Word: jamestowne
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...when the Pilgrims were still living comfortably at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, the Virginia Company planted the first permanent English colony in America at Jamestown. By the time the Pilgrims debarked from the Mayflower, the settlement at Jamestown was thirteen years old. Long ago before Squanto taught the New England Separatists how to fish and raise crops, the Virginians were exporting thousands of pounds of tobacco to satisfy the nicotine hunger of England. Jamestown was earlier, bigger, and richer than Plymouth. Yet we commemorate the Pilgrims' first good harvest, and all but ignore the Virginia colony...
...ideals of the Jamestown colony have grown unreal and stale like the values of Plymouth. The men who backed the Jamestown venture were no other-wordly visionaries, but practical men of business. The Virginia Company hankered after precious metals, a Northwest Passage, and raw materials with which to produce "all the commodities of Europe, Africa and Asia, and to supplye the wantes of all our decayed trades." Bradford's "spirite of God and his grace" were conceits foreign to the minds of these entrepreneurs. In return for their investment they wanted earthly dividends of the sort envisioned by Michael Drayton...
Here is a proper ethic for a self-possessed, acquisitive people, and here is a bit of the seventeenth century that embodies the principles of the twentieth. If the lessons of Plymouth could inspire the 1860's, the ambitions of Jamestown are suited to our own decade...
...record of Jamestown has all the theatrical trappings of an achievement to be honored in a national holiday. Like the Pilgrims, the Virginia colonists barely survived their first years in the New World. Like the Pilgrims, they persevered. Against Miles Standish's bungled courtship of Priscilla Alden, the Jamestown legend can put the capture of John Smith by Powhatan and his rescue by Pocahontas. The counterpart of the Pilgrim's harvest feast in Virginia was the arrival of a relief expedition on June...
...leveling their gaze at material gain, the founders of Jamestown made themselves the truer precursors of modern American ideals. Thanksgiving, though reduced to an occasion for a square meal, still immortalizes the deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers. Surely the Pecuniary Fathers of Jamestown deserve to be enshrined in the nation's folklore with their own holiday...