What challenges faced early Chesapeake colonists?

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Figure false: Secotan Village
Figure false: This engraving was copied from an original drawing John White made in 1585 when he visited the village of Secotan on the coast of present-day North Carolina. The drawing shows daily life in the village, which may have resembled one of Powhatan’s settlements. This drawing conveys the message that Secotan was orderly, settled, religious, harmonious, and peaceful—and very different from English villages. Princeton University Libraries, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Figure false: > VISUAL ACTIVITY
Figure false: READING THE IMAGE: What does this image say about Indian life in Secotan?
Figure false: CONNECTIONS: How did Indian society differ from the English tobacco society that emerged later?

IN 1606, England’s King James I granted the Virginia Company more than six million acres in North America in hopes of establishing the English equivalent of Spain’s New World empire. Enthusiastic reports from the Roanoke voyages twenty years earlier claimed that in Virginia “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance … without toile or labour.” Investors hoped to profit by growing some valuable exotic crop, finding gold or silver, or raiding Spanish treasure ships. Their hopes failed to confront the difficulties of adapting English desires and expectations to the New World already inhabited by Native Americans. The Jamestown settlement struggled to survive for nearly two decades, until the royal government replaced the private Virginia Company, which never earned a profit for its investors.

CHAPTER LOCATOR

What challenges faced early Chesapeake colonists?

How did Chesapeake tobacco society take shape?

Why did Chesapeake colonial society change in the late seventeenth century?

Why did the southern colonies move toward a slave labor system?

Conclusion: Why were export crops and slave labor important in the growth of the southern colonies?

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Check what you know.

CHRONOLOGY

1606

  • – Virginia Company receives royal charter.

1607

  • – English colonists found Jamestown; Pocahontas “rescues” John Smith.

1617

  • – Pocahontas dies in England.

1618

  • – Powhatan dies; Opechancanough becomes Algonquian chief.

1619

  • – House of Burgesses begins to meet in Virginia.

1622

  • – Opechancanough launches an assault on English settlers in Virginia.

1624

  • – Virginia becomes a royal colony.