Early Trials of Jamestown
What manner of men were the emigrants from that old world to this new one who made the beginnings of the change which in three centuries has become a transformation?…
From: 1607 C.E. To: 1608 C.E.
Location: Jamestown, Virginia, United States of America
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From “The Founders of the Colony” in Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs by Mary N. Stanard, 1917.
Three Hundred years ago, as every school child knows, European civilization was already comparatively ripe. England had her great churches, her palaces, her universities, and had enjoyed golden ages of chivalry and of letters. But America was still a wilderness—its only roads the trail of the Indian, the track of the deer, the bear or other wild creature, its only sign of human habitation clusters of bark huts and such patches of corn, beans, and tobacco as savages were able to cultivate by scratching the ground with the most primitive implements of wood and stone.
What manner of men were the emigrants from that old world to this new one who made the beginnings of the change which in three centuries has become a transformation?
We know that, charmed with travellers' tales of an El Dorado, or aflame with the spirit of adventure, or with zeal to add to their king's earthly dominions and win a heathen people for a heavenly one, and with an eager curiosity hard for a blase age like ours to comprehend, these men left their familiar haunts, their more or less comfortable fire-sides, their friends and relatives and the women they loved.
Crowded into toy ships in which they endured indescribable miseries and were over and over again swept far out of their course by violent gales, they crossed three thousand miles of ocean and, in spite of dangers, disappointments, illness, famine, death, sowed here the seeds of the white man's civilization—the white man's religion. Who were they, and what was their condition in that distant land whose manners and ways they transplanted to this?
The question is a difficult one, for the emigrant did not concern himself about our interest in him, or stop to make a family tree, though here and there an allusion in a will, letter, or legal paper in Virginia or England, or a rare reference in a foreign pedigree to a member of a family who had come to America, gives us a hint as to who one of them was at home.
Thanks to the lively "Historie" of Captain John Smith we have a comparatively complete record of the little band of "first planters" who came in 1607 and the two "supplies" added to them in 1607-08. These three parties brought, in all, about 295 persons—the first settlers numbering 105, the first "supply" 120, and the second "supply" about 70, and Captain Smith gives us the names of early all of them. Of the whole number ninety-two are described as "gentlemen," forty-five as "laborers," fourteen as "tradesmen," seven as "tailors," four as "carpenters," three as "surgeons," two as "apothecaries," two as "goldsmiths," two as "refiners," two as "blacksmiths," a "jeweler," a "perfumer," a "gunsmith," a "cooper," a "sailor," a "barber," a "bricklayer,'" a "mason," a "drummer," a "tobacco pipe-maker," six "boys," eight "Dutchmen and Poles " and "some others," including two women.
The term "gentleman" was a comprehensive one at the time and was applied to men of widely varying social rank. In England during the later Tudor and early Stuart periods there was general aspiration for heraldic distinction and it was the fashion for successful men to secure coats-of-arms. Prosperous merchants would buy land and become country gentlemen; men of yeoman origin, like Captain Smith, would become army officers and be styled "gentleman"; and of course the landed families of ancient, as well as those of more recent, descent were included in the gentry.
In regard to most of our ninety-two earliest of Virginia " gentlemen," there is but little known. Some of them, like Master George Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and author of a "Discourse," which is one of the valuable sources of information in regard to the first settlement, and Francis West, brother of Lord Delaware, were younger sons of noblemen. Others bore the names of good old English families. Of these were Master Edward Wingfield, the colony's first President; "worthy and religious" Captain Bartholomew Gosnold; Captain Gabriel Archer, the ready writer, who, says Wingfield, "glorieth much in his pennworke," and whose "True Relation" is another illuminating contribution to the settlement story; Harrington, Throckmorton, Pennington and Waller. Some, like Captain John Martin, whose patent for the plantation of "Brandon," later to become widely known as the historic Harrison seat, is still in existence, were sons of prominent Londoners; but of a larger number we have only names.
The embarking of so large a proportion of "gentlemen" upon an undertaking which called for the severest manual labor has caused many hard things to be said about the colony. Captain Smith—who was a bundle of energy and enterprise, with no tolerance for men less hardy than himself—was their first and harshest critic.
True, it was to search for gold, not to cut down trees and prepare the soil for crops, that most of these "gentlemen" came adventuring to Jamestown. Dreams of vast quantities of the precious ore had come true in countries further south, and they hoped to see them come true in Virginia. Yet when the need arose, they did their part with the axe and the hoe, as well as in exploring the country for food supplies and defending the colony against the Indians. Of the very beginning of the Jamestown settlement it is written:
"Now falleth every man to worke, the Councell contrive the Fort, the rest cut down trees to make place to pitch their Tents; some provide clapbord to relade the ships, some make gardens, some nets."
In the year following, as soon as the "Supply" arrived, Captain Smith, who was then the President, took a party of thirty of them down the river to learn to make clap-board, cut down trees, and become hardened to sleeping on the ground. Among those he chose were Gabriel Beadles and John Russell, described as "the only two gallants of this last Supply, and both proper gentlemen." The quaint chronicler adds:
"Strange were these pleasures to their conditions; yet lodging, eating and drinking, working or playing, they were but doing as the President did himselfe. All these things were carried so pleasantly as within a weeke they became Masters: making their delight to heare the trees thunder as they fell; but the Axes so oft blistered their tender fingers that many times every third blow had a loud othe to drowne the echo; for remedie of which sinne, the President devised how to have every man's othes numbered, and at night for every othe to have a cann of water powred downe his sleeve, with which every offender was so washed that a man should scarce heare an othe in a weeke."
It was after nearly five months of discomfort and mishaps at sea that, on that memorable 13th of May, 1607, the Susan Constant the Godspeed, and the Discovery were moored to the trees in six fathom water before what was soon to be Jamestown. Any one who now visits James River in the month of May, when the temperature is balmy and the wooded banks newly dressed with green and garlanded with bloom, may readily imagine the delight of the sea-weary voyagers with the situation. A few days after the landing “Master Percy," walking with several others in the woods, found "the ground all flowing over with faire flowers of sundry colours and kindes, as though it had beene in any Garden or Orchard in England," and with “Strawberries and other fruits unknowne." Walking on through " this Paradise," they came to an Indian village where they were given berries to eat and shown "a Garden of Tobacco and other fruits and herbes," and one of the Indians hospitably gathered some of the tobacco and distributed it among them.
By June 15 the triangular shaped fort, with its bulwarks mounted with artillery at each corner, was finished, and most of their corn was planted. Thus fortified—as they supposed—against the Indians and hunger, Percy complacently remarks:
“This is a fruitful soil, bearing many goodly and fruitful trees."
But conditions were not so favorable as they seemed, and soon enough this enthusiastic sounder of Virginia's praise was to tune his pipe to a different key. On June 22 Captain Christopher Newport, admiral of the little fleet that brought the settlers over, sailed for England, "leaving us," says Percy, "one hundred and foure persons verie bare and scantie of victualls; furthermore, in warres and in danger of the Savages."
With the departure of the ship on whose stores they had depended "there remained neither taverne, beere house, nor place of reliefe, but the common Kettell," which—equally distributed—provided "halfe a pint of wheat, and as much barley boyled with water for a man a day."
Says Thomas Studley, another of the "gentlemen" whose observations had been preserved by Captain Smith: "Had we beene as free from all sinnes as gluttony and drunkennesse, we might have beene canonized for Saints.... Our drinke was water, our lodgings Castles in the ayre."
And so, for all the fairness and fruitfulness of the country, there was no bread, and they soon found that with water all around there was not a drop that was fit to drink. As the spring mildness gave way to fierce summer heat to which their bodies were not "seasoned," they were to make another discovery. All unseen, there lurked in that "paradise" a foe more deadly than the Indians were soon to prove. Not only were there trees and fruits "unknowne" to the English emigrant, in the neighborhood of Jamestown, but, invisible and undreamed of, millions of malaria germs flourished in the undrained swamps—and there was no quinine and little medicine of any kind.
Dysentery laid them low. The grim twins. Ague and Fever, fell upon them, setting their teeth chattering, their limbs quaking with cold, then burning and parching their flesh with maddening heat and racking their bones with aching, and finally leaving them weak of body and will, dispirited and miserable and without nourishment or restoratives. The kind physician, Dr. Thomas Wotton, and the godly minister. Reverend Robert Hunt, did all in their power to relieve and comfort them, but their huts—hastily put up of green timber thatched with reeds from the swamps—became houses of torture and of death.
"God (being angrie with us)," says Captain Smith, "plagued us with such famine and sicknes that the living were scarce able to bury the dead."
Under such conditions contentment would have been impossible among any set of men in any part of the world, and, though the naive humor with which even the most dismal of their accounts is spiced indicates that the colonists were well supplied with that wholesome preservative, mutiny and discord were rife. They berated the authorities in London for sending them out so poorly provided, they berated President Wingfield and the Council, they berated each other.
The sturdy Smith himself "tasted the extremity of the Country's sickness," but he seems to have had unusual recuperative powers, for he was soon up and doing again and chiding his enfeebled and half-starved companions for their idleness. Of course building and planting were neglected, but the chroniclers, though sufferers themselves, had not yet fully enough realized the debilitating effects of malaria to make due allowance, and the colonists had little sympathy from them or the "adventurers" at home who, in return for what they had spent in fitting them out, were anxiously awaiting a share in the products of so fruitful a region as Virginia was reported to be. The wonder to-day is that all effort was not abandoned and that the infant colony should have, even feebly, held on to life.
Toward the end of the summer Master George Percy, the late enthusiastic stroller through a "paradise," entered in his note-book this pathetically eloquent necrology:
"The sixt of August there died John Ashbie, of the bloudie Flixe.
"The ninth day died George Flowre, of the swelling.
"The tenth day died William Bruster, Gentleman, of a wound given by the Savages, and was buried the eleventh day.
"The fourteenth day Jerome Alicock, Ancient [Ensign] , died of a wound. The same day Francis Midwinter and Edward Moris, Corporall, died suddenly.
"The fifteenth day there died Edward Browne and Stephen Galthorpe.
"The sixteenth day there died Thomas Gower, Gentleman.
"The seventeenth day there died Thomas Mounslic.
"The eighteenth day there died Robert Pennington and John Martine, Gentlemen.
"The nineteenth day died Drue Piggase, Gentleman.
"The two and twentieth day of August there died Captaine Bartholomew Gosnold, one of our Councell: he was honourably buried, having all the Ordnance in the Fort shot off, with many vollies of small shot.
“The foure and twentieth day died Edward Harrington and George Walker; and were buried the same day.
"The sixe and twentieth day died Kenelme Throgmortine.
"The seven and twentieth day died William Roods.
"The eight and twentieth day died Thomas Stoodie, Cape Merchant.
"The fourth day of September died Thomas Jacob, Sergeant.
"The fifth day there died Benjamin Beast.
"Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases... and by warres, and some departed suddenly: but for the most part they died of meere famine."
Master Percy adds: "There were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia. Wee watched every three nights, lying on the bare cold ground what weather soever came; warded all the next day: which brought our men to be most feeble wretches. Our food was but a small Can of Barlie sod in water to five men a day. Our drinke, cold water taken out of the River which was at a floud verie salt; at a low tide full of slime and filth."
The sick and dying men "night and day groaning in every corner of the fort " were "most pitifull to heare." Sometimes, continues the ghastly record, those "departing out of the World" were as many as "three or foure in a night," and in the morning their bodies were "trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges, to be buried."
"From May to September," says Studley, "those that escaped lived upon Sea-crabs and Sturgeon. Fifty in this time we buried."
Ere long their pitiful store of provision was "all spent," and the sturgeon season was over. Even the Indians who they hourly expected to destroy them in their weakness, seem to have been touched by their "desperate extremitie," for it is written that God "so changed the harts of the savages that they brought such plenty of their fruits and provision as no man wanted."
With the aid of these unexpected supplies and doubtless helped also by the passing of summer with its burning suns, the remnant of the original one hundred and five colonists seems to have secured a firmer grip on life. Captain Smith, who was given control of affairs, set some of them "to mow, others to bind thatch, some to build houses, others to thatch them."
Going off in "the shallop" on a search for food, he succeeded in securing a helpful supply of game and corn from the Indians, in return for beads, hatchets and "such toys," and established a fantastic sort of trade with Powhatan, which in spite of the fact that the wily old "emperor" never ceased to view the dauntless White Chief with suspicion, nor to plot his destruction, kept the colony from actual starvation until the arrival of the First Supply from England. Moreover, Smith's reports of the plenty he had seen and the love of Pocahontas for himself and the colony, "so revived their dead spirits... as all men's fears was abandoned."
It is significant that chroniclers who found Virginia in spring a paradise are silent as to the beauties of autumn. There was no enthusiasm left with which to chant the praise of the sunset-colored woods, the golden sunishine, the softening, veil-like mists of Indian summer.
In the spring of 1607 the change from sea to shore had made Mother Earth doubly charming, but in the midwinter following it was the first glimpse of the white wings of Captain Newport's returning ship that enraptured their longing eyes. Enfeebled as they were, we may be sure they found voices that made the woods ring with shouts of, A sail! Newport! England has not forgotten us! We are saved! Glory to God! Long live the king!
One hundred and twenty men, "well furnished with all things that could be imagined necessary," both for them- selves and the first settlers, landed on January 14, 1608. But the joy they brought was shortlived, for three days later, during freezing weather, Jamestown was destroyed by fire. Buildings, arms and ammunition, bedding, clothing and much of the provision went up together in smoke. Their houses had been rough and comfortless, but had, at least, afforded shelter; the church was barn-like and rickety, but it had served to remind them that God was still in heaven, and in it they had daily said the prayers they had learned in England. Say Thomas Studley and Anas Todkill, contributors to Smith's "Historic":
"Good Master Hunt, our Preacher, lost all his Library and all he had but the cloathes on his backe; yet none never heard him repine at his losse."
And so the First Supply meant only over a hundred more stomachs to fill, and according to Studley and Todkill, they were again reduced to meal and water, "whereby, with the extremitie of the bitter cold frost, more than halfe of us dyed."
Stanard, Mary N. Colonial Virginia: Its People and Customs. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1917.
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