On May 13, 1607, three small wooden ships - the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery - dropped anchor along a marshy stretch of the James River in what is now Virginia. About 104 English men and boys waded ashore and started chopping down trees. They called their new settlement Jamestown, after King James I, and it would become the first permanent English colony in North America.
The early years were brutal. The settlers were mostly gentlemen who expected to find gold, not farm land. The water was bad, the summers swampy, and food ran short. By the end of the first winter, more than half of them were dead. Captain John Smith took charge, made rules like he who does not work shall not eat, and traded with the local Powhatan people for corn. A young girl named Pocahontas, daughter of the powerful Powhatan chief, became famous in English stories for helping the colonists, although the real history is more complicated than the legends.
What saved Jamestown in the end was tobacco. A colonist named John Rolfe figured out how to grow a kind of tobacco that Europeans loved to smoke, and soon ships were sailing back to England loaded with leaves. The colony grew rich, but the success came at a heavy cost. In 1619, the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, beginning a system of slavery that would shape American history for centuries. The same year, the colony held its first elected assembly. Jamestown was where two of America's deepest stories - self-government and slavery - both began.
