by James C. Sherlock
Sunday, on a brilliant fall day in Hampton Roads, my wife and I went on an outing.
Despite having lived in Virginia for many decades, neither of us had ever been to Jamestown.
We all know the outlines of the story. Jamestown was founded in 1607 as a commercial venture by British investors, the Virginia Company. It was ill-conceived and badly executed, but survived, if barely.
We know, or think we do, about John Smith and Pocahontas. The arrival of African slaves. The beginnings of the General Assembly. Bacon’s Rebellion. The abandonment of the settlement in 1699 when the capitol was moved to Williamsburg.
It turned out that neither of us knew enough about Jamestown to avoid being constantly surprised and educated during a visit to Jamestown Settlement, a living history museum presented by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF).
What makes that museum very special is the way the JYF has woven together the stories of early Jamestown:
- the 1607 voyage of three ships and 104 colonists under the command of Captain Christopher Newport;
- the managers hired by the Virginia Company, then royal appointees from 1624 when the settlement became a colony, and wayward sons of the well-to-do like Nathanial Bacon;
- the other European immigrants, mostly indentured servants;
- the indigenous peoples; and
- Africans, both slave (starting in 1619) and free.
The museum presents not only their history, but their humanity.
The colonists. In Great Britain, 1603 began the 111-year reign of the House of Stuart. James I of England (James IV of Scotland) in 1606 chartered the Virginia Company of London, a venture of wealthy Englishmen hoping to profit from Virginia the way the Portuguese and Spanish had profited from their colonies in the Americas.
In 1607 Captain Newport sailed up the James River and deposited the settlers on Jamestown Island. It had a deep water anchorage, good natural defenses, and little else.
Brackish water and a lack of food almost wiped the settlers out.
They had decided to abandon Jamestown when ships arrived from England with more settlers and supplies in the Spring of 1610. Under a new royal charter and a governor, strict martial law was established.
Among the arrivals were indentured servants, who worked side-by-side with, and were treated like, slaves. When freed of their contracts, many moved to the frontiers and refused to obey colonial laws.
Tobacco was the crop that made the settlement profitable after 1613, resulting in the plantations that line the James River south of Richmond. The first successful planter, John Rolfe, married Pocahontas and took her to England, where she died.
Bacons Rebellion. Cambridge-educated Nathanial Bacon, he of the 1676-77 rebellion, had been exiled to Virginia by his very wealthy father for allegedly cheating a friend. He was charismatic, made wealthy by a parting gift from his father, and was well connected in Jamestown. Ravaged by head lice, he may also have been mad.
His rebellion was more self-serving than civic.
A planter, he emerged as a leader of a group of White and Black frontiersmen who wanted the Indians killed for both revenge and greed. They conducted raids against Pamunkeys further up the James River and in the Middle Peninsula counties of King and Queen, Essex, Middlesex, and Gloucester.
The outlaw Bacon was nonetheless elected to the House of Burgesses by the voters of Henrico.
The Burgesses enacted reforms, including suffrage to non-landholding White freemen. That splitting of the suffrage, and interests, of poor White men from free Blacks presaged the original Constitution a century later and, when slavery was ended, Jim Crow laws 200 years after those original ones.
Unappeased, Bacon and his men burned Jamestown to the ground in September of 1676. Bacon died of dysentery in October of the same year. Governor Berkeley hanged every man he could find among the remaining leadership.
The Indians. Captain Newport had deposited the settlers in the midst of 14,000 Algonquian Indians in a confederacy of about 30 tribes ruled by Chief Powhatan. After initial peace and some trading, the relationships between the colonists and the Indians fluctuated between wariness and war.
Powhatan was the father of Pocahontas and the older brother of Opechancanough, who captured John Smith in 1607 and led attacks against the settlers in 1622 and 1644.
Powhatan’s people were hunters, fishermen and corn farmers.
His capitol, Werowocomoco, was at Purtan Bay in present day Gloucester County across the York River from Camp Peary.
Archeologists have found evidence there of a large residential settlement dating to at least 1200. English artifacts of the trading relationship were unearthed at that site.
The Africans. The first Africans arrived in 1619 on a ship flying a Dutch flag. They had been captured as slaves during the Portuguese wars in Angola.
They left behind a highly developed society, with both urban and rural regions. Among them were skilled women farmers. Women did the farming in Angolan society. They proved far better farmers than the White indentured servants, and made possible the labor-intensive tobacco economy of early Virginia.
Some of the Angolan men had been herders, others were artisans including blacksmiths.
Some of them were probably familiar with European languages and customs because of trade relationships. By Portuguese law, all slaves were baptized.
There were eventually Black freemen among them, but not many, as tobacco made slaves more and more valuable.
The museum. First recommendation is go there. It is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and located along the Colonial Parkway.
The films, each with its own theater, and the galleries, arranged chronologically, are the must see, and can be experienced even on a rainy day. The outdoor displays are terrific.
The museum takes the stories of three peoples from the broad outlines I have sketched above through the end of the 17th century.
There are not separate rooms for each of the peoples and their experiences in Jamestown and environs, but rather storytelling displays as interwoven as were the lives of these people.
It is an extraordinary accomplishment.
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