History

 

The journey that changed the world.

Four hundred years ago, on 19th December 1606, one hundred and five men and boys set sail from London, and then Kent, on three ships: the ‘Susan Constant’, ‘Godspeed’ and ‘Discovery’. Eighteen weeks later they landed at Cape Henry, where after two weeks and dreadful privations, they founded Jamestown, the first capital of Virginia, the earliest permanent English colony in America.

One hundred and fifty years later, the English colonies, which by this time numbered thirteen, were rich and populous and formed the core of the first British Empire. In 1775, however, the colonies rebelled and, a year later declared their independence from Britain as the United States of America.

But they remained essentially English in language, law, religion and (despite a dusting of republican and democratic forms) government.

In the late sixteenth century English was a small European language spoken by circa four million people in Britain and nowhere else. In 1607, English began its voyage to world status, spoken by more than one billion people today.

So join us in 2007 for the four-hundredth birthday, not only of America, but of the English-speaking world.

It’s a lot to celebrate.

 

View of Greenwich with ships on Thames,
Flemish School 1620-30.
Copyright Museum of London

Dr David Starkey on Jamestown

The year 2007 will mark the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown, Virginia. The Virginia Company of London established the colony in 1607; London financiers and merchants supplied the venture capital, the ships, the supplies and the personnel, while the King and Court gave it their blessing and patronage.

This official, ‘establishment’ quality sharply distinguished Jamestown from the religious, oppositionist, endeavour of the Mayflower, thirteen years later. There resulted the characteristic flavour of the Virginian Commonwealth, which itself did so much to shape the future of English-speaking America.

The Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery departed from England in December 1606 and reached the Virginia coast in late April 1607, where the colonists selected a site offering deep water anchorage and a good defensive position.

Nevertheless, the settlement had a struggle to get established. The unfamiliar climate, brackish water supply and shortage of food, all capped by a prolonged drought, led to relentless disease and death. The colonists also lacked the skills necessary to exploit the land, while the upper-class backgrounds of many of them meant they were unused to hard manual labour. To counteract this, Captain John Smith, like an earlier American Lenin, had to introduce a ‘no work, no food’ policy. Finally, there were political difficulties. Jamestown was located in a chiefdom of Algonquian-speaking Indians ruled by Chief Powhatan. The colonists’ relations with him and his people were fragile, though they were by no means universally hostile, as is shown by the famous story of the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas, who married an Englishman, became an English lady and died and was buried in England.

But the colony did survive. And it began, slowly, to multiply. The first two English women arrived at Jamestown in 1608, and more came in subsequent years. For most of the seventeenth century, however, men outnumbered women.

The breakthrough come when colonist John Rolfe, who later married Pocahontas, introduced tobacco as a cash crop. Tobacco cultivation stimulated the rapid growth of the Virginia economy; it even supplanted the search for gold.

The settlers who planted the successful colony at Jamestown brought with them, by charter, the rights of Englishmen and a heritage of liberty grounded in Magna Carta. Indeed, the colonists went further, as the novel circumstances of life in the New World enabled leadership to develop outside the traditional ruling classes (a new concept for Jacobean England). Only a dozen years after the foundation of the colony, the Virginians convened the first elected assembly in America in July 1619—an exercise in representative government that has continued, uninterrupted, to the present day.

The Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony. Jamestown continued as the centre of Virginian life until 1699 when the capital moved to Williamsburg. Half a century later, Jamestown ceased to exist as a town. But its legacies of limited, representative government, democracy, the Rule of Law, entrepreneurship and — eventually, as a kind of long-delayed fulfilment of the marriage of Rolfe and Pocahontas — multiculturalism are embodied in contemporary America and beyond that in the world-wide Anglo-sphere which remains the best hope of human prosperity and freedom.

Links:

• Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA):
• Virginia Tourism Corporation - Jamestown website:
• Jamestown Island:
• Jamestown Settlement:
• National Parks Service: