Thirteen years before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, a group of 104 men and boys made a 4 1/2 month voyage from England to the New World. They settled on the James River with the goal of making a profit from the New World’s resources for the Virginia Company in London. But survival, soon became their mission. The settlers at Jamestown did survive, and women and children eventually made the voyage to join them. Jamestown became the first permanent English colony in the New World.
Find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river…as runneth into the land…that you may take election of the strongest, most fertile and wholesome place. -Virginia Company 1606
The bunks were for the captain and crew. The passengers traveled and slept in the very crowded the mid-deck.
The provisions included, among other things, many barrels of beer which was just slightly fermented, and much safer than drinking water.
Soon after their arrival they built a fort for protection, including barracks, a few individual houses, buildings for tradesmen and a church which they attended with strict orders from the king twice a day, and three times on Sunday.
The English settlers worst enemy was hunger, not the nearby Powhatan tribe. The English would have been completely wiped out had it not been for the tribes corn crop.
Shortly after seeing the Jamestown Settlement, we bolted forward in history to 1781 and the end of the American Revolutionary War. We visited the Battlefield in Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered his entire army of 7,000 English Loyalists to the French/American troops under the direction of General George Washington.
…and the rest is history!
Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown by John Trumbull, 1797
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