Word: river
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Many things did go wrong. The most pressing problem was sustenance. The first year, the settlers drank from the James River, succumbing to typhoid, dysentery and salt poisoning. Once they had dug a well they were able to drink safely, but what would they eat? Gardening and farming were fiendishly difficult. Studies of tree rings show that the Chesapeake was baked by drought during the first seven years of the colony. This meant they were dependent on bartering or seizing supplies from local Indians, whose own stores were depleted. The settlers who died of disease or starvation...
...colony flourished, its Powhatan neighbors became alarmed. Trading posts were one thing, permanent farms another. On March 22, 1622, the new leader of the Powhatan, Opechancanough, launched dawn raids on 28 plantations and settlements along the James River, killing 347 colonists, a quarter of the total population. Jamestown itself escaped, warned by an Indian boy who had converted to Christianity. "Besides them they killed," a survivor lamented, "they burst the heart of all the rest." Dispirited and disorganized, hundreds more colonists died the following winter, the second "starving time...
...Nantaquoud. He even offered Smith some nearby land. Smith instead returned to Jamestown, where his adversaries charged him with negligence in the death of two of his men killed by Indians. Smith was sentenced, again, to be hanged. Hours before he was to swing, Newport arrived up the James River with fresh settlers and supplies, intervening once more to spare Smith from the noose...
...deal with Smith, but also the Virginia Co. investors who funded Jamestown and were impertinent enough to expect a return. Forget it, Smith wrote his London underwriters. There was no sense digging for gold where nature had left none, he scoffed, nor would the rock-strewn James River ever guide their wind-driven square-riggers on some long-dreamed-of shortcut to China. Disenchanted investors, he concluded, were free to join him in Jamestown, where their odds of surviving were about...
...national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, Deans is author of The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James