Jamestown Settlement Is Founded: May 11, 1607

This text comes from our book, The American Venture.

For over 50 years following Cabot’s last voyage, England ignored the New World. What is called the Reformation was dividing Europe into hostile religious camps, Catholic and Protestant, and England was soon drawn into the fray. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catharine of Aragon (daughter to Fernando and Isabel), King Henry VIII (Henry VII’s son) proclaimed the Church of England independent of the papacy. Under the reign of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI, this “Church of England” became thoroughly Protestant in doctrine. When Edward’s half-sister, Mary, ascended the throne, she restored unity with the Catholic Church—briefly; under her half-sister, Elizabeth I, the Church of England reverted again to Protestantism. With such religious upheavals, England had little leisure for New World exploration.

Sir Francis Drake

Under Queen Elizabeth I, however, England began its decisive turn to the sea. Elizabeth enlarged England’s merchant fleet, trading on the North and Baltic seas and the Mediterranean. On the Atlantic, English ships carried out an illegal trade with the Spanish West Indies. English privateers raided Spanish settlements and captured ships carrying gold and silver to Spain. In 1577, Elizabeth commissioned the privateer, Francis Drake, to circumnavigate the world. Setting out from Portsmouth harbor, Drake sailed down the eastern coast of South America, rounded Cape Horn, and continued up the west coast of both North and South America, raiding Spanish settlements and seizing Spanish ships along the way. In the summer of 1579, Drake landed somewhere on the coast of what is now northern California, claiming the land for Queen Elizabeth. He named it “New Albion” (New England).

From New Albion, Drake continued up North America’s Pacific coast until he reached the Olympic Peninsula. From there, he set out into the Pacific. After more than a year traversing the Indian Ocean and rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic, Drake sailed into Plymouth on September 26, 1580. For this triumph, the queen knighted the pirate, Sir Francis Drake.

All this sea travel tantalized English speculators with dreams of New World wealth. The first attempt at a New World settlement was made by Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert’s attempt, in 1583, to form such a colony on Newfoundland, however, was a failure. Gilbert himself was lost at sea on the return voyage to England.

One of the investors in Gilbert’s scheme had been his own half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh. A great favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh received royal permission to explore America and to possess any lands he explored and occupied. Raleigh said he would call these lands Virginia, after Queen Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen”—so called because she had never married. The Virgin Queen, however, said Raleigh had to stay by her side in England. Others would have do the exploring and settlement for him, she demanded.

In 1584, Raleigh sent Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe to explore Virginia. Reaching the North American coast off of Florida, Amadis and Barlowe sailed north until they came to Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. There they collected animal skins, pearls, and two Indians (Manteo and Wanchese) and returned to England. Such goods proved of great interest to wealthy Englishmen, and Raleigh was able to secure investment to attempt a permanent settlement.

Sir Walter Raleigh

The following year, Raleigh sent Sir Richard Grenville, Ralph Lane, and a party of 108 men to Roanoke Island. Their attempts at a settlement, however, proved a failure. They arrived too late in the year to plant crops, and Lane’s swaggering with the natives led to violence. Fortunately for the settlers, Sir Francis Drake happened to be passing up the coast at the time. He gathered the disappointed settlers and brought them back to England.

In 1587, Raleigh attempted another settlement—this time of the Chesapeake Bay farther north. However, the sailors who carried John White and the 121 men and women across the Atlantic disobeyed orders and landed them at Roanoke Island, refusing to take them farther north. Making the best of a bad situation, White returned to England for supplies, leaving the settlers to make do with what they had.

The Roanoke settlers never received the supplies. With the threat of war between England and Spain, White could not return to Roanoke until 1591. There he found no one. The colonists were gone, their houses dismantled; only a log carved with the word CROATOAN (the name of an island) remained to mark the lost Virginia settlement. Bad weather prevented White from sailing to Croatoan, forcing him to return to England. Subsequent attempts to find the colonists failed. No one ever learned what happened to them.

Though failures, Raleigh’s attempts at settlement had whipped up English interest in Virginia. Two adventurers, Bartholomew Gosnold and Richard Hakluyt, formed a trading company, called the Virginia Company of London (or just the London Company), and sold “bills of adventure” to investors. In April

1606, Elizabeth’s successor, James I, granted the London Company a charter to found a colony in Virginia.

In April 1607, three ships commissioned by the London Company landed at Cape Henry at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay. In June, the settlers chose a site for their new colony—Jamestown (in honor of King James I)—on a small peninsula jutting out into a river, also christened James. Jamestown suffered many trials in the first three years of its existence. The lands around the James River were swampy, and fevers killed many of the colonists. The Algonquin people of the region, often incensed to anger by the swaggering way the English forced them to give them supplies, raided the settlement. Then there was the problem that the colony was not producing the wealth that the London Company’s investors wanted. For a time, it appeared that the Jamestown experiment would end in failure.

Then in 1610, an Englishman named John Rolfe arrived at Jamestown with a treasure—tobacco seed, smuggled from the Spanish West Indian islands. Tobacco smoking had become quite popular in England and all of Europe, and the best tobacco came from the Spanish West Indies. In 1612, the Jamestown settlers planted the smuggled seed and, at harvest, discovered that it produced a leaf that was sweet, strong, and fragrant. Indeed, soon smokers in England were declaring that, though the Virginia leaf was inferior to the Caribbean, it was quite good, nonetheless. Jamestown and Virginia had found their cash crop. Tobacco growing thus saved the fledgling colony from collapse.