American History - Jamestown

In 1607, some one hundred settlers arrived in Virginia and founded Jamestown. Let’s just put it right out there from the start. The majority of them were stupid somewhat rich gentleman and their house servants. They were the kind of people most likely to fall for get rick quick schemes and who had no skills whatsoever when it came to creating a colony. The Virginia Company, which owned the colony, had promised them that Virginia was a land filled with gold and other easy riches, which they figured out was completely false soon after arrival. Things pretty quickly went to shit from there. The colonists, being complete idiots, built Jamestown in the middle of a swamp and then began failing at farming in said swamp. The local natives of the Powhatan Confederacy, fairly confused by the general ineptitude of the strangers from across the ocean, at first tried to help by trading food, but a local drought and the fact that the colonists were a bunch of lazy assholes soon put a stop to such kindnesses. Two-thirds of the first settlers were dead, killed by disease and pissed off natives in less than a year.

Meanwhile, back in England, the Virginia Company was busy convincing as many people as they could that things were totally hunky dory and that they should totally check out this whole Jamestown thing. By the end of 1608, 170 new colonists had arrived, again most of them gentleman who didn’t know how to do a jack shit, plus a few craftsman who knew how to make glass, which was pretty useless, and a couple women, because why not add jealousy over a select few people getting laid just to make things more interesting. The colony limped on for the next few years, pretty much entirely dependent on food shipped from England, the shipments always including more colonists, also known as suckers. Unfortunately, when a storm stranded one of these shipments on the newly discovered island of Bermuda, the result was mass starvation, which in turn led to cannibalism. In the fall of 1609, the colony had some 500 residents, by the spring of 1610 it had only 60. The only thing that saved the colony was the timely arrival of a new food shipment and the fact that the Virginia Company was finally wising up, sending not only colonists who knew how to farm, but also livestock and women, the latter in hopes that family men would be less likely to constantly demand a ride home to England. These new settlers, actually knowing what they were doing, decided it would be in their best interest to start farming better lands further from Jamestown.

Now through most of these shenanigans, the Powhatan Confederacy remained fairly patient with their new neighbors. Though they could have easily wiped out the colonists, their leaders hoped that via trading with the colonists they might gain an edge over rival tribes in the area. However, this came to an end in 1610, when the newly invigorated colonists decided to take control of better farmlands by just up and killing the natives already living on them, committing all sorts of pretty terrible acts of violence. From the colonist’s viewpoint, the Powhatan had pretty much done nothing to help as the colonists starved to death. From the Powhatan viewpoint, they had never asked the colonists to show up in the first place. What followed was four years of warfare, with both sides committing atrocities against each other, but the English eventually gaining the upper hand thanks to their firearms and willingness to just completely fuck shit up if they didn’t get their way. When the two sides finally made peace, the colonists controlled a much larger chunk of coastal Virginia, which proved advantageous given what happened next.

For most of the first decade of Jamestown’s existence, the colony struggled to make money. Once it became painfully obvious that no gold was in the area, the Virginia Company tried numerous strategies to make money, the most lucrative was the export of lumber. However, none of these brought in the kind of money needed to sustain the colony. This all changed in 1614, when a colonist named John Rolfe became the first to plant tobacco as a cash crop. Tobacco had long been grown by the natives throughout the Caribbean and present day southeastern United States, using it mostly for various spiritual and medicinal uses. The Spanish first brought tobacco to Europe in 1528, where smoking it for recreational and purported medicinal uses became popular across western Europe by the mid-sixteenth century. As they were the only major suppliers, the Spanish profited handsomely from this trade, so much so that they threatened to execute anyone who tried to sell seeds to a non-Spaniard. Though the natives did grow tobacco in Virginia, the local strains were too harsh compared to the smooth flavorful strains grown by the Spanish. However, by 1614, Rolfe had managed to somehow get his hands on some seeds from Trinidad. As a result, tobacco began to be widely cultivated in Virginia for export to England.

With the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop, for the first time the Virginia Company began to show a profit. Eager to make money, new settlers began to cross the ocean to set up tobacco plantations. However, cultivating tobacco was pretty labor intensive and for some reason the local natives weren’t really down with helping out. Passage across the Atlantic was also quite expensive. To alleviate this issue, the Virginia Company set up an indentured servant system, where poor people could have their passage paid for by rich planters in return for four to seven years of free labor, after which the servant would be given a free plot of land. As a result, the colony’s population reached 2,000 by 1620. However, the increasing number of English at Jamestown did not sit well with the Powhatan, who finally came to the conclusion that having the English around was not really a good thing. In 1622, they initiated a widespread sneak attack, killing around a quarter of the colonists in a single day. The hope was the colonists would be so horrified that they would leave, but instead they formed a militia, which burned all of the nearby Powhatan villages, killing any inhabitants they could find. The attacks were so vicious that the Powhatan sued for peace the following year, but the colonists poisoned the wine used at the peace conference.

The second war with the Powhatan lasted for a decade, with the Powhatan attacking smaller settlements and killing any colonist they found in their territory, and the colonists sending out a militia each summer to attack Powhatan villages and burn their corn fields. The Powhatan definitely got the shittier end of the stick. Already at a disadvantage due to their lack of firearms, famine and disease further thinned their numbers. They sued for peace in 1632, agreeing to hand over an even larger portion of coastal Virginia to the English. As for the English, the war convinced the king of England it was not in his best interest to allow the Virginia Company to remain in control. Immigration to Virginia slowed greatly, endangering the growth of the important tobacco exports. In 1624, Virginia was declared a crown colony, putting it under direct control of the English government and ending the Virginia Company’s monopoly. Rule of the colony was given to a royal governor, which somewhat pissed off the colonists given they had pretty much been ruling themselves via an elected assembly of landowners, but a compromise was reached where the two would share power. Following the end of the second Powhatan war, the end of the Virginia Company’s monopoly and the new land available for settlement spurred a period of rapid immigration, with new towns springing up along region’s coast and rivers. By 1640, the English population reached 10,000.

American History - Virginia

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.

American History - Hats

As has been discussed previously, for the Spanish the primary focus of their explorations of the New World was gold and silver. Given the two precious medals were basically the global currency at the time, finding them was the equivalent of discovering a bunch of hundred dollar bills just lying on the ground. As a result, the Spanish really didn’t give two shits about the majority of North America once it was ascertained that no easy to get at sources of gold and silver existed. Aside from some initial expeditions and the occasional coastal raid to enslave hapless Native Americans who decided to visit the beach on the wrong day, the Spanish largely kept out of what we today call the United States and Canada.

The lack of interest by the Spanish created opportunities for other countries, though not initially, given none of the other nations were really interested either in an area with no discernible way to make a quick buck. Initial explorations by England and France in the early sixteenth century largely focused on trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage, and when they failed to do so, the region pretty much got ignored by them for the rest of the century, with two exceptions. The first was the founding of the French colony of Fort Caroline in 1564 in what is today Florida, built specifically to create a supply depot and base of operations for French privateers attacking Spanish shipping. Mysteriously, the Spanish weren’t really down with this and Fort Caroline was destroyed after less than a year. The Spanish then founded the colony of St. Augustine nearby in order to guarantee nobody else would build further forts in Florida. The second was the English pretty much doing the same thing, founding the Roanoke colony in present day North Carolina in 1587 to act as a supply depot for privateers. However, the 120 colonists completely disappeared by 1590, their fate unknown.

Though not a popular destination for permanent settlement, throughout the second half of the sixteenth century the cod rich Grand Banks region south of Newfoundland was a popular spot visited by English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish fisherman. When the boats were full, the fisherman would find a safe harbor along the American coast where they would dry the fish prior to returning home, you know, to avoid spoilage. When doing this, they would often trade with the local natives, mostly exchanging metal tools for various curiosities. One of the more popular items trade for were beaver skin coats, which being warm and waterproof, were perfect for the cold Atlantic crossing. Now as luck would have it, the increasing number of fisherman visiting the Grand Banks coincided with a major shift in fashion trends in Europe. Though beaver felt hats had been a mark of the aristocracy for the better part of a century, the rising merchant and middle classes, who wanted to look as rich and respectable as possible, caused a huge spike in demand starting around 1550. As a result, hunters in Russia, the place from which most western European nations imported beaver pelts, hunted their beaver to near extinction over the next fifty years, creating a new opportunity for profitable enterprise in the New World.

The French were the first to really latch onto the idea of the New World being a viable competitive source of beaver pelts. Starting in the late sixteenth century, they began sending expeditions to the New World specifically to trade with the Native Americans for pelts. The other nations of western Europe quickly followed suit, increasing demand, driving up the amount of trade goods the natives expected to be paid for each pelt, and leading to traders exploring further afield to find additional tribes with which to trade. The primary region for this trade was around the St. Lawrence River, where the highest quality beaver pelts could be found. Eventually, the increased competition led to French investors funding the establishment of permanent colonies along the eastern Canadian coast. The first of these was Port Royal in present day Nova Scotia. Built in 1605, it was later destroyed by rival English traders in 1613, but was then rebuilt. It was soon after followed by the colony of Saint John in present day New Brunswick in 1606 and Quebec City at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in 1608. French explorers also explored further up the river, Samuel Champlain exploring the eastern end of the Great Lakes in 1615.

As a result of building colonies across the St. Lawrence region, the French quickly came to dominate the North American fur trade. The English attempted to counter this by laying claim to Newfoundland, but it proved too late, especially given coastal supplies of beaver pelts were increasingly beginning to disappear. However, new competition in the pelt market arrived soon after in the form of the Dutch. In 1609, as part of the latest round of fruitless searching for the Northwest Passage, Dutch navigator Henry Hudson explored the North American coast, discovering what became known as the Hudson River in present day New York. Though Hudson would die two years later, set adrift by his mutinous crew in the icy waters of Hudson Bay, his earlier discovery of the river created a new avenue of trade with tribes further inland. Beginning in 1610, the Dutch merchants began sending regular trading expeditions to the Hudson River, exploring the surrounding coast and inland. These traders eventually consolidated into a single trading company, which built Fort Nassau near present day Albany in 1614 and then the colony of New Amsterdam, present day New York City, in 1621.

As was the usual with such things, while the Native Americans did benefit from these contacts with the outside world, they suffered more than they gained. Though the increased contact with European traders in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries led to the introduction of metal tools and other goods, it also caused the spread of disease, especially in present day New England, resulting in especially bad outbreaks in 1616. As a result, some 90 percent of the native population of the New England coast were dead by 1620, with traders reporting finding completely abandoned villages and great piles of unburied dead people. The shell shocked survivors did their best to maintain their traditional way of life, but were largely pushed aside by other less affected tribes. The death of so many so quickly, led to a significant shift in the beaver trade, with the Iroquois and Algonquian peoples living in the region around the eastern Great Lakes becoming the primary source. Eager to benefit from trade with the Europeans, they increasingly came into conflict with each other in order to secure prime hunting grounds. With the Dutch mostly trading with the Iroquois and the French mostly trading with the Algonquin, both European factions began actively selling firearms to their respective partners, resulting in a sharp increase in bloodshed and death. The Spanish had long been careful not to supply the natives they encountered with firearms, but the Dutch and French traders had no such qualms. This conflict, which would come to be known as the Beaver Wars, would rage for the next century. All just so fancy people in Europe could wear a particular type of hat.