On the sixteenth of April, 1607, land was sighted, and the adventurers soon entered Chesapeake Bay, naming the outlying capes, Henry and Charles, after the king's sons, and the river, which they soon ascended, the James, in honor of the monarch himself. Fifty miles above the mouth of the river is "a low peninsula half buried in the tide at high water," which they unfortunately selected as the site of a town; and landing there on the thirteenth of May, they called the place Jamestown. Wingfield, one of the patentees, was chosen president of the resident council, exploring parties were sent out, fortifications were begun, and a few log-huts reared. The colonists had been instructed by the English council to search for water passages running through to the Pacific. A party soon set out, under Newport and Smith; but on reaching the falls of the James turned back. At first they were troubled by Indians; but peace had been made with the neighboring chief before Newport left for England, the twenty-second of June.
The marshes were rank, the water was bad, and food scanty at Jamestown. The colonists were for the most part a shiftless set, lacking the habit of industry. |A dismal summer.| The heat was so intense during the first summer that few houses were built, and the tents were rotten and leaky. The natives, being ill-treated, soon broke out again into hostilities. When autumn came, fifty of the colonists had died. "Some departed suddenly," wrote a chronicler, "but for the most part they died of mere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were in this new discovered Virginia.... It would make ... hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries." The only men in office who had not in some degree succumbed to the miseries of the situation were Gosnold, a man of really superior ability, and Smith himself, the latter having now attained to supreme control by common consent. Smith compelled his people to labor,—"he that will not work shall not eat," was his dictum,—maintained trade with the Indians, among whom he became popular, drilled the little garrison, kept up the fortifications, explored and mapped the country and the coast, wrote appeals for assistance to London, and was the life and soul of the colony for two years.
In 1609 Newport had come out with supplies and one hundred and twenty emigrants, who again were mainly "gentlemen, goldsmiths, and libertines;" and he promptly sailed back with a load of worthless shining earth. Smith found the new-comers seized with a frenzy for discovering gold mines, and his troubles increased. |Smith the savior of the colony.| The company, impatient for returns, were disappointed because he insisted on having the people cultivate the rich soil, build houses, trade with the natives, and explore, rather than go seeking for gold where there was none. He appears to have been the only man of authority in the enterprise who understood the true conditions of colonization. He had repeatedly urged the patentees in London to cease sending him gentlemen, idlers, and curious handicraftsmen, and instead of such to ship "carpenters, husbandmen gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots;" and insisted that they "as yet must not look for profitable returning." To Smith we owe it that Jamestown lived through all its early disasters, so that when he left it, in October, 1609, it had acquired a foothold and was the nucleus of permanent settlement in Virginia. He never again returned to the colony, although in later years we find him diligently exploring the New England coast.
The king yields some of his prerogatives.
With the following year began a new order of things. The London Company, stimulated by ill success, had gained from the king many of the powers heretofore reserved to himself, and secured the appointment of Lord Delaware as governor and captain-general; he was authorized to rule by martial law, thus depriving the turbulent colonists of numerous privileges heretofore given them. |Administrations of Delaware and Dale.| Delaware was in Jamestown but for one year, being succeeded by Sir Thomas Dale (1611), who found the colony in ill condition; many of its servants had defaulted, and there was a large deficiency. In March following (1612), the company obtained a fresh charter, giving it still further powers of self-direction and of dealing with crime and insubordination, and adding to its domain the Bermudas, or Somers Islands,—called thus after Sir George Somers, who had touched at them in 1609 while on a voyage of relief to Virginia. Dale, now possessed of enlarged authority, met with excellent success in bringing the unruly mob of settlers under control of the military code, and induced fresh immigration of a somewhat better class. He caused the abandonment of the non-progressive and unsatisfactory system of communal proprietorship, introduced individual allotment, and broadened the foundations of a prosperous State.
Samuel Argall, "a sea-captain of piratical tastes," followed Dale in the governorship (1617), but was soon recalled (1618), because the settlers complained bitterly of tyrannical and mercenary treatment at his hands. |Liberals gain control of the company.| The liberals in England—prominent among whom were Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton—had now gained control of the corporation, and were fighting the king through the colony, with the result that Virginia gained in the next few years political privileges which were never after wholly relinquished; the colonists, too, had, in the case of Argall, learned the power of organized resistance,—a lesson which long stood them in good stead.
First meeting of the assembly.
The colony was granted a representative assembly,—the first in America,—called the house of burgesses, which was first convened in June, 1619. In the words of the "briefe declaration," written a few years later, "That they might have a hande in the governinge of themselves, yt was graunted that a general Assemblie shoulde be helde yearly once, whereat were to be present the Govr and Counsell wth two Burgesses from each Plantation, freely to be elected by the Inhabitants thereof, this Assemblie to have power to make and ordaine whatsoever lawes and orders should by them be thought good and profitable for our subsistance." In this assembly Governor Yeardley (arrived April, 1619) and his council had seats and took active part. The effect of this convention, composed of twenty-two burgesses, representing eleven "cities," "hundreds," and "plantations," was greatly to restrict the governor's power, heretofore quite absolute. Yeardley was a judicious executive, and the settlement, in spite of many difficulties, prospered under his rule. |Indented servants.| Men with families began to come out from England; but an unfortunate element in the immigration of the time was the class of indented servants, which not only included convicts and vagabonds, but was largely made up of boys and girls entrapped on the London streets by press-gangs and hurried off to Virginia to be forcibly placed in servitude for long terms of years,—the nucleus of the "poor white" element in the South. Another and far worse disaster befell the colony this year (1619). |Introduction of slavery.| Twenty African slaves, the first in America, were landed and sold in Jamestown from a Dutch man-of-war. This was the beginning of a large and wide-spreading traffic in human beings throughout the Southern colonies.
Further political concessions.
In 1622 Sir Francis Wyatt succeeded Governor Yeardley, and brought out with him, as a gift to the colonists, a most unexpected political concession,—confirmation of all liberties previously granted, and definite assurances and provisions for the regular assemblage of the house of burgesses. It is no wonder that the king declared the London Company, with its free debates and bold experiments in popular government in Virginia, "a seminary for a seditious Parliament."