15

Ink preparation was considered one of the seventeenth-century housewife's duties, and most period cookbooks include two or three recipes for it. It is tempting to imagine colonial women concocting ink by adding exotic materials found in the New World such as "Musquaspenne," or bloodroot, which Captain John Smith reported was a colorant in body ornamentation highly prized by the Powhatan Indians. 16 However, contemporary accounts of early life in the colonies suggest that women were preoccupied with activities more basic to survival than inkmaking and it is more likely that the inks found on this set of documents were imported with the paper. Nevertheless, the unusual ink color, discoloration, and solubility on some of the Jamestown Records sheets have prompted testing. X-ray fluorescence identified iron and calcium in all samples tested and copper and calcium in some. Spot tests confirmed the presence of iron.

Another influence on the ultimate color and aging characteristics of inks may be the container in which the ink was stored. Caniperius, the leading ink chemist of the seventeenth century, recommends storing ink in a lead container in order to deepen the color. 17 The Library's Conservation Division was therefore especially excited to learn that a lead inkwell was recently unearthed at the Jamestown archeological excavation site. While no ink traces were found in the container, its recovery does suggest that the Jamestown settlers followed Caniperius's recommendations. However, Library of Congress scientists identified no lead in the six Manuscript Division documents that they analyzed.

Discoloration Patterns in the Records

The Jamestown Records display interesting discoloration patterns consistent with storage in a wet and humid environment. Changes in relative humidity enhance the diffusion of iron2+ (a water-soluble component of irongall inks), which could account for the dramatic haloing effect evident on some pages. All the papers show evidence of exposure to water in its liquid form, which caused a once-soluble component of the ink to dissolve and spread throughout the wet area generally. This displaced ink does not respond to water in the same way today, suggesting that a chemical alteration has taken place in the past three hundred years. The hard tide lines that appear along some of the wet/dry interfaces contain this once-soluble ink component as well as sizing that is now yellowed. The areas that were obviously wet are considerably softer that the central portion of the pages. In addition, advanced paper deterioration and pink stains in these areas evince previous mold growth. Ink deterioration also follows the usual patterns for irongall inks. A number of the documents have suffered breaks in the paper as a result of the ink's acidity.

Treatment of Silked Documents: Weighing the Options

Although the silking treatment administered early in the twentieth century allowed the records to be consulted for essential scholarly research, it also created a presentation that is now considered unsatisfactory. The materials used in the silking process imparted agents that accelerate aging of the paper. Objects that have been silked are usually extremely brittle and unnaturally yellowed owing in part to the alum used in the starch adhesive. Surface pH ranges are very low. Apart from the gross obliteration of paper structure, legibility is impaired by the decreased contrast between the paper and the ink as well as by the woven silk gauze, which imposes a grid-like texture. Disfiguring foxing spots also appear on the infill paper after it is pressed between metal plates during the silking process. Although on many silked objects this induced foxing is evident on the original as well as the infill paper, the Virginia Company Records are on what was once a fine quality paper (in contrast to the lesser-quality fill paper). It may be that the original quality of the paper has protected the records somewhat from this common condition.

The Manuscript Division brought these records to the attention of the Conservation Division chiefly out of concern for their obviously poor general condition and a desire to protect them as a legacy for posterity. Enhancing their accessibility to serious scholars was an additional goal. Accordingly, treatment was directed primarily toward stabilization. The pivotal question to be decided was whether to re-treat the silked documents by removing the silking, or to try to improve their condition with less invasive techniques such as housing in mylar. Arguments in favor of the less aggressive course included the objective uncertainties that attend the washing and deacidification of irongall ink documents. Leaving possible re-treatment to future generations is, in some ways, a seductive option when one considers what might go wrong. Yet the more conservative approach clearly has its own liabilities. Through the years the Conservation Division at the Library of Congress has had the opportunity to examine and treat hundreds of other silked documents and has developed certain conclusions about the implications of this treatment for aging patterns and long-range stability. These conclusions guided the ultimate decision about the treatment of the Jamestown Records.

Mylar Treatment and Other Alternatives to De-Silking

Mylar encapsulation is the principal housing option available for brittle silked documents because of the present fragility of the paper. Yet there is compelling evidence that mylar encapsulation of an acidic object accelerates degradation by acid hydrolysis. 18 Double-sided documents such as the Jamestown Records are particularly vulnerable because inserting a buffering interleaf will not prevent this degradation. Non-aqueous deacidification is an unattractive option because depositing buffering salts in the complex structure of a silked object is an uncertain process.

The De-silking Option

Despite the attendant uncertainties, considerations in favor of removing silking include the likelihood of restoring silked documents to something close to their original appearance and the probability of increasing their legibility. The division has found that while re-treatment of silked documents cannot restore the original paper surface texture, some semblance of it is certainly unveiled. Legibility is reliably enhanced. The paper regains considerable flexibility. The deteriorating influence of the alum/starch adhesive is greatly minimized. There is also the opportunity of imparting some alkaline reserve during the course of this treatment.

Given the division's and the Library's collective experience, the unique set of variables presented by these objects, and the desire to return the documents to an optimal state of preservation, the decision was made to remove the silking from the Jamestown Records as part of the initiatives undertaken to preserve them.

De-silking the Jamestown Records

Generally, a silked document's response to water-based treatment can be reliably predicted by assessing its response to the silking process. Some silked documents show signs of ink sensitivity, specifically sinking, as a response to silking. The silked documents in the Jamestown Records were found to have a surface pH of 3.5-4, which is very typical of silked documents. The adhesive tested positive to alum. Treatment began with a thorough examination and spot testing of the individual sheets, silked and unsilked. While all the silked documents tested stable to water-based treatment reagents, some of the unsilked documents were very sensitive to water. Although inks which had been visually affected by the silking procedure tested stable to the water-based reagents, the fact that they had responded negatively to treatment once before was not reassuring. In addition, areas where the paper fibers have broken under the action of the acidic irongall ink are generally too weak to withstand the expansion caused by immersion into water-based solutions. While this was not a problem with the silked documents, several unsilked pages exhibited significant areas of this type of degradation. A final overarching concern was the desire to treat the collection as consistently as possible. Under the circumstances it became apparent that a treatment course involving partial water solutions would offer the safest, most effective alternative

Division staff were able to remove the silking with the aid of an enzyme solution with activity matched to the adhesive. 19 Partially non-aqueous solutions (mixtures of purified water and alcohol) were used for rinsing as well as deacidification, leaving a modest alkaline reserve of 0.7 percent. 20 During the treatment, Merck Indicator Strips revealed the presence of iron2+ (ferrous sulfate) ions in many of the document inks. Presumably, after deacidification treatment this compound was entirely changed to iron3+ (ferric sulfate), a more stable, non-water-soluble form. The surface pH after this phase of the treatment was typically pH 8

Repairing the De-silked Documents by Leafcasting

Conservators mended the documents with a leafcasting method, saturating them first to protect the ink. Their approach called for the documents to be resized after casting and lined using an alcohol-based adhesive (Klucel G) and a very transparent tissue called Gossamer, made of Japanese paper fibers, on one side only. This treatment is fully reversible. 21

When the documents had dried, conservation staff observed several changes in them. First, the leafcasting method of repair had indeed produced structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing sheets. 22 The attachment of the pulp collar to the edges of each document is an intimate one. No distortions or other adverse effects have been observed from leafcast edges on many other documents treated in a similar manner at the Library. In all cases, including that of the records, the leafcast collar has acted in concert with the document instead of pulling against or constricting its edges, as frequently occurs with traditional false margins. Second, the Gossamer tissue provided sufficient support to the weakened areas of paper damaged by mold and ink deterioration. The addition of the overall Klucel G size and the unifying element of the Gossamer tissue adds to the effect of the finished page as a unit. Third, conservators noted increased cleansing of the sheets as a result of the leafcasting treatment. This is most readily explained by the paper's exposure to water during the leafcasting process. This development obviously attests to the limits of the alcohol resist, although the often-observed phenomenon by which previous buffering procedures enhance paper cleansing may have been an additional factor. No change in the ink could be detected; indeed, increased legibility was a definite benefit of this operation. In addition, as treatment progressed, better control of the expansion of the differential deteriorated sheets proved to be another of this method's important advantages.

Treatment of Unsilked Pages

With the silked documents treated, the Conservation Division turned its attention to the unsilked pages. The division is wary of treating untreated documents and tends to determine treatment based on standards different from those applied to previously-treated materials. There is a greater likelihood of re-treating an already-treated object if the prior treatment can be shown to be deteriorating and the re-treatment proposal can be defended on the basis of improved structure or aesthetics. In contrast, conservation staff are reluctant to propose invasive treatment on objects that have not been previously or obviously treated.

Yet conservators recognized that cleansing the untreated Jamestown documents would create consistent conditions across the collection--something that had not been accomplished by the treatment undertaken in the early twentieth century. In the end, this proved to be a decisive consideration, as conservators determined that it was desirable to give the untreated documents the same alkaline reserve and sizing material that the silked documents had received in order to better equalize the aging process.

Accordingly, after the documents had been separated by ink type, extensive spot testing was performed on each one. Because many of the inks in this group were still quite soluble, the documents were spray-deacidified non-aqueously with Bookkeeper (TM) solution. 23 A mylar template was cut to the exact conformation of the documents and a collar of paper pulp was cast around the template. After drying, the collar was pasted onto the documents with very dilute wheat-starch paste. The documents were then sized with Klucel G and supported with Gossamer tissue on one side. Although the attachment of leafcast collars to the edges of documents is not as satisfactory an arrangement as leafcasting into place, conservators expect that the use of minimal adhesive in the attachment and the overall lining and sizing will mitigate any dimension strains that may result.

Future Treatment of the Jamestown Records

Conservation staff gave careful consideration to the final format of the Virginia Company of London Records. Their deliberations were complicated by the curators' desire to be able to rearrange the order of the pages if subsequent research suggested a more logical arrangement. Initially, conservators proposed to encapsulate the washed and deacidified sheets in mylar and post-bind them into book format. While providing the best support to the papers themselves, however, book format presents obvious drawbacks. A post-bound, mylar-encapsulated book is heavy and awkward, and it divorces the papers completely from their physical conditions of origin. Conservation staff then suggested binding the papers into a letterbook format using some of the beautiful new laid and chain papers, modeled after early handmade papers, that the Library of Congress has developed with contemporary hand-papermakers. 24 Such an approach has aesthetic appeal and sympathetically reflects the historical context in which the papers originated. It also affords the papers increased security and protection during handling.

The curator in charge of the collection has responded favorably to this proposal, but his overriding concern remains cataloging. The papers relating to the Jamestown colony present a maze of challenges to the cataloger, and the scholarship required to collate the various inventory systems into something more accessible will take enormous time. It is unlikely that an effort similar to that undertaken by Susan M. Kingsbury in the early twentieth century will be launched anytime soon. In the end, therefore, the type of letterbook binding selected at the close of this phase of conservation had to be one which could easily be disassembled should the papers need to be reorganized. In the meantime, the identification system developed by Kingsbury and recorded on the documents' individual acidic folders has been maintained.

As of this writing, despite the fact that the Conservation Division has successfully brought the individual sheets that make up the Jamestown Records to a better state of preservation, access to the papers remains limited until such time as the completed bound format can provide the needed physical protection. Thus, although one of the original objectives of the conservation project was to provide serious scholars with access to the original material, this goal has yet to be realized–a piece of unfinished business worth noting because it so clearly demonstrates the complexity of conservation projects. Conservation entails not only the examination, analysis, and treatment of collections, but addressing the broader consequences set in motion by the conservation task. Despite exhaustive planning and collaboration, conservation projects typically take on a life of their own and their implications cannot always be anticipated.

by Sylvia R. Albro and Holly H. Krueger

• Ivor Noel Hume, The Virginia Adventure (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 10. [ Return to text ]
• Quoted in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 1607-1626 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906-35), 1:45. [ Return to text ]
• Quoted in ibid., 1:42-43. Peyton Randolph was the son of Sir John Randolph, who according to Jefferson had borrowed the documents from the Virginia Council office in order to write a history of Virginia and died while they were in his possession. Mr. Stith, however, says that the papers were in the possession of the House of Burgesses before they came to Peyton Randolph. The Court Books came into Jefferson's hands through other avenues. They belonged to the family of William Byrd (a seventeenth-century governor of Virginia) until they were borrowed by Colonel Richard Bland, whose library Jefferson purchased. [ Return to text ]
• Manuscript Division Memorandum Book, 1901. [ Return to text ]
• Kingsbury, Records , 1:46. [ Return to text ]
• Letter from Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam to the Public Printer, July 1, 1920. [ Return to text ]
• Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1901 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), 262. A Library of Congress recipe from the period gives alum and arsenic as additional ingredients. [ Return to text ]
• Holly H. Krueger, "The Core Collection of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress," AIC Book and Paper Group Annual 14 (1995): 12. [ Return to text ]
• In a memorandum to the Librarian in 1903, curator of manuscripts Worthington C. Ford says that the manuscript restorers are two to three years behind schedule in their work. [ Return to text ]
• C. M. Briquet, Les Filigranes (Amsterdam: The Paper Publication Society, 1968), vols. 2 and 4. [ Return to text ]
• William J. Barrow, "Black Writing Ink of the Colonial Period," American Archivist 11 (1948): 292. [ Return to text ]
• Various ink samples were confirmed to be iron-containing with a 5 percent thiocyanate potassium solution. [ Return to text ]
• Johan G. Neevel, "Phytate: A Potential Conservation Agent for the Treatment of Ink Corrosion Caused by Irongall Inks," Restaurator 16, no. 3 (1995): 144. [ Return to text ]
• G. Weddell, ed., Arcana Fairfaxiana Manuscripta: A Manuscript Volume of Apothecaries' Lore and Housewifery Nearly Three Centuries Old, Used, and Partly Written by the Fairfax Family. Reproduced in Fac-simile of Handwritings. An Introduction (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Mawson, Swan, and Morgan, 1890), 4. [ Return to text ]
• Barrow, 306. [ Return to text ]
• Phillip Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1986), 1:154. [ Return to text ]
• Pietrus Maria Caneparius, De Atramentis Cujuscunque Generis. Opus Sanè Novum, Hactenus à Nemine Promulgatum. In Sex Descriptiones Digestum (London: J. Martin, 1660). [ Return to text ]
• C. Shahani, "Accelerated Aging of Paper: Can It Really Foretell the Permanence of Paper?," Preservation Research and Testing Series 9503 , Preservation Directorate, Library of Congress, 1995. [ Return to text ]
• The alpha amylase used was Calbiochem #171568 with an Activity level of 1,595 AU/mg. [ Return to text ]
• The magnesium bicarbonate is taken from the Library's stock solution, which is between 7 and 8-1/2 gm magnesium bicarbonate per liter. The magnesium bicarbonate is held in solution in the alcohol environment by the following method. The de-ionized water and ethyl alcohol are mixed together and refrigerated. C02 gas is bubbled through the stock magnesium bicarbonate solution. The two solutions are mixed and used immediately. Air is blocked from the bath with a plastic sheet on top. No precipitate is formed when this procedure is followed. [ Return to text ]
• Hydroxy Propyl Cellulose (Klucel G) is commonly used at the Library both in the paper and in the book conservation sections. Unpublished research conducted by the Research and Testing Division on films of Klucel G under conditions simulated to predict behavior encountered in natural aging indicated it to be a very stable material. In addition to this in-house study done in the 1980s supporting the use of Klucel G in film form, conservators ordered additional testing before use with the Jamestown Records. Klucel G was brushed out onto the Gossamer tissue and subjected to humid oven aging. The positive results of this testing bolstered conservators' confidence in the material used in this setting. Gossamer tissue was first introduced by Frank Mowery at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is composed of 100 percent Kozo tissue and is virtually transparent when attached over media. While not appropriate for repairing tears, it is ideal for supporting paper structurally compromised by mold, insect, or ink deterioration. When Mr. Mowery ceased producing the tissue, the Library of Congress began making its own for in-house use. The fibers are broken down in a very traditional manner involving a stress-reducing pounding with wooden hammers. The fibers are then cast into sheets on the Library's leafcasting machine. While the operation is time-consuming and requires some training, the Library has found the product to be well worth the effort on a number of levels. [ Return to text ]
• The paper pulp furnish was composed of 80 percent Abaca, 20 percent Sulfate fibers. The torn pieces were soaked for several days in CaOH-enhanced water before being macerated with an industrial-strength blender. Library conservators have found longer periods of soaking and blending to have a positive effect on fiber length and "castability." [ Return to text ]
• Bookkeeper is a patented non-aqueous deacidification product made by Preservation Technologies, Inc. [ Return to text ]
• Library of Congress book conservators Jesse Munn, Terry Wallis, Mary Wootton, and Barbara Meier-Husby developed this project in collaboration with internationally known hand-papermakers. They published their finding in the AIC BPG Annuals for 1993 and 1996. [ Return to text ]

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Archaeologists finally solve mystery behind oldest tombstone in US belonging to English knight

It was earlier unclear where exactly in europe the slab made of black limestone came from, article bookmarked.

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The oldest known tombstone in the US belonged to an English knight and likely came from Belgium , according to a new study that sheds more light on trade routes linked to colonial America.

Archeologists have known the tombstone belonged to a knight and was set up in 1627 in Jamestown , Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America. But it was unclear where exactly in Europe the slab made of black limestone came from.

The new study, published recently in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology , assessed the carvings and inlays of the tombstone to trace its origins.

Scientists found that it had a carved depression that once likely held brass inlays of a shield, an unfurled scroll, and a depiction of an armoured man.

Historical records indicate that two knights died in Jamestown during the 17th century – Sir Thomas West, in 1618, and Sir George Yeardley.

Sir Yeardley’s step-grandson ordered a tombstone for himself in the 1680s with the same inscription as the black limestone one.

This led researchers to suspect that the 1627 tombstone belonged to Sir George Yeardley.

Sir Yeardley was born in Southwark, England, in 1588 and arrived at Jamestown in 1610 after surviving a shipwreck near Bermuda.

King James I knighted him when he went back to England in 1617. He returned to Jamestown in 1621 and died there in 1627.

Scientists analysed fragments of the tombstone and found tiny fossil microbes, many of which did not co-occur in North America. The microbe fossils, researchers said, co-occurred in what is now Belgium and Ireland.

They further narrowed down the tombstone’s source to Belgium, which was known at the time as the most common source of this type of limestone rock.

“Therefore, the knight’s tombstone had to be imported from Europe. Historical evidence suggests Belgium, from where it was transshipped in London and on to Jamestown,” scientists wrote.

“We hypothesise it was quarried and cut to size in Belgium, shipped down the Meuse River, across the English Channel to London where it was carved and the brass inlays installed, and finally shipped on to Jamestown.”

The findings point to the extent of trade networks connecting Europe and Jamestown during colonial times.

These jet-black stones were “the most in-demand and expensive” in Europe at the time, according to the study.

“Successful Virginia colonists who had lived in London would have been familiar with the latest English fashions and tried to replicate these in the colonies,” researchers said.

The findings highlight the effort some colonists were willing to put in to commemorate themselves even during some of the harshest periods in the history of early American colonies.

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Man dies after being hit by SUV while riding E-Bike in North Tonawanda

NORTH TONAWNADA, N.Y. (WKBW) — A Jamestown man has died after an accident involving an E-Bike in North Tonawanda.

Police say 58-year-old Terry Crick died at the hospital after he was hit while riding an E-Bike Monday morning.

Investigators say Crick was traveling eastbound on Tremont Street and never stopped when crossing Twin City Memorial Highway where he was hit by a Ford Explorer that was southbound.

Crick died from his injuries Tuesday at ECMC.

The driver of the Ford fully cooperated with the investigation and is not facing any charges.

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This is what admissions officers really want to read in college essays

The important thing is not to overthink it.

by Allie Volpe

One of the most memorable essays college admissions counselor Alexis White worked on with a student wasn’t about a harrowing personal challenge or a rewarding volunteering experience. “It started with the sentence ‘My hair arrives in a room before I do,’” says White, the founder and director of the consultancy firm Alexis College Expert. “It just was the best. And everybody who reads it loves it.”

College application essays have an infamous reputation for being one of the most difficult aspects of the application process. But it remains a crucial way to share details about your life and interests — a way to distinguish yourself beyond your grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, even in the era of ChatGPT (more on that later).

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Admissions officers are looking to be entertained when reading application essays, White says. Of course, students should use their essay to showcase their curiosities, character, and point of view, but contrary to popular belief, these personal statements don’t need to recount devastating moments of painful growth. “You can be fun,” White says. “You don’t have to have trauma.”

There are a number of essays students will need to write as a part of their college application. Over 1 million students apply to college through the Common App , a streamlined platform that allows students to apply to multiple schools at once. There, students write a personal statement, usually between 500 and 650 words , centered on a student’s identity, beliefs, accomplishments, and interests, and can choose from among seven prompts for the 2024–25 application season. One prompt even allows the applicant to write about a topic of their choice. “Write the essay that your heart wants to write,” says college essay coach Cassandra Hsiao .

Individual colleges also ask for additional shorter pieces ( around 250 words ), also known as supplemental essays, which may ask applicants to explain why they’re applying to this specific school, and about their academic interests and extracurricular activities.

With so much to write, students need to dedicate serious time and effort — White suggests at least eight weeks — into crafting compelling and effective essays. Here’s what college essay pros want applicants to know.

Make sure your essays are unique to you

Students often put pressure on themselves to have a one-of-a-kind essay topic, White says. There are very few unique concepts, she continues, but what will set you apart is your way into the essay. Start strong with an attention-grabbing first sentence, experts say, that immediately hooks the reader.

Can’t decide what to write? Try these exercises.

Look around your house or room and pick 10 items that spark a memory — like a soccer trophy or a painting you made — and write them down. Or recount a typical day in your life in detail, from the music you listen to in the shower to the snack you grab before bed.

The point, Brook says, is to hone in on things that you may think of as humdrum, but that you can use to tell a story about yourself.

Don’t discount minor details when thinking about extracurriculars and accomplishments. “When my kids are stuck, it’s a lot of chatting about things that they think don’t matter and then we typically come to something really great,” says Tyler.

Another tactic is picking five adjectives would you use to describe yourself, suggests White. Expand on each with an experience or memory.

Focus on developing a unique lens through which to see an event in your life, with an original point of view. These can be small moments, says Stacey Brook, the founder and chief adviser at College Essay Advisors . For example, one student she worked with wrote an essay about bonding with her mother during drives to gymnastics practice. After the student got her license and no longer had these moments with her mother, she wrote, she felt a sense of loss. “She was reflecting on what those drives meant to her and what it means to grow up and to gain things and lose them at the same time,” Brook says. “That’s the tiniest moment, the smallest slice of life out of which you can make an incredible essay.”

Even if you’re writing about a common topic, like school sports or lessons learned from an adult in your life, one way to differentiate your essay is to add dialogue, Hsiao says. “It’s in the specificity that only you can write because you went through that,” she says.

Avoid regurgitating your resume, Hsaio continues. Instead, lead the reader through a narrative arc showing your growth. You don’t need to explicitly state what you learned from the experience. Instead, use descriptive, scene-setting language — about how tense you were during that big game or your excitement when you stepped onto the stage — that shows how you’re different on the other side.

Again, you don’t need to share the worst thing that’s ever happened to you — or try to dramatize your life to make it seem more challenging than it is — but help the reader understand the effort you put in to get a new club off the ground, for example. “What you went through objectively might be really small on a global scale,” Hsiao says, “but because it felt big to you and I care about you as the writer, it will feel big to me.”

Don’t even think about copying from ChatGPT (or other generative AI)

While Brook understands the appeal of ChatGPT, experts say don’t use it to write your essay. College application reviewers will be able to tell.

The purpose of these pieces is to display your personality and writing ability and bots will never produce a unique, personalized essay. These chatbots use a style and tone that is immediately identifiable to readers, one that is rife with cliches and an awkward cadence, experts say.

Appropriate uses of generative AI include spell and grammar check or as a thesaurus. “Once you start pulling full paragraphs, you’re cheating,” White says. “It’s not your work.”

Tailor supplemental essays to each school

Depending on the school, you may be asked to write one or two shorter supplemental essays . These prompts may have similar themes, about your academic interests or how you relate to the people around you . For these essays, experts say you can reuse answers for multiple schools — but make sure you revise your answers to be specific to each school.

To ensure you’re tackling supplemental essays efficiently, Brook says to collect all of the prompts for the schools you’re applying to and see where they overlap. Hsiao suggests brainstorming three or four activities, obsessions or aspects of your life you know you want to showcase and try to match these topics to essay prompts. This can be anything from an extracurricular to your favorite TV show. “We are prioritizing what is important in our lives and then showcasing that by mixing and matching per school for the supplemental essay questions,” she says. For example, if you plan on writing about your future major for one college, adapt that essay to each school. However, make sure you’re researching each university and adding details about their specific program to your piece, Brook says.

For essays asking why you want to attend that specific college, ensure your answers are unmistakably catered to that school. “‘I love Delaware because I can’t wait to go to football games and pledge a sorority, and I’m excited about the business school.’ That is not going [cut it] because you could say that about Rutgers,” says Kyra Tyler , a senior director and college admissions consultant at Bright Horizons College Coach. Instead, pepper your answer with details about school traditions, an honors program you hope to join, interesting research opportunities or what you observed when you went on a tour (whether in person or virtual), Tyler says.

Tell a vivid story — and showcase your writing ability

Not only do your essays need to be of substance, but they should showcase style, too.

Tyler suggests students avoid metaphor: Don’t talk about caring for your younger sibling in the context of a Bluey episode — be straightforward. (“Kids can’t get away from [metaphors],” Tyler says, “and what happens is they get stuck under them, and they can’t write.”) You’ll want to write vividly using concrete examples instead of plainly spelling everything out, White says. For instance, if you were a camp counselor who helped a nervous child come out of their shell, write a scene showing the camper interacting with other kids rather than simply saying the camper was less reserved.

Write as if you were talking to your best friend, Tyler says. Avoid slang terms, but let your personality come through your writing. Try reading your essay aloud to see if it sounds like you.

Don’t forget about the basics, like good grammar, proper spelling, and word choice (make sure you’re not repeating similar words and phrases). You don’t need to focus on the five-paragraph structure, Hsiao says. Just make sure you’re telling a compelling story. Have a trusted adult, like a teacher or parent, read your essay to help point out style and structural issues you may have missed.

After you’ve completed a draft, set it aside for a few days, come back to it with fresh eyes for revisions, Tyler says.

College application essays are your chance to share who you were, who you are, and how this university will shape who you hope to be, Hsaio says. Focus on topics you want admissions officers to know and let your voice and passion carry the essay.

Correction, September 19, 11 am ET: A previous version of this story conflated the number of applicants with the number of applications sent through the Common App. Over 1 million students apply using the Common App.

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Guest Essay

Gen Z Has Regrets

By Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson

Dr. Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business; Mr. Johnson is the chief executive of the Harris Poll.

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

Was social media a good invention? One way to quantify the value of a product is to find out how many of the people who use it wish it had never been invented. Feelings of regret or resentment are common with addictive products (cigarettes, for example) and addictive activities like gambling, even if most users say they enjoy them.

For nonaddictive products — hairbrushes, say, or bicycles, walkie-talkies or ketchup — it’s rare to find people who use the product every day yet wish it could be banished from the world. For most products, those who don’t like the product can simply … not use it.

What about social media platforms? They achieved global market penetration faster than almost any product in history. The category took hold in the early aughts with Friendster, MySpace and the one that rose to dominance: Facebook. By 2020 , more than half of all humans were using some form of social media. So if this were any normal product we’d assume that people love it and are grateful to the companies that provide it to them — without charge, no less.

But it turns out that it can be hard for people who don’t like social media to avoid it, because when everyone else is on it, the abstainers begin to miss out on information, trends and gossip. This is especially painful for adolescents, whose social networks have migrated, since the early 2010s, onto a few giant platforms. Nearly all American teenagers use social media regularly, and they spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on these platforms.

So what does Gen Z really think about social media? Is it more like walkie-talkies, where hardly anyone wished they had never been invented? Or is it more like cigarettes, where smokers often say they enjoy smoking, but more than 71 percent of smokers (in one 2014 survey ) regret ever starting?

We recently collaborated on a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z adults (ages 18-27). We asked them online about their own social media use, about their views on the effects of social media on themselves and on society and about what kinds of reforms they’d support. Here’s what we found.

Daily time spent by Gen Z on social media

For 18- to 27-year-olds who use social media

4 to 6 hours

3 hours or less

7 hours or more

Source: Harris Poll/Zach Rausch

Note: Figures may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding.

What type of impact has social media had on your emotional health?

For 18- to 27-year-olds

Non-L.G.B.T.Q.

Almost half of Gen Z wishes social media platforms like X and TikTok didn’t exist

Percentage of Gen Z respondents who agree with the statement “I wish ___ had never been invented”

Smartphones

Messaging apps

The internet

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