Jamestown Quotes

American Heartbreak I am the American heartbreak-- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe-- The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago.

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.

A friend who won't respond to what a friend can't ask is like a looking glass in which you cannot see yourself.

I am the American heartbreak— The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago. —Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak: 1619

She noticed the lemony yellow light in her dream and heard nothing of her alarm clock so continued to dream and dreamt of Jamestown and the sound of the foghorns over the water and the gulls and every night that was the breath of the day before.

The notion of Spaniards fighting Frenchmen in Florida four decades before England established its first permanent settlement in America, and half a century before the Pilgrims sailed, is an unexpected notion to those accustomed to the familiar legends of Jamestown and Plymouth.

طبیعت وظیفه‌ای به عهده فرد گذاشته است. اگر این وظیفه را انجام ندهد می‌میرد، اگر انجام بدهد، بازهم می‌میرد. طبیعت به این مسئله اهمیت نمی‌دهد. خیلی‌ها اطاعات می‌کنند و این خود مطیع نیست، بلکه نفس اطاعت است که همیشه وجود دارد.

They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families - men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased.

How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor.

Respect pain. If we could truly imagine pain we don't feel, we would not survive a day, so we don't imagine it, we can't, and that indispensable glitch in the human machine is also ironically what lets us inflict pain on others at little cost to a good night's sleep.

طبیعت با تن مهربان نیست، و در مقابل چیزی که فرد نامیده می‌شود مسئولیتی ندارد. توجهش به انواع، نه نژاد است.

Remember that one bares their teeth while laughing.

Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor.

It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies. The more run-of-the-mill people seeking a financial payoff, who abandoned their dream once it was defunct? Eh. We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.

Bear in Mind...that all Histories from the Rock at Plymouth, and Jamestown to the present time, have been made by white men, and a man who tells his own story, is always right until the adversary's tale is told.

IF anybody had been there to observe the gentle-looking elderly lady who stood meditatively on the loggia outside her bungalow, they would have thought she had nothing more on her mind than deliberation on how to arrange her time that day. An expedition, perhaps, to Castle Cliff; a visit to Jamestown; a nice drive and lunch at Pelican Point_ or just a quiet morning on the beach. But the gentle old lady was deliberating quite other matters. She was in a militant mood.

Just as successful in work and marriage was Harvey, William Tew’s oldest son. After working for his father in the family business for seventeen years, in 1870 Harvey established a rubber factory with his brother- in- law Benjamin F. Goodrich. The story goes that the pair came up with the idea after large fires swept through Jamestown, which still consisted mainly of wooden buildings, sometimes wiping out entire neighborhoods. In winter, the fire brigade was repeatedly rendered powerless when the water froze in its leather hoses. The discovery that water stayed liquid in rubber hoses made the fortunes of Harvey and his brother- in- law and formed the basis of a company that would grow into one of the world’s largest tire producers.

Although the frontier had advanced by fewer than two miles a year in the 150 years following Jamestown’s establishment, in the first half of the nineteenth century it shot west at nearly forty miles a year, stopping only when settlers reached the Pacific Coast.

In fact, most disturbingly of all, the traffic was largely in the other direction: scores of settlers appeared to prefer ‘savage’ to ‘civilized’ life and, in spite of the threat of severe punishment, deserted Jamestown to live in Native American communities where they could enjoy an ample diet and relative freedom.

Why was it I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?

It is broken in four places. Just the cracks in the beginning, left untreated now for years. His mother in Kokrobité, Olu in Boston, Kofi in Jamestown, Folasadé all over. That woman, all over him, deep in the fascia, in the muscle, in the tissue, in the matter, in the blood. He is dying of a broken heart. He cannot help but laugh at this.

خوب چه اهمیتی دارد؟ فوقش چند سال دیگر هم سیر یا گرسنه به سر می‌برند، و بالاخره مرگ که از همه آنها گرسنه‌تر است یقه‌شان را می‌گرید.

That they dared make a town of this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step bespoke the glorious and yearning bullshit of men's souls.

Still the most intense pleasure's but a splinter of ice on the gallons of lava that gush from my cracked heart.

We depended on the indigenous of this land to teach us farming and harvesting skills that we largely lacked upon arrival. Indeed, had it not been for the wisdom of native North Americans, the first attempt at European colonization would have failed entirely. We were starving in droves, perishing in Jamestown because we had spent so much time looking for gold that we’d forgotten to plant crops that could sustain us through the harsh winters. Four hundred–plus years later that folly has been repeated, at least metaphorically, in an economy so focused on the chasing of wealth for wealth’s sake that it has failed to re-sow its crops, to invest in the future, to actually produce anything of value as it opts, instead, to chase financial fortunes and immediate riches.

Subtract everything inessential from America and what's left? Geography and political philosophy, V says. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The Federalist Papers. --I'd say geography and mythology, James says. Our legends. He gives examples, talks about Columbus sailing past the edge of the world, John Smith at Jamestown and Puritans at Plymouth Rock, conquering the howling wilderness. Benjamin Franklin going from rags to riches with the help of a little slave trading, Frederick Douglass escaping to freedom, the assassination of Lincoln, annexing the West, All those stories that tell us who we are---stories of exploration, freedom, slavery, and always violence. We keep clutching those things, or at least worn-out images of them, like idols we can't quit worshipping.

They'd never seen the likes of this, but they'd leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this world he wouldn't own it now.

It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had said: . . . we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish’d to enrich little more than forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper rates, than any other men have slaves. . . .

Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way—scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.

In exchange, he was given a note “with the armes of Englande testifying the receipt therof.”24 Because of the size of his investment—£50, or roughly $10,000 in modern money, compared with the single share price of £12 10s (12 pounds, 10 shillings), or about $2,500 in modern terms—and because of his legal background, he was also appointed to the Virginia Council, the group of men whose job it would be to oversee operations of the colony from London.

[...] to you, unknown corporeal interlocutor who I hope is just kind of out there somehow knowing my thoughts and undertaking your own heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth [...]

No one taught me to be Native American. My mother taught me that I was, but she did not have the context for what that heritage meant. My grandmother mentioned it very little, even though it was visible in her features. Yet from my earliest memories, being Native has always been an integral part of my identity. Even though I was raised far from my tribe, far from any tribe, I heard the drumbeat of our traditions in my heart. My name is Leah Kallen Myers. I am the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in my family line.

We don’t yet know the state of the naturals. Are they friends or foes? None of us can say. We ought to anchor in the bay, as near as we might come to the shore, and bide our time. The naturals will show themselves, soon or late. They know we are here already, or else I’m a virgin girl.

National coverage of Lewis’s falling-out with SNCC over Black Power was rooted in a white perspective. White Power had been acceptable since Jamestown. Now even the hint of Black Power was denounced as un-American. Citing the Times headline LEWIS QUITS S.N.C.C.; SHUNS BLACK POWER, Good observed, “The headline’s partial truths fitted the rationale of a white society that had tolerated racial injustice for a century, yet denounced ‘black power’ in a day. At the same time, some in the society were paying sentimental homage to the good old days when Negroes faced fire hoses and police dogs with beatific smiles.

You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You cast your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love—not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death.

Sir George, meanwhile, remained on the ship’s poop, conning the vessel. As the morning hours passed, the storm abated slightly. Suddenly, the admiral jumped to his feet. He wiped the driving rain from his face and stared ahead, hoping his tired eyes were not deceiving him. Suddenly, Somers cried a word that brought amazement, and then joy, to all on the struggling ship. “Land!” he cried. “Land!

In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us. In August 1619, just twelve years after the English settled Jamestown, Virginia, one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth, and some 157 years before English colonists here decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought twenty to thirty enslaved Africans from English pirates.4 The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship whose crew had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day mark the beginning of slavery in the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America. They were among the more than 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War.5

labored almost without rest to save the ship and who had urged and cajoled his fellow passengers to bail and pump and then pump and bail some more, was ready to concede defeat. He waded out of the flooded hold saying that if he was to die, he did not want to perish in the hold of the ship, but on the deck, under the open sky, in the company of his friends. But the Sea Venture was not sinking—not yet, at least. And, probably at screamed orders from Admiral Somers, Strachey and Gates and the other men who were still able—and women, too, no doubt—went back to the pumps, back to the buckets and pails, and back to the exhausting, ceaseless, lifesaving work.

In the seven weeks that it took for Longwood to be refurbished and extended, Napoleon stayed at a pretty bungalow called The Briars, closer to Jamestown, with the family of the East India Company superintendent William Balcombe, where he had one room and a pavilion in their garden.66 This period was his happiest on St Helena, not least because he struck up an unlikely, charming and innocent friendship with the second of the Balcombes’ four surviving children, Betsy, a spirited fourteen-year-old girl who spoke intelligible if ungrammatical French and to whom Napoleon behaved with avuncular indulgence. She had originally been brought up to view Napoleon, in her words, as ‘a huge ogre or giant, with one large flaming eye in the centre of his forehead, and long teeth protruding from his mouth, with which he tore to pieces and devoured little girls’, but she very soon came to adore him.67 ‘His smile, and the expression of his eye, could not be transmitted to canvas, and these constituted Napoleon’s chief charm,’ she later wrote. ‘His hair was dark brown, and as fine and silky as a child’s, rather too much so indeed for a man as its very softness caused it to look thin.’68 The friendship began when Napoleon tested Betsy on the capitals of Europe. When he asked her the capital of Russia she replied, ‘Petersburg now; Moscow formerly’, upon which ‘He turned abruptly round, and, fixing his piercing eyes full in my face, he demanded sternly, “Who burnt it?” ’ She was dumbstruck, until he laughed and said: ‘Oui, oui. You know very well that it was I who burnt it!’ Upon which the teenager corrected him: ‘I believe, sir, the Russians burnt it to get rid of the French.’69 Whereupon Napoleon laughed and friendship with ‘Mademoiselle Betsee’, ‘lettle monkee’, ‘bambina’ and ‘little scatterbrain’ was born.

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.

History is to record us,” he warned his colleagues at the time. “Is it to record that when the destruction of the Union was imminent … we stood quarreling?

Later, the US government went against the treaty and tried to have our tribe sent to one of the reservations they had set up in Washington, including one that was along the Elwha River. The other was in what is now called Kitsap, farther south. They offered plots of land and $80 to anyone who would move to these locations. Members who moved to Kitsap became the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe, and those who moved to the Elwha River became the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. Some tribal members stayed, insisting that Jamestown Beach was where they belonged. They pooled together $500 worth of gold coin and purchased 210 acres along the water. There is where we staked our independence and became the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe.

The salmon is a symbol of prosperity and determination to the Coast Salish tribes, the band of tribes in the Pacific Northwest of which the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is a part. She defies nature, swimming upstream to provide for the people of the land. Yet she must sacrifice herself to give that abundance to others. Her determination comes at a deep personal cost.

It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

You will always fail when you attempt to do God’s work in your own power,

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.

Although we might not imagine England as a hotbed of malaria, in fact the marshes and fens of Kent, Essex, and Sussex were notorious for their “agues.” The prevalence of the mosquito vector Anopheles atroparvus in the soggy English lowlands created an extension of the vivax malaria zone. The first settlers—at Jamestown, at Plymouth—carried Plasmodium vivax across the Atlantic in their blood.

MyBoys3 Press Supports Did You Enjoy Shadows at Jamestown

All the world spins on good performed in secret, which sleeps like a seed in darkness and blooms with the dawn.

and

As a result, Jamestown and the other Virginia forays survived on Indian charity

... I considered those who had come before me. They are like a river, I thought, and the river is me. Like drops of water, their blood was mine. A verse formed in my head: All their eyes are upon me. They are me.

An adventurer goes to a faraway place to see what is out there. But a pilgrim goes to a faraway place to see what is in here." I patted my heart.

In the fourth year of war, two hundred forty-five years after the arrival of the enslaved at Jamestown, eighty-eight years after the Declaration of Independence, and seventy-six years after the ratification of the Constitution, an American president insisted that a core moral commitment to liberty must survive the vicissitudes of politics, the prejudices of race, and the contests of interest. This is not to separate Lincoln’s moral vision from his political sensibilities—an impossibility—but to underscore that he was acting not only for the moment, not only for dominion in the arena, but for all time. His achievement is remarkable not because he was otherworldly, or saintly, or savior-like, but because he was what he was—an imperfect man seeking to bring a more perfect Union into being.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 "...

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 Londoner who saw Virginia as a place he might find financial salvation was William Strachey, a failed civil servant, poetaster, and sometime playwright. The son of a successful gentleman with landholdings in rural Essex, Strachey had studied law at Gray’s Inn, but cut his training short to spend his time scratching out mostly unpublished verse and socializing with London’s literary set.2 Strachey particularly enjoyed London’s lively and rambunctious playhouses. He was a stockholder in Blackfriars Theatre and a regular playgoer who was almost certainly friendly with the company’s actors, including William Shakespeare.

a collaborator with Jonson in the writing of Eastward Ho!, a somewhat scandalous play about the Virginia colony.

Living a literary gentleman-poet’s lifestyle took so much of Strachey’s time in the early 1600s that he seems not to have had many hours to devote to the business of making money. And what with evenings at the theater and afternoons spent in Southwark watching cockfights and bearbaitings and hours spent drinking and swapping lies with his friends, Strachey found himself forced to borrow heavily from London’s moneylenders.

By the spring of 1609, Strachey—he was aged thirty-six or thirty-seven by then—was so deep in debt that he feared imprisonment. Sometime that spring, a friend who had been jailed as a debtor wrote a letter to Strachey pleading with him for aid. Strachey replied that he was “haretly sorrie” he was unable to help, adding that he was himself in danger of being sent to prison “for want of present money.”5 In fact, Strachey’s situation was perilous. As the weather warmed that spring and the Thames thawed and began flowing again after one of the coldest winters ever, he knew that each time he dared to quit his lodgings for even a brief foray into the street, he ran the risk of an unpleasant scene with a creditor or—worse—arrest and a stint in the Clink or one of London’s other infamous gaols.

Captain John Smith, the “president” of the colony during much of its earliest history, regularly complained of the quality of those sent to establish the settlement. The colony, he said, would have been better off if the company in London had sent “one hundred good labourers (in place of) a thousand such Gallants as were sent me, that would doe nothing but complaine, curse, and despaire.”15

Then there were the people the Virginia Company called the “naturals”—the roughly nine thousand Indians gathered into a loose-knit confederation of disparate groups ruled by the paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, who was known to the English as Powhatan. Trouble between the Indians and the settlers started on the first day the English stepped ashore on the banks of the Chesapeake. Late that day, as an exploring party of about two dozen armed settlers returned to the safety of the three ships anchored off a spot of land they called Point Comfort, a group of natives crept from the woods “like Beares,” in the words of settler George Percy, “with their Bowes in their mouths.” When the Indians—there were only five or six—got close enough, they loosed a volley of arrows. Gabriel Archer, one of the colonists, was wounded in the hands and a sailor, Matthew Morton, “in two places of the body very dangerously.”16 The English responded with a volley of musket fire that drove the Indians back into the woods.

Perhaps it was there that Jonson told him—it was advice he gave to others—that the only hope for any man in debt was to flee “to Constantinople, Ireland, or Virginia” if he wanted to rebuild his life and repair his credit.6 Strachey had already tried his luck in Turkey, and failed. Now, while Ireland may have beckoned, it must have seemed to the impoverished poet that Virginia offered a better chance to escape his creditors and perhaps, just perhaps, his best opportunity, if not for riches, then for security and freedom.

Of course, he had heard of Virginia. He was obviously fond of the theater, fond enough to put some of his money at risk as a shareholder of the Blackfriars Theatre Company.

By 1609 Strachey, like other Englishmen, knew that Seagull’s words were not true. He knew that no diamonds had been found on Virginia’s beaches, that no golden chamber pots had been discovered. But he also knew that the land across the Atlantic still held hope for men like himself who wanted to flee their problems in search of a new opportunity. And so, in the spring of 1609, William Strachey decided that Virginia was the answer to his troubles.

it was a difficult matter for a private individual to finance the creation of a settlement. And Ralegh’s beloved Virgin Queen was far too cautious with her funds to finance a colonial venture, even if England’s long-running war with Spain had left enough coin in the royal treasury to cover the expense. Then, in 1603, everything changed. Early in the morning of March 24 of that year, Elizabeth I, the queen whose reign was expected to outlast the moon and sun, died in her private chamber in Richmond Palace. The queen’s death and the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England brought quick peace between England and Spain; freed private capital that could be used to finance foreign settlements; and made soldiers and sailors available, indeed desperate, for employment. Suddenly, English capitalists were looking hungrily at Virginia as a potential outlet for

By that time, English merchants had experience taking profits from foreign trade through the formation of joint stock companies like the Muscovy Company. Now they hoped to do the same in Virginia.

asked King James I for government approval for their plans to establish colonies in Virginia—then considered to be the entire swath of land running roughly between Spanish Florida and the French colonies in Canada.

a history of English seafaring and exploration that helped kindle interest in New World colonization; the Earl of Southampton (William Shakespeare’s patron); and other notables whose names made up a veritable who’s who of Early Stuart England.

There was little of the religious idealism or of the search for personal freedom that motivated the Pilgrims in 1620 and none of the search to create a “City on a Hill” that spurred the Puritans to take ships for Boston in 1630. To these financial backers, the settlement of Virginia was primarily about trade and money.

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.

John Smith, for one, knew the value of good food during an ocean voyage. The want of good food, he said, “occasions the losse of more men, then in any English fleet hath bin slaine in any fight since 1588.”8 Smith was not exaggerating. Scurvy, a terrible wasting disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, wreaked havoc on crews during long ocean voyages. Symptoms often appeared within weeks of leaving port as men complained of weakness and a feeling of general malaise. Soon bleeding was seen around hair follicles on the arms and legs and around rapidly loosening teeth. As the illness progressed, skin was discolored by large purple bruises that often became open sores. In the worst cases, old wounds that seemed to be healed reopened. Eventually sufferers died screaming in agony.

In addition to the stored foods, livestock—chickens and pigs and probably a few goats and geese—were penned on Sea Venture’s deck, both to provide fresh meat during the voyage and to help stock Jamestown’s farms.

Even in the best of times, meals were rough affairs. Once their private stores ran out, not long after the voyage began, Gates and Somers and all the other important men and women on the vessel were forced to eat the same bad food as the lowliest of the deckhands: a hard biscuit and perhaps some cold porridge, washed down by sour beer or foul water.

One unlucky sailor, who had been branded a liar by his shipmates, was given the unenviable job of cleaning the slop buckets and swabbing the privy in the ship’s beak.

Evangelista Torricelli, the Italian physicist who invented the barometer, the instrument used to forecast storms by registering fluctuations in air pressure, was an infant in mid-1609. The instrument he invented would not be in common use at sea for another hundred years. Without science to guide them, Somers and Newport and the other Sea Venture mariners were forced to rely largely on signs and portents to warn of bad weather.

Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers and one-armed Captain Newport were certainly among the first to board the Sea Venture, followed by mariners hauling the officers’ sea chests, heavy with clothes, books, charts, weapons, nautical instruments, and, it is safe to say, special food to supplement the shipboard diet as well as some aqua vitae and wines to liven the table and conversation in the admiral’s quarters. Gates also brought on board some fruit and vegetable seeds he hoped to plant in Jamestown.

more than one hundred Virginia-bound settlers would squeeze themselves into a space not much larger than a middling-sized English cottage. By that time, carpenters would almost certainly have built crude partitions dividing the already small space into a maze of tiny compartments designed to provide some privacy for the passengers who would soon be jammed on board. From below, the three would have climbed a ladder to the mate’s cabin, situated just below the great cabin aft and now turned into a crowded dormitory for a few of the gentlemen settlers who were making the voyage to Virginia.

They would have inspected the bread room, which would soon be filled with casks of flour and biscuits; the gunner’s room, where powder and shot were stored; and the steerage area and tiller room. Making their way topside, the ship’s officers would have checked the rigging and eyed ropes and lines and masts and spars and surveyed the ship’s boat, turned turtle on the upper deck.

Sir George Somers, an experienced mariner, was put in charge of the fleet. Roughly sixty years of age, Somers, from the town of Lyme on England’s southwest coast, had a resume that included service under Essex, Sir Francis Drake, and the privateering Sir John Hawkins.30 A member of parliament, he was an accomplished mariner and navigator. His second in command as master of the fleet’s flagship was Captain Christopher Newport, whose maritime pedigree was every bit as impressive as Somers’s. About forty-nine years of age in 1609, Newport had gone to sea as a young man, sailing to South America and the Caribbean as a privateer. In 1590, when he was about thirty years of age, Newport had been in a sea battle with two Spanish treasure ships off the coast of Cuba. In that battle, Newport lost his right arm but persevered. For the next thirteen years, he was an active Caribbean privateer and was a leading participant in the capture, in 1592, of the Spanish treasure ship the Madre de Dios, a prize that carried about half a million pounds in gems, spices, silks, and other goods. Newport’s long experience as a privateer helped him establish strong links with English merchants. He was also known to King James I, having presented the monarch with two live crocodiles and a wild boar following one of his New World voyages. In 1606, he was named commander of the first Virginia expedition and sailed as captain of the Susan Constant, flagship of the first Virginia fleet.31 By the time he was named sailing master of the flagship of the 1609 fleet, he had made three crossings between England and Jamestown.

have been built in East Anglia in about 1603, the Sea Venture was a three-masted vessel roughly a hundred feet long from the end of her bowsprit to her stern post. The vice admiral, or second-largest ship in the fleet, was the Diamond, probably just a little smaller than the Sea Venture. She was captained by Vice Admiral John Ratcliffe, who had served as captain of the Discovery, one of the three ships of the first Virginia fleet. The third-largest vessel, the Falcon, was called the rear admiral. She was under the command of John Martin, one of the original Virginia settlers who had returned to England in 1608 and who was now on his way back to Jamestown. Sailing master of the Falcon was Francis Nelson, a veteran of one ocean crossing, having made a voyage to the New World as captain of the Phoenix, a pinnace that brought forty settlers to Virginia in 1608.