Unlike the 1587 Lost Colony’s ex-residents, the 1607 Jamestown colonists weren’t seeking status, just money. Their flight from impoverishment in England amounted to a lethal version of a 1930s Warner Brothers animated cartoon gag. Depravation chased the colonists around the barn of poverty and they ran so hard and heedlessly that they collided with depravation’s backside. Of the five hundred some colonists who arrived in Jamestown between 1607 and 1610, 440 of them died, mostly from starvation.
The initial settlers landed too late in the year to plant crops and didn’t know much about planting anyway. Their only piece of good fortune was not being immediately evicted by the local landlords, the Powhatan Confederacy.
This was an organization of about thirty Algonquian-speaking tribes that had formed a military alliance against Siouan-speaking tribes to their north and west under the leadership of Wahunsenacawh, father of Pocahontas.
The Powhatan were well aware of the three rules of real estate. None of them lived on the location, location, location of Jamestown. The peninsula on the James River at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay was mosquito infested, too swampy for farming or hunting, and, wetland though it may have been, suffering a drought that left the colonists nothing to drink but brackish river water.
Having mentioned Pocahontas, we might pause to consider what we can learn about the founding of America from one of the few prefoundational Americans that we know something about.
Except we don’t know anything about her, starting with her real name, which was Matoaka unless it was Amonute. She either saved the life of John Smith, one of the Jamestown expedition’s original leaders, or she didn’t. She may have been participating in an adoption ritual where her father pretended to club Smith on the head. She may not have been there at all. Smith didn’t mention her in his first account of being captured by Wahunsenacawh. Smith’s stories about Pocahontas are inconsistent. He seems to be making them up as he goes along.
We’re told in early histories of Jamestown that as a child Pocahontas sometimes visited the colony and was acquainted with John Smith. (John Smith? John White? The early history of America reads like the guest register at a shady motel.)
In 1613, after the English and the Powhatan had had a falling-out, Pocahontas was, in turn, captured (more like kidnapped) by the colonists. Perhaps she had Stockholm syndrome. Or a sadder story. She converted to Christianity, took yet another name, “Rebecca,” married colonist John Rolfe, and had a son, Thomas.
Rolfe took her and Thomas to England where she was a minor celebrity, something short of a Wallis Simpson but considered more presentable to a king. And she was presented to King James. She lived near London for most of a year. In the one portrait of her rendered from life she looks a bit dour. (Probably the weather.) Then, after getting onboard a ship back to Virginia with her husband and son, she became ill and died at Gravesend, aged twenty or twenty-one.
Thomas survived, wed the daughter of a wealthy Virginia landowner, and had a daughter who married a Colonel Robert Bolling. A number of prominent Virginia families—including that of Woodrow Wilson’s wife Edith (nee Bolling)—claim descent from Pocahontas. So we learn that American racism is, at least, topped by descended-from-a-princess snobbery. Pocahontas was the Meghan Markle of her day. Other than that we learn nothing. We might as well have watched the very stupid 1995 Disney movie.
The Jamestown colonists did not arrive with the equipment, supplies, or inclination to found a self-sustaining colony. The Jamestown business model was to export valuable commodities. But they couldn’t find any. They shipped a load of clapboard to England.
The London investors who had funded Jamestown were not best pleased. They sent a stiff note along with their 1608 (inadequate) resupply of the colony. According to the historian James Horn, preeminent expert on Jamestown, the investors insisted that the colonists send them enough goods to pay for the cost of the resupply voyage plus a lump of gold, proof that the South Sea had been discovered, and somebody from the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
And a partridge in a pear tree.
Jamestown would go down in history—and down was the direction it was headed—for many American firsts. The kind of firsts you wish America hadn’t had.
The poorest among the Jamestown colonists were the first to condemn themselves to indentured servitude to pay for their trip to America. Their terms of bondage ranged from three to seven years, but it was mostly death rather than time served that released them from their debt.
To add evil to iniquity, the first abducted Africans known to have been transported to British America were sold as slaves in Jamestown in 1619.
The same year brought America’s first politicking and America’s first elected assembly, Jamestown’s Virginia House of Burgesses. The legislative body was founded “to establish one equal and uniform government over all Virginia” with “just laws for the happy guiding and governing of the people there inhabiting.” Although to hell with the happy guiding of the Powhatan and every other un-English-born, un-male, un-free, un-Jamestown colony resident on the continent north of Spanish Florida. They weren’t part of the electorate.
Also that same year Jamestown experienced America’s first strike. The colony included a number of artisans who hadn’t been born in England. They seem to have been the only artisans the colony possessed. They included a soap maker, a timber crafter, and a glass blower. They went on strike for the right to vote. And it may have been America’s first (and last?) quick and amiable settlement between organized labor and management. Dirty Englishmen sitting under sagging roof beams drinking out of cupped hands immediately granted artisans the franchise.
The House of Burgesses legislated as wisely as American legislatures continue to do, that is, making laws
