Desperate Shores —The Starving Time

American Political History · Mar 21, 2021 · 13m

May 14th, 1607. One hundred and four men and boys wade ashore onto a low, marshy Virginia peninsula and drive stakes into the ground. This is Jamestown — the first permanent English settlement in America. Permanent is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Within seven months, more than half of them will be dead.

They arrived at the edge of the Powhatan Confederacy — thirty nations, tens of thousands of people, controlled by a man named Wahunsenacah whom the English called Chief Powhatan. He was not a savage. He was a king. And he had a plan for the English that had nothing to do with their…