The Settlement of Jamestown
On December 20, 1606, under a corporate charter authorized by King James I for the newly formed London Virginia Company, a fleet of three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery left London and set sail for the Americas. The three ships carried slightly more than 100 adventurers with high hopes of finding wealth and new opportunities in this new land not available to them in England. About half were the younger sons of English gentry, ineligible to inherit land or wealth. The other half were mostly artisans and laborers who were disenchanted with the class structure of English society which offered no opportunity to better their lot in life. After more than four months at sea, they spotted the coast of Virginia on April 6, 1607.
The King's charter instructed them to do four things. They were to locate a sea passage to the Orient, search out the wealth of this new territory, convert the heathens to the Anglican faith and to bring glory to themselves and to England. They accomplished none of these, but they did start the first permanent English settlement on American soil with the seeds that became the United States of America.
A landing party the first day had an ominous beginning. They spotted lush green growth of trees and meadows with wild flowers and wild strawberries, but two of their party were killed by Indians. Landing parties continued to explore the area for two weeks. They selected a site 60 miles upstream on an island connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land, which they thought would be easy to defend. They named their settlement Jamestown after the King.
With high spirits, the small group went to work building a fort, homes and farms, working communally as the Virginia Company had instructed them to do. The men's wives came over later after the homes were built and the farms established. As the only man that seemed to best understand the requirements and the potential of this new land, and because of his ability to deal effectively with the Indians, Captain John Smith was elected president of the governing council. He led them successively through the first two years, and with arrival of successive waves of colonists, the settlement had grown to 500. In September of 1609, John Smith was wounded by an accidental gunshot in the leg and returned to England for treatment. His departure was a great loss for the villagers. Hostile Indians killed many of them on the farms and kept the rest bottled up in the forts. Starvation and disease caused the band to shrink to 60 by spring, 1610.
They were about to abandon their settlement when 300 new and well-provisioned colonists arrived under the command of the newly appointed Governor Gates. Communal living was abandoned. They pushed further out into the surrounding area, each man was given his own plot of land and could now reap the profits from his own sweat. A new spirit of hope and opportunity fired the colonists. In those early years, the idea of self-determination became the backbone of the colonial spirit. The Virginia settlers set up their own government of elected representatives and developed a growing sense of "inalienable rights". These early settlers sensed that they were in the process of creating a new world and a new world order. By 1685 there were 70,000 colonists in Virginia that nurtured much of the early American leadership.