A History of the American People

they built a fort, a church, and huts with roofs of thatch. None of the original settlement survives
but an elaborate reconstruction shows us what it looked like, and it was extremely primitive. It
was in fact more like a Dark Age settlement in western Europe during the 6th or 7th centuries
than a neat township of log cabins-as though the English in establishing a foothold on the new
continent had had to go back a thousand years into their past. As it was, lacking a family unit
basis, the colony was fortunate to survive at all. Half died by the end of 1608, leaving a mere
fifty-three emaciated survivors.
The rest might have perished too had it not been for the leadership of Captain John Smith
(c.1579-1631). Smith was a Lincolnshire man, who had had an adventurous career as a
mercenary fighting the Turks. He Joined the Jamestown expedition not as an investor but as a
hired soldier. His terms of engagement entitled him to a seat on the Jamestown council, set up
immediately the colony was formed, but he was denied it for brawling on board ship. He
accordingly spent the winter of 1607 mapping the Chesapeake Bay district. In the course of it he
was taken by the Indians, part of a tribal grouping Thomas Jefferson was later to call the
Powhatan Confederacy. He put this to good advantage by establishing friendly relations with the
local inhabitants. When he returned to the colony he found it in distress. Since he was the only
man who had a clear idea of what to do, he was elected president of the council in September
1608, the earliest example of popular democracy at work in America. He imposed military
discipline on the remaining men, negotiated with the Indians for sufficient food to get the colony
through the winter, and in fact kept the mortality rate down to 5 per cent-a notable achievement
by the standards of early colonization across the Atlantic. He got no thanks for his efforts. A
relief convoy which arrived in July 1609 brought the news that changes in the company's charter
left him without any legal status. So he returned to England two months later. Smith continued to
interest himself in America, however. In 1614 he conducted a voyage of discovery around the
Cape Cod area, and published in 1616 A Description o f New England, which was to be of
importance in the next decade-among other things, it was the first tract to push the term New England' into common use." Meanwhile Jamestown again came close to collapse. Under its new charter, the Virginia Company tried to recruit new settlers from all levels of society by promising them land free in return for seven years of labor. It attracted about 500 men and put them aboard the relief convoy, under a temporary governor, Sir Thomas Gates. Gates' ship (one of nine) was wrecked off Bermuda, where he spent the winter of 1609-10, thus providing England's first contact with a group of islands which are still a British crown colony at the end of the 20th century-and Shakespeare with his setting for The Tempest. The rest of the fleet deposited 400 new settlers at Jamestown. But, in the absence of both Smith and Gates, the winter was a disaster. When Gates and his co-survivors, having built two small ships in Bermuda-no mean feat in itself-finally arrived at Jamestown in May 1610, scarcely sixty settlers were still alive. All the food was eaten, there was a suspicion of cannibalism, and the buildings were in ruins. The Indians, moreover, seeing the weakness of the colony, were turning hostile, and it may be that a repetition of the Roanoke tragedy was pending. An immediate decision was taken to give up the colony, but as the settlers were marching downriver to reembark, a further relief convoy of three ships arrived, this time under the leadership of the titular governor of the Virginia Company, the grandee Lord De La Ware (or Delaware as the settlers wrote it). Under his rule, and under his successor Gates, a system of law was established in 1611. We have here the first American legal code, what Gates called his 'Lawes Divine, Moral and Martiall.' They are known asDale's Code,' after his marshal, Thomas Dale, who had the job of