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In May 1607 the Virginia Company of London, investors seeking gold and a foothold against Spain, landed three ships on a swampy island about 40 miles up the James River. The site was hidden from Spanish patrols and deep enough to tie ships to the trees, but it had no fresh spring and drank brackish water. Many of the first colonists were gentlemen who did no manual labor. Tree rings from bald cypress studied in the 1990s show they arrived in the worst drought in 700 years, which also left the Powhatan Confederacy without corn to trade. After John Smith, who enforced the rule that he who will not work shall not eat, left with gunpowder burns in 1609, the fort was besieged.

The relief fleet’s flagship Sea Venture was wrecked on Bermuda, and during the starving time of 1609 to 1610 only about 60 of 214 settlers survived, some by cannibalism. The castaways built the Deliverance and Patience, found the colony dying and sailed away on June 7, 1610, until Lord Delaware’s fleet turned them back. John Rolfe’s smuggled tobacco seeds made the colony profitable, and in 1619 the General Assembly met as the first representative legislature in the Americas, months before the privateer White Lion brought the first documented enslaved Africans. Opechancanough’s 1622 uprising killed over 300 settlers, and the capital moved to Williamsburg in 1699.

• A skull with butchery marks found in the fort’s trash pit confirmed cannibalism during the starving time.
• Polish artisans denied the vote in 1619 went on strike and won equal voting rights on July 21, 1619.
• The Africans aboard the White Lion came from the Kingdom of Ndongo, and records name Antoinette, Isabella and Angela.
• Nathaniel Bacon’s followers burned Jamestown in 1676, and the statehouse burned again in 1698.
• A 1900 seawall protecting the church tower stopped erosion, so archaeologists in 1996 found the original fort’s postholes intact.