Jamestown 1607 Quotes

By 1624 the Colony had grown from a single settlement at Jamestown to a series of communities along the James River and on the Eastern Shore. Until 1611 only Jamestown had proven lasting. In this fourth year, however, Kecoughtan (Elizabeth City) was established on a permanent basis and Henrico was laid out. In 1613 the fourth of the Company settlements was established at Bermuda which was to become Charles City.

1619 at the time of the Assembly meeting, there were eleven localities, or communities, that sent representatives to Jamestown.

In 1625 a total of 27 areas or communities were reported. In this surge of expansion the center of population now passed again from Jamestown and rested in the lower areas of the James. In 1624 and 1625 Elizabeth City was indeed Virginia's most populous community. In fact, early in 1625 the Elizabeth City group (Kecoughtan, Buckroe, Newport News, etc.) had a greater population than did all of the plantations above Jamestown. At this

Samuel Argall, it seems, was attracted to the area west of Jamestown and established his people here. He and his associates had been assigned 2,400 acres for the transportation of 24 persons by Charter of March 30, 1617 issued just before he left England. This was one of the first such grants. There were settlers with him, too, to be employed on land set aside for the support of the Governor's office. Evidently his settlement, or plantation, got underway in 1617 and two years later was listed among the populated areas in the Colony. It was one of the eleven communities which sent representatives

He had explored and found the site he liked, "a convenient strong, healthie and sweete seate to plant a new Towne in." Already at Jamestown he had prepared "pales, posts and railes to impaile his proposed new Towne.

Within one hundred years of the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607, settlers were well on the way to eliminating the ancient eastern woodlands of North America in what was to become the largest and most rapid deforestation in human history, until the current industrial-scale assault on the world’s tropical rainforests.

The bad news carried to England by the returning ships of the third supply, late in 1609, had caused considerable stir in Virginia Company circles and had resulted in De La Warr's decision to go to Virginia. Learning of the new supply, Gates hastened back to Jamestown. The new settlement had been saved in a manner that was recognized at that time as an act of "Providence.

Gates, after dealing with the Indians, left for England. De La Warr, who continued to live aboard ship for a time, called a Council, reorganized the colonists, and directed operations to promote the welfare of the Colony, including the construction of two forts near Point Comfort. He fell sick, however, and, after a long illness, was forced to leave Jamestown and Virginia in March 1611. The now veteran administrator, George Percy, was made governor in charge. With De La Warr went Dr. Lawrence Bohun, who had experimented extensively with the curative powers of plants and herbs at Jamestown.

In the interval from about February to May 1609, there was considerable material progress in and about Jamestown. Perhaps forty acres were cleared and prepared for planting in Indian corn, the new grain that fast became a staple commodity. A "deep well" was dug in the fort. The church was re-covered and twenty cabins built. A second trial was made at glass manufacture in the furnaces built late in 1608. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus which connected the Island to the mainland for better control of the Indians, and a new fort was erected on a tidal creek across the river from Jamestown.

This was the third supply, and it reached Jamestown in August. Unfortunately it arrived without its leadership and the authority to institute the governmental changes which the Company had authorized.

Ruin and desolation were everywhere. Gates, with his Council, on July 7, 1610, wrote that Jamestown seemed "raither as the ruins of some auntient [for]tification, then that any people living might now inhabit it...." Gates promptly distributed provisions, such as he had, and introduced a code of martial law, the code that was strengthened later by De La Warr and made famous by its strict enforcement during the governorship of Sir Thomas Dale.

John Martin was sent to attempt a settlement at Nansemond, on the south side of the James below Jamestown, while Captain Francis West, brother of Lord De La Warr, was sent to settle at the falls of the James. Returning to Jamestown after an inspection

military leave from his post in the Low Countries, arrived as deputy governor of Virginia. With him were three ships, three smaller boats, 300 people, domestic animals, and supplies. He proceeded to give form and substance to the martial law which had been evoked by his predecessors and to the achievement of rather severe regimentation. He began by posting proclamations "for the publique view" at Jamestown. Later, he thoroughly inspected suitable settlement sites and surveyed conditions generally. He wrote, on May 25, that on arrival at Jamestown he found "...

mild "gold rush" at Jamestown as some hopeful looking golden colored soil was found. This all delayed early spring clearing and planting, and boded ill for the coming summer when Smith undertook additional explorations.

September 1608 that Smith became president in fact and inaugurated a program of physical improvement at Jamestown. The area about the fort was enlarged and the standing structures repaired. At this point, in October, the second supply arrived, including seventy settlers, who, when added to the survivors in Virginia, raised the over-all population to about 120.

Among the new arrivals were two women, Mistress Forrest and her maid. Several months later, in the church at Jamestown, the maid, Ann Burras, was married to one of the settlers, John Laydon, a carpenter by trade. This marriage has been ranked as "the first recorded English marriage on the soil of the United States." Their child, Virginia, born the next year, was the first to be born at Jamestown.

left Jamestown, and started down the James. The next morning, while still in the river, advance word reached Gates that Lord De La Warr had arrived at Point Comfort on the way to Jamestown and was bringing 150 settlers and a generous supply.

At Jamestown an area was cleared of trees and the fort begun. The soil was readied and the English wheat brought over for the purpose was planted. At this point Newport, in one of the small boats, led an exploring party as far as the falls of the James. He was absent from Jamestown about a week and returned to find that the Indians had launched a fierce attack on the new settlement which had been saved, perhaps, by the fact that the ships were near at hand. These afforded safe quarters and carried cannon on their decks that had a frightening effect on the natives.

The work of establishing Jamestown and of exploring the country round about began almost simultaneously

At Jamestown an area was cleared of trees and the fort begun. The soil was readied and the English wheat brought over for the purpose was planted. At this point Newport, in one of the small boats, led an exploring party as far as the falls of the James. He was absent from Jamestown about a week and returned to find that the Indians had launched a fierce attack on the new settlement which had been saved, perhaps, by the fact that the ships were near at hand.

Newport reached Jamestown with the first supply for the settlers. He brought food, equipment, instructions, and news from home. The two ships of the supply had left England together, but the second did not reach Virginia until

Jamestown was the first to feel the impact of the advantages and fruits that growth produced.

Participation in the affairs of government was another element in the new Company approach. Soon after his arrival, Yeardley issued a call for the first representative legislative assembly in America which convened at Jamestown on July 30, 1619, and remained in session until August 4. This was the beginning of our present system of representative government.

It developed into one of the original Virginia shires in 1634. This shire, a decade later, became a county. James City County continues as the oldest governing unit in English America. Jamestown was its chief seat, Virginia's capital town and the principal center of the Colony's social and political life.

the colony is removed up the river forescore miles further beyond Jamestown to a place of high ground, strong and defensible by nature, a good air, wholesome and clear, unlike the marshy seat at Jamestown, with fresh and plenty of water springs, much fair and open grounds freed from woods, and wood enough at hand.

One of President Wingfield's first acts in May, 1607, after the construction of James Fort was underway, was the dispatch of a party to explore the river above Jamestown. Twenty-two men under Capt. Christopher Newport left on May 21 and proceeded inland to the falls of the James. in six dayes they arrived at a [Indian] Towne called Powhatan, consisting of some twelve houses, pleasantly seated on a hill; before it three fertile Iles, about it many of their cornefields, the place is very pleasant, and strong by nature ... To this place the river is navigable: but higher within a mile, by reason of the rockes and isles, there is not passage for a small boat, this they call the Falles.

Men were recruited—no women, for this initial attempt at colonization—and ships and supplies were obtained. In December of that year, a fleet of three vessels dropped down the Thames from London. For long weeks, the ships lay anchored in the Downs, just off the southeast coast of England, battered by terrible storms, waiting for favorable weather. Finally, in February 1607, the three ships set out across the wintry Atlantic. After crossing from England to the West Indies and then north along the Atlantic coast, the ships—the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed—dropped anchor in the Chesapeake on April 26, 1607.

Control of trade was sought by specifying that no ships should "break boulke [bulk] or make privatt sales of any comodities" before reaching Jamestown. Taxes were not ignored either for a levy of ten pounds of tobacco, already the common currency it appears, was laid on each male above 16 years of age to help defray the "publique depte [debt]." Lest it be forgotten, it was enacted that obedience was required "to the presente government." Old planters were given special exemption from public service, "they and theire posteritie," while Burgesses were rendered exempt from seizure during Assembly time. "Persones of qualitie" when found delinquent, it was stated, could be imprisoned if not fit to take corporal punishment. It is of note that service to the Governor, or the public, was made contingent on Assembly consent. Of particular interest, too, was the action on the principle of taxation. It was bold, indeed, at this time for the Assembly to declare that; The Governor shall not laye any taxes or impositiones uppon the Colony, theire landes or comodities otherwi[se] then by the awthoritie of the Generall Assemblie, to be levied and imployed as the saide Assembly shall appoint. This was an early word on taxation, but it was to be far from the last word in the next century and a half.

The bad blood that pitted Archer and Ratcliffe against Smith had its beginnings in 1607, in Jamestown’s earliest days, when the three men served together on the colony’s ruling council. In the months when colonists were dying of hunger and illness, Smith discovered that the duo, along with a few others, were planning to steal supplies and a small boat they could use to flee Virginia for the safety of England. While Smith would almost certainly have been happy to see the last of the two men he thought of as cowards and traitors, he knew the colony could not survive without the boat and that the supplies the men were about to steal were sorely needed by the hungry colonists. Smith, in typical John Smith fashion, soon spiked those plans when he ordered several of the settlement’s cannon turned on the boat and ordered those on board to come ashore or be shot out of the water. Neither Archer nor Ratcliffe was the type of man to take such effrontery lying down, especially from a man they would have considered their social inferior. A few weeks later, the two saw an opportunity to even the score. At that time (it was after Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas, when he returned to Jamestown), Archer and Ratcliffe used the Bible as a legal text and charged Smith with murder under Levitical law. Ludicrous as it seems, the two argued that the “eye for an eye” verse made Smith responsible for the deaths of two of his men who had been killed when Smith was captured by the Powhatan people. It is a measure of Smith’s unpopularity with the “better sort” of colonists (not only Ratcliffe and Archer) that he was—within hours of his return to Jamestown—charged, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die, with the execution scheduled for the next morning. That night (it was in early 1608), Smith was saved from death when Captain Christopher Newport, the man who later served as the Sea Venture’s captain, unexpectedly sailed up to Jamestown with a handful of new colonists and a shipload of food and other supplies. Newport, who recognized Smith’s value to the colony even if some of the other leaders did not and who, no doubt, saw the idiocy of making Smith responsible for the death of the men who had been killed by the Indians, immediately ordered him freed and all charges against him dropped.

Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World of the Americas in 1492. Ferdinand Magellan’s crew sailed around the globe, returning in 1522. And in 1607, when Galileo was forty-three, settlers arrived in Jamestown and founded one of the first English settlements in North America.

ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

From time to time there emerged in the West voluntary communist societies. One of them was the Virginia Company in Jamestown (1607); another, New Harmony of Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist Robert Owen. All such attempts broke down sooner or later, largely because of their inability to resolve the problem of “free riders,” members who drew a full share of the community’s harvest while doing little if any work.

It was people from these ranks, fleeing starvation or the sheriff, whom the Virginia Company recruited, together with gentlemen adventurers, often the younger sons of gentry families. In December 1606 three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, left England and arrived in the Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607, with 105 men on board (39 had died at sea). Sailing some sixty miles up the James River to make their presence less obvious to the Spanish, the three ships anchored on May 13 at the site of what became Jamestown, named, like the river, for England’s king. But other than its relative security from Spanish assault, the chosen site, on the north bank of the James and beside a swamp, had very little to recommend it. The swamp, while perhaps providing some protection from Indians, bred mosquitoes by the millions in the spring and summer, and these spread malaria through the colonists. More, the water in the shallow wells the colonists dug was often brackish, especially when the river was running low. This caused salt poisoning among the colonists as they sweated in the fierce Virginia heat and drank copiously. And, when the river ran low, the garbage and sewage thrown into it did not pass out to sea, but festered and promoted such diseases as typhoid and dysentery. The result was a slaughter. Of the 105 original colonists, only 38 remained alive nine months later. The basic problem was that the Virginia Company was venturing into a brand-new business—American plantations—that had been made possible by a radically new technology—the full-rigged ship. As has so often been the case since—railroads in the early nineteenth century, the Internet in the late twentieth come to mind—there was a very steep and expensive learning curve to be mastered before steady profits could be achieved under these circumstances. The commercially savvy and often very wealthy London merchants who dominated the Virginia Company simply had no idea what it took to establish a successful colony on the edge of the American wilderness, three thousand miles and three months from home.