Jamestown Important To Early American History

Jamestown

Jamestown, is located off the James River in Virginia, USA. Jamestown is important to American history because it was the first English colony. In the early 1600’s, a group of 100 members of a Virginia company, paid for ships to come from England, where they founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. During the 1620s, Jamestown expanded from the area around the original James Fort into a New Town built to the east. Jamestown remained the capital of the Virginian colony until 1699.
About 100 colonists left England in early December 1606, on a cold, foggy, wet and nippy day. They were traveling in three ships, these ships were called The Susan Constant, The Godspeed and The Discovery. It took 4 months for them to sail from England until they reached Chesapeake Bay late the next April. John Smith, who was a former mercenary was aboard the ship, he was accompanied by several other members of the Virginia Company. These were people that were part of a group that searched for a suitable settlement site. On May 14, 1607, the ships landed on a narrow peninsula in the James River. This is where they would live their lives in the New World.

Many problems occurred when the settlers were first in Jamestown, they suffered from famine and disease. The settlers also skirmished with local Native American tribes in the first few years, all of these problems almost brought Jamestown to the brink of failure. The failure was caused by the lack of survival skills that the colonists had, also the lack of sanitation which caused them disease and that they used brackish water to drink, this was caused by the high