On 20 December 1606, three ships, containing settlers for ‘Virginia’ with their baggage and sailing under the auspices of the Virginia Company, chartered in London for this purpose, shipped anchor in the Thames. After weathering ‘many crosses in the downes from tempests’, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, arriving in Chesapeake Bay in the middle of the following April where, after some consideration, they established themselves at a site on an island in the James River.

As every proverbial American schoolchild knows, the Jamestown pioneers endured years of misery, suffering bouts of dysentery, as well as harassment from the neighbouring ‘Indians’, while they squabbled incessantly amongst themselves. They also failed to find either mines from which to extract precious metals or a quick ‘Northwest Passage’ to the lucrative East Asian trade, preoccupations which prevented them from growing the crops necessary to sustain themselves. Only the reform programme implemented by the heroic Captain John Smith – at least, according to Smith's own account – saved the colony. Even so, a further ‘starving time’ rendered its situation precarious after Smith's departure: the survivors of the desperate first years had packed up to return to England when a relief ship and a new governor, Thomas West, Lord de la Ware, arrived in 1611. In the meantime, the Virginia Company manned the public relations pumps against the flood of derogatory reports generated at home by disgruntled colonists and other naysayers as they sought to keep their endeavour afloat.

Subsequently, matters became easier: the famous marriage between John Rolfe, a leading Virginian, and the Powhatan ‘princess’, Pocahontas, stabilized relations with her father and Rolfe's equally famous introduction of tobacco cultivation provided the English with the all-important ‘staple crop’ which generated a ‘boom’ as hundreds of people made their way to Virginia. In addition, some time before 1619, the first Africans arrived at Jamestown thereby facilitating the introduction of the transatlantic system of slavery to the Chesapeake region.