In 1606, two years after peace with Spain, the hand of destiny beckoned toward Virginia. A joint-stock company, known as the Virginia Company of London, received a charter from King James I of England for a settlement in the New World.
The main attraction was the promise of gold, combined with a strong desire to find a passage through America to the Indies.
Like most joint-stock companies of the day, the Virginia Company was intended to endure for only a few years, after which its stockholders hoped to liquidate it for a profit.
This arrangement put severe pressure on the luckless colonists, who were threatened with abandonment in the wilderness if they did not quickly strike it rich on the company's behalf.
Few of the investors thought in terms of long-term colonization. Apparently no one even faintly suspected that the seeds of a mighty nation were being planted.
The charter of the Virginia Company is a significant document in American history.
It guaranteed to the overseas settlers the same rights of English men that they would have enjoyed if they had stayed at home.
This precious boon was gradually extended to subsequent English colonies, helping to reinforce the colonists' sense that even on the far shores of the Atlantic, they remained comfortably within the embrace of traditional English institutions.
But ironically, a century and a half later, their insistence on the "rights of Englishmen" fed hot resentment against an increasingly meddlesome mother country and nourished their appetite for independence.
Setting sail in late 1606, the Virginia Company's three ships landed near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where Indians attacked them.
Pushing on up the bay, the tiny band of colonists eventually chose a location on the wooded and malarial banks of the James River, named in honor of King James the 1st.
The site was easy to defend, but it was mosquito-infested and devastatingly unhealthful. There, on May 24, 1607, about a hundred English settlers, all of them men, disembarked.
They called the place Jamestown.
The early years of Jamestown proved a nightmare for all concerned-except the buzzards. Forty would be colonists perished during the initial voyage in 1606-1607, Another expedition in 1609 lost its leaders and many of its precious supplies in a shipwreck off Bermuda.
Once ashore in Virginia, the settlers died by the dozens from disease, malnutrition, and starvation.
Ironically, the woods rustled with game and the rivers flopped with fish, but the greenhorn settlers, many of them self-styled "gentlemen" unaccustomed to fend ing for themselves, wasted valuable time grubbing for nonexistent gold when they should have been gathering provisions.
Virginia was saved from utter collapse at the start largely by the leadership and resourcefulness of an intrepid young adventurer, Captain John Smith.
Taking over in 1608, he whipped the gold-hungry colo nists into line with the rule "He who shall not work shall not eat." He had been kidnapped in December 1607 and subjected to a mock execution by the Indian chieftain Powhatan, whose daughter Pocahontas had "saved" Smith by dramatically interposing her head between his and the war clubs of his captors.
The symbolism of this ritual was apparently intended to impress Smith with Powhatan's power and with the Indians' desire for peaceful relations with the Virginians.
Pocahontas became an intermediary between the Indians and the settlers, helping to preserve a shaky peace and to provide needed foodstuffs.
Still, the colonists died in droves, and living skeletons were driven to desperate acts. They were reduced to eating "dogges, Catts, Ratts, and Myce" and even digging up corpses for food.
One hungry man killed, salted, and ate his wife, for which misbehavior he was executed. Of the four hundred settlers who managed to make it to Virginia by 1609, only sixty survived the "starving time" winter of 1609-1610.
Diseased and despairing, the remaining colonists dragged themselves aboard homeward-bound ships in the spring of 1610, only to be met at the mouth of the James River by a long-awaited relief party headed by a new governor, Lord De La War.
He ordered the settlers back to Jamestown, imposed a harsh military regime on the colony, and soon undertook aggressive military action against the Indians.
Disease continued to reap a gruesome harvest among the Virginians. By 1625 Virginia contained only some twelve hundred hard-bitten survivors of the nearly eight thousand adventurers who had tried to start life anew in the ill-fated colony.