Comment by GlenTheMachine
6 days ago
The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth. They didn’t know how to care for the fishing nets, so they rotted, and then didn’t know how to fix them.
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some context.
John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.
Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
The soil may have been brackish, but this wasn't their main setback.
The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival. Their first ship brought jewelers and smiths to work the gold they assumed they'd find, but didn't have a real plan for agriculture. The majority died of starvation and disease, but the survivors were sustained by meager leftover travel supplies from newly arriving ships, and by raiding neighboring natives for their corn.
Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors. The Pilgrims settled in a higher latitude with a shorter growing season, but during their first drought they had already stored enough supplies to share with local natives.
Jamestown could have been on a similar footing if they'd prioritized survival and diplomacy over finding treasure for the crown, the chartering company, and themselves.
>The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival
Source? I'm pretty sure they planted corn and wheat as soon as they could, in the first month of arrival. "The 15th June we had finished our fort... we had also sown most of our corn on two mountains. It sprang a man's height from the ground." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Maria_Wingfield
By the third year (1609) they had cleared and planted at least 40 acres https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/2/hh2b2.htm
> Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors.
And, as I understand it, settled into areas which had previously been cleared and cultivated by the natives but had been relatively recently abandoned.
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Pilgrims-and-the... "The Pilgrims decided to establish their colony in an area that had been cleared and abandoned by the Patuxet Indians. One colonist remarked, “Thousands of men have lived here, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same."
That's one amazing head start. And, had they not had it, the Pilgrims probably would have died, too.
This mostly fails a sniff test to me? And indeed, reading the linked article doesn't support your editorializing. To quote: "There is some evidence that they had poor fishing skills, but other factors may have contributed more to their failures"
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
From the article:
‘They suffered fourteen nets (which was all they had) to rot and spoil, which by orderly drying and mending might have been preserved. But being lost, all help of fishing perished.’ (25)
(25) Strachey, W. 1998b [1610], ‘A True Reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony then, and after under the government of the Lord La Warre’, in Haile 1998, p. 441
I originally learned this by talking with a Jamestown National Historical Park docent. I said that, having grown up in Virginia in the 20th century and knowing what tidewater Virginia was like in the 17th century, it would have been very hard to starve to death. American chestnut was still the dominant forest tree, and provided literally tons of nuts per tree. Black walnut and acorn were also plentiful and make good survival foods if you know how to prepare them. The Chesapeake Bay had enormous oyster beds, with oysters being described as "the size of dinner plates", and John Smith said that he thought he could have walked across it on the backs of fish, and if you know how to dry or salt fish it doesn't matter that the sturgeon and rockfish are seasonal. Mussels and crab, likewise, would have been plentiful, and unlike fish, accessible year round. Deer, turkey, rabbit, groundhog, squirrel, opossum and raccoon were plentiful, and passenger pigeon were also around, not having suffered the overhunting they did in the early 20th century.
She indicated that the majority of the English settlers weren't farmers or fishermen and didn't have the hands-on experience to make use of the resources at their disposal. I went home and did a bit of internet research on that statement, and it seemed fairly accurate.
I do not claim to be a trained historian of colonial Virginia; I just grew up there.
You are still strengthening the claim beyond the paper, is my point. The paper, specifically, has several other explanations beyond "they didn't know how to care for nets."
For example:
That is, it isn't just that they were not "professional fisherman." Something that probably didn't even exist in the modern sense of the word. They were in a much harsher environment than was anticipated.
The low stock of salt and not having the same dry season that they were used to from the other side of the Atlantic almost certainly played much more heavily, as well. (And to be clear, that paper covers these as heavy influences.)
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be. Our food supply is supernaturally clean, nowadays.
At any rate, my main gripe here is the mental image of "second sons that didn't know how to do anything" that you conjured. Certainly possible, but feels far overstated, to me. They had managed to survive a ship across the ocean. Something that was not a passive cruise journey.
4 replies →
Jamestown also starved because they tried collective farming (communism). It didn't work for them any more than it worked for anyone else.
So did the Pilgrims for their first year. They starved, too.
Walter, I appreciate your comments but you surely have to know Jamestown settlers were in no way practicing communism as it's understood today.
Google "did jamestown use communal farming?"
And they did. After it utterly failed, they moved away from it to individual ownership of farms.
6 replies →
Marx didn't write about communism until a couple centuries later. The ideas were very similar though.
1 reply →
[flagged]