Jamestown: Life Complicated

Last week David and I rode to Jamestown, one of the other two historic sites near Williamsburg, Virginia. Before last week, if you had quizzed me on early American colonial history, I could have told you that Jamestown was one of the first three English settlements, founded in the early seventeenth century. It's come a long way since then, with motorized fountains, bronze sculptures, and flags from all fifty states at the entrance:

After our tour from the National Park guide, I now remember that Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded by the Virginia Company in 1607.

I remember learning that the first settlers encountered native Americans immediately upon their arrival. The character of those encounters depended both upon the history book one was reading and the person recounting the story. In elementary school we learned to make black paper Pilgrim hats and eat squash given by the native peoples on the first Thanksgiving. In middle school we learned that the threat of attack from the natives meant that every settlement had to have a palisade. This singular part of colonial history was full of ambiguity.

Less ambiguity now: I don't think any native American flags fly over the Jamestown monument.

The first Jamestown settlers chose the location of their landing mostly to avoid the camps of natives and to hide from Spanish vessels in the Chesapeake. They imagined that the most significant obstruction to long-term life in North America would be Spanish competition (which had already founded a colony in St. Augustine, Florida). Boy, were they wrong.

Agriculture jumps to mind as the primary economic engine for the first colonial settlements. But as we found out on our biking tour of the old Jamestown sites, glass-making also brought in some dough for the colonists. According to the placards at this site, English glassblowers could not satisfy the demand for glass in England at the turn of the 1600s. So there was a market for American glass.

We walked around the excavated site of the former glass works, and looked on as craftsmen in period garb showed us how the art is done.

I learned that glass is naturally green because of latent ferrous deposits in the silicate base. In order to make glass clear, one has to add other minerals.

I imagine glass in the 1600s to be like plastic in the late twentieth century: cheaper and easier to make than its forebear, and lighter. We have plastic (better in some ways than metal or glass); the Jamestown settlers had glass (better than pottery).

David and I had a fun National Park guide. I'm amazed at how much adults are like middle-schoolers. Give them a lecture, and they get fidgety and bored. Give them a class in which they might be called on to answer, complete with visual and tactile aids and role-playing, and they pay attention. Here's David, playing the part of a "savage," whom the colonists are asking for corn.

Which brings me back to the original Jamestown settlement. They landed in the middle of a drought, but did not know it because they'd never lived here before. As the fresh water decreased, the brackish water from the river increased, and their wells became salty. Our guide told us that drinking brackish water too long "makes you stupid." As a result, when the settlers needed their wits the most, they were losing them.

Leaders of the colony had been chosen by the Virginia Company, and the names of leaders were not revealed until after they landed--to prevent factions forming on the boat ride over. Thus leadership was not democratic, but appointed. The personalities of some of the leaders did not lend themselves to good relationships with either the natives or the settlers.
The cultural divide between European and native widened when the English discovered that the native women did all the farming, gathering, and tending the home. The men went hunting and went to war. The former male activity especially was a luxury of the nobles in England; English men were expected to work, tend the fields, and build homes. Because of the delegation of tasks in English culture, native men received the stigma of being "lazy" from the get-go. When it came time to ask the natives for help, believing the other culture was inherently slothful could not have made the conversation easier.
The Jamestown settlers' motives for coming to Virginia were not entirely economic. The group had an express intent to spread the faith of the Anglican church to new continents. The colonists had a zeal for the spread of the faith, even if it was more imperialist than the sort of zeal most Christian missionaries share today.
Last week our power went out for forty-two hours. Not only did I discover how much of my life requires electricity, I gained a new appreciation for cultures and times that live without it. The matter of clean water, for instance, that I take for granted as long as we have a water purification system, the Jamestown settlers could not take for granted. Disease that now keep us in bed for a week (until the antibiotics do their job) could wipe out a whole town in 1607.
I remember first learning about the colonists of Jamestown and Plymouth as if their success in America were a foregone conclusion. Since we're here today, there must have been a sort of manifest destiny at work--like SuperBowl champions saying they knew all along they'd win it. I have discovered this view is far from the truth. Not only did the colonists have drought, disease, relations with the natives, and poor leadership working pretty hard against them, they had the looming spectre of financial loss. The Virginia Company was a for-profit firm in London, the shareholders of which expected a return on their investment. If too many years passed without profit, the colonists would be called back home--whether the natives had become Christian or not.

[this photo needs explanation: it's a view of Jamestown ruins through a glass floor in the museum:]

During their second winter, the settlers lost two-thirds of their populace to starvation. The natives were hurting, too, because of the drought, but being natives they had the resources to tough it out. The Virginia Company settlers were in trouble. The next time a ship stopped by Jamestown, all the settlers got on board for London. The Jamestown settlement was over.

[here is a piece of slate, a permenant record of writing and drawings from Jamestown:]

Over, that is, until they ran into the next supply ship sent by the Virginia Company, at the mouth of the James River. The Company had put a new commander in place, and he told the settlers to turn around and get back to work in the colony. With so many variables at work, after all it was one new head honcho and an extra supply ship that kicked the town into feasibility. And the next season the weather improved greatly.
The following year a Virginian variety of tobacco was cultivated from smuggled stock, and the colony had her first cash crop. In the end, what made the colony viable in the long term was neither religious zeal, nor abundant health, nor perfect relations with the natives. The clincher was humanity's long-standing addiction to tobacco products, and the theft of a plant from the Caribbean.
Contrary to the simplified lists of dates at the beginning of your textbooks, history is more complicated that multivariable calculus. One just never knows if or how a new venture will pan out. It might even become the beginning of a new empire. And if you dig deep enough in your history, you might find it much messier than you expected. Your victorious civilization might hinge on international thieves and cancer-causing addictions.

Life is complicated.

~ emrys