Jamestown Fiasco Essay

Jamestown Fiasco Leads To Success

“By the time the colony was ten years old and an almost total loss to the men who had invested their lives and fortunes in it...” (Morgan 36). The Virginia Company had started sending settlers to the newly discovered land to set up a colony called Jamestown. The first years for Jamestown was a major disaster and the lives and colony was repeatedly saved by the Native Americans. The founding of Jamestown in 1607 was a “fiasco” because the European settlers that were sent by the Virginia Company were inexperienced, unmotivated to do work, and had a superiority complex to the Native Americans. Through the settlers many mistakes and failures the English learned greatly from these events and then found success …show more content…
The gentlemen that were sent over by the Virginia were not farmers; they were carpenters, bricklayers, masons, blacksmiths, tailors, and barbers. The fact that all of the settlers who were coming to Jamestown were gentlemen and not farmers had a huge impact on the way of lifestyle that was set in the colonies. None of the men were used to work and farming is not something that comes naturally to someone. Farming takes years of practice, trial and error processes to see what works best, to gain experience and they did not know how the conditions were for growing different types of plants, the climate was very different from the European climate that they were used to, and they did not know how or when to plant the seeds. The things that the gentlemen had focused on when they got to Jamestown were mining and lumber. “The major part of the colonists’ work time was supposed to be devoted to processing the promised riches of land for export and with the establishment of martial law the company had the means of seeing that they put their shoulders to the task.”(Morgan 34). The Virginia company enforced that the settlers spent their time looking for treasures instead of farming and setting up a way to survive. Since their focuses were not on growing a surplus of food for themselves to last throughout the winter they had to depend on the Native Americans as …show more content…
The Europeans thought that they were better than all other people, so when they met the Native Americans they greatly underestimated them. “For the Indians presented a challenge that Englishmen were not prepared to meet, a challenge to their image of themselves, to their self-esteem, to their conviction of their own superiority over foreigners, and especially over barbarous foreigners like the Irish and the Indians.”(Morgan 36). The English were not prepared to meet people that would be more successful than they were. The Native Americans thrived in Virginia and produced a surplus of food so great that they could sell it to the struggling settlers. Since the Native Americans did not know about God or have as advanced technologies, such as guns, the settlers deemed them as lesser people. Their success made the Europeans angry and jealous that they were not superior and then became concerned about fighting with the Indians than their own needs that they needed to set up so that they could survive there. The Indians were actually the only thing that were keeping the settlers alive and the constant guerrilla warfare that went back and forth between the two groups diminished the trust between both of them. They were constantly fighting with the Native Americans which was a poor idea because they were their main source of food. The settlers learned that they would need to help