Jamestown, Sixteen Oh Seven and What Followed

On the fourteenth of May, sixteen oh seven, three ships dropped anchor along a marshy peninsula in the James River and one hundred four English colonists stepped ashore. They named the settlement for their king, James the First, and within months they were dying faster than they could be buried. The site was swampy, the water brackish, the growing season misunderstood. By the winter of sixteen oh nine to sixteen ten, the period the survivors called the Starving Time, only about sixty of roughly five hundred settlers remained alive.

Jamestown endured anyway, for reasons that had everything to do with tobacco. In sixteen twelve a colonist named John Rolfe obtained seeds of a milder Spanish variety, Nicotiana tabacum, and discovered that the Virginia soil and climate produced a leaf that the London market wanted badly. Within a decade, colonists were planting tobacco in the streets. The crop that saved the colony would eventually reshape the entire Atlantic world, fueling a demand for labor that no number of indentured servants could satisfy.

The year sixteen nineteen brought two events that would echo down the centuries. In July the first representative legislative body in the Americas convened at Jamestown, the House of Burgesses, twenty-two elected representatives meeting inside the church. And in late August a privateer ship called the White Lion arrived at Point Comfort with, as the colonist John Rolfe recorded in a letter, 'twenty and odd Negroes.' These were the first documented Africans in English North America, brought by force from the Kingdom of Ndongo in present-day Angola.

In a single year Virginia established representative self-government and began the institution that would define and disfigure American life for the next two and a half centuries.