In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Jamestown and Its North Atlantic World Constance Jordan Landfall: April 26th, 1607. After eighteen weeks at sea, the captain of the Susan Constant, Sir Christopher Newport, saw the land that he and his crew had been commissioned to settle in behalf of the investors of the Virginia Company in London. The task to which they and those on their sister ships, the Godspeed and the Discovery, had looked forward probably seemed not a little dreadful. Spanish, Dutch, and French merchant ships were actively competing for resources from Florida, already settled by the Spanish, to Nouvelle France in what is now Nova Scotia and the northern coast of Maine. English settlements on the North Atlantic coast had not prospered. Sir Walter Ralegh’s colony at Roanoke had vanished without a trace. The Spanish, notwithstanding the peace negotiated by James I with Philip II and concluded in 1604, continued to challenge the English presence in the North Atlantic. It was inevitable that the two nations should continue to be rivals on both sea and land; each hoped to dominate the traffic to, trade with, and colonization of the peoples of the Americas. A year before the Jamestown landfall, on April 10, 1606, the Company had issued Letters Patent to the men charged with managing its Virginian investment, a grandiose swath of this new world: ‘‘lying and being all along the sea Coastes betweene fower and Thirtie degrees of northerly latitude from the equinoctiall lyne and Five and Fortie degrees of the same latitude . . . and the Ilandes thereunto adiacente.’’1 Many perhaps understood these terms were deserved, considering that the first duty of the settlers was to ensure the salvation of the natives of Virginia by the ‘‘propagating of the Christian religion to suche people as yet live in darkenesse and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worshippe,’’ and to bring them ‘‘to humane civilitie and to a settled and quiet govermente.’’ As time would show, however, it was trade that was really uppermost in the minds of the company’s investors—trade and gold, and indeed their complementary roles. The settlers were to mine for metal but also to mint coin with which to buy goods and raw materials from the natives. Other provisions of these Letters, now known as the first Charter, guaranteed the settlers the civil 276 Constance Jordan status they would have had as English subjects at home: they were allowed a right of self-defense, ‘‘all the liberties, Franchises, and Immunities’’ due English subjects, and the land they secured for themselves was to be held in ‘‘free and Common Soccage onelie and not in Capite.’’ In other words, Virginia was not to support a feudal society. By November of that year, the London Council of the Virginia Company, assigned the supervision of the enterprise at Jamestown, had issued a specific set of ‘‘Instructions . . . by way of Advice’’ which further specified what the prospective colonists should do. They were to settle where the ‘‘natural people of the Country’’ were; they were to ‘‘find out a Safe port in the Entrance of some navigable River’’; to get ‘‘Country [that is, native] Corn’’ before ‘‘the naturals’’ could perceive that the settlers ‘‘meant to plant among them.’’ Finally, the settlers were not to ‘‘advertise the killing of any of [their] men that the Country people may know it if they perceive they are but Common men.’’2 What actually happened to the settlers that first year is recorded in the various accounts by such men as John Smith, Gabriel Archer, and George Percy, and represented in part in the essays in this collection. What they thought they were doing, the contexts in which they placed their mission in order to give it a historical character and dimension, and the justification they sought for it in law, both civil and natural, are questions whose answers can help us today to place Jamestown in the large currents of cultural history. Commentary charged with the freight of religious, political, and social opinion, references to settings and contexts that rendered novelty more or less strange, and accounts of how the land was cleared, farmed, and made productive—these are the discourses that will help us learn how the experience of Jamestown was understood by those who lived it. The North Atlantic was both a place and a concept. The place, the vast ocean separating Europe and the New World, was in the process of being mapped, its shorelines surveyed, its waters charted. The scene...

Share