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Voyage1
The Virginia Company planned to search for gold and silver deposits in the New World, as well as a river route to the Pacific Ocean that would allow them to establish trade with the Orient. About 100 colonists left England in late December 1606 on three ships and reached Chesapeake Bay late the next April. After forming a governing council including Christopher Newport, commander of the sea voyage, and Captain John Smith, a former mercenary. -
JamesTown is founded
May 13, 1607, they landed on a narrow peninsula virtually an island in the James River, where they began their lives in the New World. By the summer of 1607, Newport went back to England with two ships and 40 crewmembers to give a report to the king and to gather more supplies and colonists.The settlers left behind suffered greatly from hunger and illnesses like typhoid and dysentery, caused from drinking contaminated water from a nearby swamp. -
Algonquian tribes threaten to attack4
Settlers also lived under constant threat of attack by members of local Algonquian tribes, most of which were organized into a kind of empire under Chief Powhatan. -
Powhatan and John Smith start trade
An understanding reached between Powhatan and John Smith led the settlers to establish much-needed trade with Powhatan’s tribe by early 1608. Though skirmishes still broke out between the two groups, the Native Americans traded corn for beads, metal tools and other objects from the English. -
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The starving time
After Smith returned to England in late 1609, the inhabitants of Jamestown suffered through a long, harsh winter known as “The Starving Time,” during which more than 100 of them died. Firsthand accounts describe desperate people eating pets and shoe leather. Some Jamestown colonists even resorted to cannibalism. -
Sir Thomas Gates makes new laws7
In the spring of 1610, the remaining colonists were set to abandon Jamestown. Two ships arrived with at least 150 settlers, supplies and the new English governor of the colony, Lord De La Warr. De La Warr soon got ill and went home. His successor Sir Thomas Gates took firm charge of the colony and made a system of new laws that strictly controlled the interactions between settlers and Algonquians. They launched raids against Algonquian villages, killing residents, burning houses and crops. -
A period of peace
A period of relative peace followed the marriage in April 1614 of the colonist and tobacco planter John Rolfe to Pocahontas, a daughter of Chief Powhatan who had been captured by the settlers and converted to Christianity. Thanks largely to Rolfe’s introduction of a new type of tobacco grown from seeds from the West Indies, Jamestown’s economy began to thrive. -
First Africans arrived in the English settlement10
In 1619, the first Africans arrived in the English settlement they had been on a Portuguese slave ship captured in the West Indies and brought to the Jamestown region. They worked as indentured servants at first and were most likely put to work picking tobacco. -
Powhatan's Major Assault
In March 1622, the Powhatan made a major assault on English settlements in Virginia, killing some 350 to 400 residents (a full one-quarter of the population). The attack hit the outposts of Jamestown the hardest, while the town itself received advance warning and was able to mount a defense. -
King James I
King James I dissolved the Virginia Company and made Virginia into an official crown colony, with Jamestown as its capital. The New Town area of Jamestown continued to grow, and the original fort seems to have disappeared after the 1620s. -
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The Great Rebellion13
Opechankeno, led another great rebellion he planned another coordinated attack, which resulted in the deaths of another 350-400 of the 8,000 settlers. The attack ended when Opechancanough was captured in 1646, taken to Jamestown, and shot in the back by a guard against orders and killed. -
Bacon's Rebellion
In 1676, economic problems and unrest with Native Americans drove Virginians led by Nathaniel Bacon to rise up against Governor William Berkeley. Colonists, enraged at declining tobacco prices and higher taxes, sought a scapegoat in local tribes who still periodically sparred with settlers and lived on land they hoped to obtain for themselves. -
Bacon's Forces
Bacon’s forces drove Governor Berkeley from the capital and set fire to Jamestown. Bacon died of dysentery in October, and armed merchant ships from London, followed by forces sent by King Charles II, soon put down the resistance. -
JamesTown is burned down16
The central statehouse in Jamestown burned down, and Middle Plantation, replaced it as the colonial capital the following year. While settlers continued to live and maintain farms there, Jamestown was all but abandoned. Jamestown Island housed military posts during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.