In 1585, Walter Raleigh became the first Englishman to carry out an in-depth exploration of the region around Chesapeake Bay. Raleigh had many goals; including discovering the Northwest Passage, finding gold and silver, and building a colony to be used as a base of operations for English privateers. He only managed to accomplish one of these things, establishing a small colony on Roanoke Island in present day North Carolina which was abandoned the following year, then re-established two years later, then abandoned again with every single settler disappearing, never to be heard from again. Though abjectly a failure, he did name the region Virginia, which was either in honor of the Queen of England or based on an Algonquian word for nice clothes. It really doesn’t matter all that much either way.
As far as places went, Virginia was largely ignored by the wider world. It was too far north from Spanish shipping lanes and too far south from supplies of beaver. About the only people other than Raleigh who showed any interest in Virginia during the latter part of the sixteenth century were down on their luck would be Spanish conquistadors looking for gold and Spanish friars looking to save some souls. The latter attempted to found a mission in the area in 1570, but all were killed by the less than receptive natives less than a year later. However, though the friars failed in spreading the word of god, they did manage to introduce some nasty Old World diseases, which promptly killed off two-thirds of the local natives, consisting of Algonquian peoples along the coasts and Siouan peoples in the mountains.
It should probably go without saying that this event did not lend itself to the maintaining of societal stability. Things got pretty crazy, with everyone scrambling to stake a new claim in the post-apocalyptic world. The most successful of these was an Algonquian empire known as the Powhatan Confederacy, who via diplomacy and conquest gained control over what is today the eastern half of Virginia by the start of the seventeenth century. Powhatan society largely treated men and women as equals, though both had definite gender roles, and subsisted on hunting and slash and burn agriculture, meaning they hung out in an area until all the animals were dead and the soil was worthless, because if there’s one thing post-apocalyptic Virginia had going for it, it was the wide availability of unclaimed land. Unfortunately, this newly created wealth of unclaimed land is also what attracted in people from across the sea.
In 1605, the king of England got a bug up his ass and decided it would be really cool to have a couple of English colonies in the New World, but being completely broke due to the long war with Spain, he instead farmed out the task to private investors via the the creation of a joint stock company called the Virginia Company. Now at the time, the creation of such joint stock companies to explore, trade with, and settle other parts of the world were becoming increasingly common in England. Basically the king would provide incentive by granting a company monopoly rights to this and that, and wealthy English merchants and nobles would invest in the venture in hopes of reaping ridiculous profits. The most successful was the East India Company, founded in 1600, which had the sole right, at least as far as the English were concerned, to trade with India and East Asia. However, unlike its more successful predecessor, the Virginia Company didn’t have access to the riches of Asia, just the Virginia coast. Those trying to sell shares in the new company made up for this by outright lying, promising everything they could think of, including that Virginia was most definitely full of gold and silver and that Chesapeake Bay was most definitely the beginning of the Northwest Passage. Since it wasn’t like people could just pop by and check these claims out, they worked like a charm, and before long the company had enough money and enough volunteers to establish two new colonies in the New World.
The Virginia Company established two colonies of one hundred men each the following year. For whatever reason, women weren’t included, which seems kind of stupid today, but surely made sense back then for various sexist reasons. One of these colonies was built in what is today Maine, but doesn’t matter because it failed in less than a year. The other was Jamestown, named after the king of England, and built on a peninsula alongside a river in present day Virginia, which they also named after the king, because when one is involved in a risky and expensive venture, jerking off the king as much as possible doesn’t hurt one bit. It was the first successful English colony in the New World, and what most old timey ass hat scholars often refer to as the beginning of the history of the United States, which is pretty screwed up when one starts to think about how much history we’ve already covered.
