1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [38]
It wasn’t easy. Although they no longer had to depend on Powhatan for food, the Virginia Company later reported, “not less than one hundred and fifty of [the 250 newcomers] died” within months, among them Rolfe’s young wife. Their fate was anything but atypical. Year after year, the company spent outsize sums to send colonists to Virginia—more than a hundred shiploads all told. Year after year, most of the would-be settlers perished within weeks or months—men and women, rich and poor, child and convict. England shipped more than seven thousand people to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. Eight out of ten died.
Most of the thousands of hopeful English who came to Virginia quickly died. This chart represents the author’s best attempt to calculate the total number of migrants, increasing year by year, and Jamestown’s actual population every year. The figures could well be off by several hundred, because the extant records are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. But the overall picture is clear—and dismaying.
So unremitting was the parade of death that even today it is painful to pore through the letters, reports, and chronicles Jamestown left behind. From every page dolorous phrases toll. Few in the Shipp that I came in are left alive.… Many newcomers either have all perished or have suffered horrible extreamities.… In 3 yeares their dyed about 3000 p[er]sons. Reports tally names and fates with the unadorned deadpan of old-fashioned obituary columns. Colony treasurer George Sandys notes that a servant newly shipped from London is dead before delivered. Colonist Hugh Pryse is found in the woods rente in pieces with wolves or other wild Beasts, and his bowels torne out of his body. In a drunken clash William Epps strikes Edward Stallenge so violently that he Cleft him to the scull and next day he died. Surgeon William Rowsley brought 10 men ov[er] w[i]th him to Virginia but within weeks all of his servants are dead. Edward Hill tells his brother in England he remains in Virginia only to gett what I have lost and then god willing I will leave the Contrey. (Hill never did leave; unable to recoup his losses, he died in Virginia a year later.) I am quite out of hart to live in this land, wails Phoebus Canner, god send me well out of it.
On December 4, 1619, John Woodlief landed with thirty-five men at a new plantation, upstream from Jamestown, called Berkeley Hundred. Woodlief had been instructed by his backers to celebrate the day of arrival “as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god”—the first Thanksgiving in English America. Berkeley Hundred’s founders had ordered the date to be observed every year. By the next December 4, thirty-one of the thirty-five tassantassas who had landed that day were sleeping in the soil.
Why did the Virginia Company keep trying? “Whatever else may have entered into the activities of the company,” Wesley Frank Craven observed in his history of the company, “it was primarily a business organization with large sums of capital invested by adventurers whose chief interest lay in the returns expected from the investment.” Yet the Virginia Company did not act like an ordinary business organization. When the initial hope of discovering precious metals and a route to Asia didn’t pan out, the company tried wine making, shipbuilding, iron monging, silk weaving, salt panning, and even glassblowing. All failed, at dreadful cost in money and lives. Nonetheless, the firm kept dumping money and people into Virginia. Why didn’t the company’s backers pull the plug? Why did they keep sending ship after doomed ship?
Equally puzzling, why did Powhatan allow the colony to survive? Jamestown escaped his first assault but remained at the edge of a precipice for years. Why didn’t Powhatan push it over, once and for all?
Part of the answer to both questions is the Columbian Exchange.
“ENGLISH