Today I will be summarizing the story of Jamestown.
The story begins when Walter Raleigh founded the first English colony in North America. While Roanoke was no great success, many other colonies would begin developing along the Atlantic coast of North America. The first settlement in North America was the colony of Jamestown, in modern day Virginia. The London Company was a joint stock company established by King James I. Just like the British West India Company colonized the Caribbean, the London Company colonized the coastal United States. The first colony of the London Company was Jamestown. Late in 1606, the London Company commissioned a fleet of three ships to establish a colony. The Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, sailed to the American mainland to find a suitable location. These settlers first landed near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, but traveled inland on the James River. The settlement site for Jamestown was decided on May 24, 1607. Though there were years of hardship ahead, this would be the first English colony to survive in North America. The site remains preserved with some of the original buildings to this day. Jamestown, and many of the American settlements, was populated mostly by fortune-seekers. These men did not help in the survival of the colony, and as a result of their laziness, two thirds of the colonists died in the first year. In 1608, new colonists arrived from Germany and Poland to join the English. Captain John Smith took over the colony as its third president, and helped the colonists work together. He insisted that “if anyone would not work, neither would he eat”. John Smith had to return to England to recover from a wound he incurred in 1609. 1609-1613 was nicknamed the “Starving Time” because of the lack of food and no new supplies from England. Finally though, in 1614, the colony was able to turn its first profit. The colony had been started as an investment, and investors in England were tiring of sinking money into the settlement. John Rolfe, a surviving settler, had planted a crop of tobacco in 1610 and harvested it in 1614. Rolfe became a wealthy man, and also married the Indian princess Pocahontas.
By 1624 Jamestown finally could stand on its feet and was a stable city in what would become the state of Virginia.
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