100 Fun Facts About Jamestown

Jamestown followed which English colony, found deserted in 1590?

Roanoke's governor came back from England after three years to find the village empty and a single word, CROATOAN, carved in the wood; the settlers were never found.

Jamestown was England's first lasting American colony, but which Spanish town in Florida is 42 years older?

St. Augustine was founded by Spain in 1565 and has been lived in ever since, which is why Jamestown's claim always carries the words "permanent English".

The Virginia Company that founded Jamestown in 1607 was a group of investors based in which English city?

London's company had a twin: the same 1606 charter set up a Plymouth branch, whose 1607 colony in Maine was abandoned the following year while Jamestown hung on.

Which three ships carried the first Jamestown colonists?

Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery carried 104 men and boys; the two larger ships sailed home that summer, leaving little Discovery behind for the colonists to use.

Into which bay did the first Jamestown colonists sail in April 1607 before choosing their river site?

Chesapeake Bay had drawn Europeans before: Spanish Jesuits planted a mission there in 1570 and were killed, a generation before the English ships arrived.

What name did the Jamestown colonists give their first landfall in Virginia in April 1607?

Cape Henry honoured the king's elder son and heir, who died at eighteen and never reigned; the cape opposite took the name of his brother, the future Charles I.

Jamestown and its river were both named in 1607 for which reigning monarch?

James I of England is the same king who sponsored the Bible translation that bears his name, published four years after the colonists landed.

What was the elected chamber of Virginia's colonial assembly, which grew out of the 1619 session at Jamestown, called?

The House of Burgesses lasted until 1776, when independence turned it into the House of Delegates, which still sits as the lower house of Virginia's legislature.

Why did the first colonists choose swampy, mosquito-ridden Jamestown Island for their fort in 1607?

To evade Spanish naval patrols, the colonists picked a spot far upriver that was easy to defend, but its salty, slimy river water soon made many of them fatally ill.

What did the rings of ancient cypress trees reveal about Virginia around the time Jamestown was founded?

A severe, years-long drought, the worst in centuries, began in 1606, just before the colonists landed, and withered the harvests of English and Powhatan alike.

Which crop, traded for or seized from the Powhatan, kept Jamestown's first colonists fed?

Corn came first as gifts from Chief Powhatan; when the English kept demanding more, he ordered his people to stop trading it, and the fort went hungry.

Virginia, the colony that began at Jamestown, was named in the 1580s most likely to honour which English monarch?

Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen", is the usual explanation for the name; back then it covered the whole coast from the Carolinas to New England.

Among the craftsmen who reached Jamestown in 1608 were specialists in making which product?

Glass was meant to repay the investors, and samples went home on the next ship; like the colony's pitch, tar and soap ash, it never turned a profit.

Besides gold, the Virginia Company ordered Jamestown's settlers to look for a river passage to which ocean?

The Pacific, which they called the South Sea, was the hoped-for short cut to Asia; within weeks of landing they had sailed upriver in search of it, as far as the falls where Richmond now stands.

Which Jamestown council president told the colony's backers to send labourers and craftsmen instead of gentlemen?

John Smith had landed as a prisoner, accused of plotting mutiny on the voyage and nearly hanged; sealed orders opened on arrival named him to the ruling council anyway.

Why was Jamestown's third council president forced to sail home to England in 1609?

An explosion burned him badly when gunpowder went off in his boat; he sailed for England that October to be treated and never saw Virginia again.

What is the winter of 1609–1610 at Jamestown called?

The Starving Time came when a Powhatan siege penned the colonists inside their fort; they ate horses, dogs, rats and shoe leather, and only about 60 were alive by spring.

A girl's cut-marked skull, found at Jamestown in 2012, confirmed reports of what?

Cannibalism: her remains had been thrown out with butchered horse and dog bones in the terrible winter of 1609–10.

The 1609 wreck of the Jamestown-bound ship Sea Venture is widely thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest opens with a storm that casts a ship's company onto a strange island; the Sea Venture survivors' story reached England shortly before the play was first staged in 1611.

What did the shipwrecked Sea Venture survivors name the two small ships they built to reach Jamestown?

Deliverance and Patience were knocked together by the castaways, who planned one ship and found they needed two; they reached Jamestown in May 1610 to find barely 60 colonists alive.

Which giant fish, swimming up the river each summer, was a key food for Jamestown's colonists?

Sturgeon were once so plentiful in the river that they kept the fort fed in summer; overfished for their caviar in later centuries, the species was declared endangered in 2012.

Whose relief fleet met the departing Jamestown colonists in June 1610 and turned them back?

Lord De La Warr arrived with fresh supplies just as the survivors were sailing away; his title, worn smooth by English tongues, later named Delaware Bay and the state beside it.

What shape was James Fort, the palisade the Jamestown colonists finished building in June 1607?

A triangle with a cannon-armed bulwark at each corner, it was thrown up in under three weeks after a Powhatan attack on the open camp killed at least one settler and wounded eleven.

Kidnapped by the English in 1613, Pocahontas converted to Christianity and married which Jamestown colonist a year later?

John Rolfe's marriage to her in April 1614 brought eight years of peace between the colonists and her father's people; their son Thomas was born the following winter.

Pocahontas was only a nickname; which secret personal name did she reveal to the English when she was baptized?

Matoaka stayed secret until she was a captive: kidnapped by the English in 1613 and held for ransom, she revealed it when she was baptized as Rebecca.

Where was the Sea Venture, flagship of Jamestown's 1609 relief fleet, wrecked in a hurricane?

Bermuda was uninhabited when the admiral ran the leaking ship onto its reefs, saving all 150 aboard; within three years the Virginia Company had claimed the islands for England.

Which cash crop, first exported in the 1610s, finally made the Jamestown colony pay?

Tobacco of a milder Spanish strain replaced the bitter local leaf, and within a few years its exports turned a colony that had only lost money into a paying one.

Where did Pocahontas die in March 1617?

In England: she died at Gravesend just as her ship was setting off down the Thames for Virginia, and her infant son was left behind to be raised there.

Which rule did Jamestown's council president impose in 1608 to get the colony's idle gentlemen working?

No work, no food: his actual words were "he that will not work shall not eat", a line borrowed from St Paul, and the gentlemen duly took up their tools.

What did indentured servants receive in return for years of unpaid labour in early Virginia?

Passage across the Atlantic was the bargain, and from 1618 it paid twice: whoever covered a servant's fare could claim fifty acres of land for doing so.

Where did America's first representative assembly meet in 1619?

Jamestown Church was simply "the most convenient place" the members could find to sit in; the session lasted six days in heat so fierce that one of them died.

Which group of Jamestown workers staged what is often called America's first strike, in 1619?

Polish artisans downed tools when the colony's first election was limited to Englishmen; the Virginia Company gave way and granted them the same rights as any other settler.

On which ship did the first documented enslaved Africans reach English North America in 1619?

White Lion was an English privateer that had robbed a slave ship bound for Mexico; at Point Comfort its captain traded "20 and odd" captives to the colony's leaders for food.

In 1608 Captain Newport brought Chief Powhatan which gift from King James, hoping he would kneel to receive it?

A crown was meant to turn him into a vassal of the English king; Powhatan replied that he was a king already, refused to kneel, and relations only grew worse.

How was Jamestown itself spared in the 1622 attack?

A warning from a Virginia Indian employee, a youth living in an English household, reached Jamestown in time; the outlying settlements had no notice, and 347 colonists were killed.

What did Sir Thomas Gates impose on Jamestown's survivors in May 1610?

Martial law came with a harsh code, the "Laws Divine, Moral and Martial"; the company's 1618 charter finally lifted it and let the colonists elect an assembly.

What happened to the Virginia Company's charter in 1624?

King James revoked it once the company was bankrupt and its colony reeling from war and disease; Virginia stayed a royal colony from then until the American Revolution.

How did Opechancanough, the Powhatan leader captured and brought to Jamestown in 1646, die?

Shot in the back by his guard, against orders: the chief, by then thought to be over ninety, had been put on show to the townspeople, and his death broke the Powhatan chiefdom's power.

During which 1676 uprising was Jamestown deliberately burned?

Bacon's Rebellion torched the capital that September; a month later its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, died of dysentery, the revolt fell apart and the governor hanged 23 of his followers.

What prompted Virginia to move its capital from Jamestown in 1699?

A fire destroyed the statehouse again in 1698, the last straw: the government moved a few miles inland the next year, and Jamestown soon ceased to be a town at all.

What was Williamsburg called before it became Virginia's capital in 1699?

Middle Plantation sat in the middle of the peninsula; in 1699 five students from its new college made speeches urging the lawmakers to move the capital there, and the town was renamed for King William III.

Which poisonous plant takes its common American name from Jamestown, where soldiers who ate it in 1676 hallucinated for eleven days?

Jimsonweed is a worn-down form of "Jamestown weed": the troops were served its young leaves as boiled greens and came round days later remembering nothing.

Why did the Virginia Company ship about 90 young women to Jamestown in 1620?

To marry the planters: the company feared a colony of single men would never put down roots, and each husband was expected to repay the cost of the voyage.

Before 1990s digs found it, where was Jamestown's 1607 fort believed to lie?

Underwater was the accepted story: the fort was thought lost to the river as the shore eroded, until a dig begun in 1994 found its traces on dry land.

As of 2025, the 1907 Jamestown Exposition site holds the world's largest what?

Naval base: the exposition's parade of warships made such an impression that in 1917, with America entering World War I, the Navy bought the old fairground.

Which monarch visited the 350th anniversary festival in 1957?

It was her first visit to the United States as queen, and she lent a copy of Magna Carta for the exhibition.

Which Virginia-born former president gave a two-and-a-half-hour speech at Jamestown's 250th anniversary in 1857?

John Tyler lived nearby at Sherwood Forest Plantation; four years after his marathon speech he sided with the Confederacy and was elected to its congress shortly before he died.

Anne Burras, who reached Jamestown in 1608 as a lady's maid, soon became the colony's first English what?

Bride: she and her mistress were the first two Englishwomen to arrive, and within weeks the maid had married one of the colony's carpenters, John Laydon.

Jamestown is linked by the Colonial Parkway to Williamsburg and which other historic site?

Yorktown is where Washington's victory in 1781 ended British rule; the parkway joins it to Jamestown, so English America begins at one end of the road and finishes at the other.

Which Irish actor played Jamestown's best-known captain in Terrence Malick's 2005 film The New World?

Colin Farrell starred opposite newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, and many scenes were shot on the James and Chickahominy rivers, a few miles from the real site.

Stephen Hopkins, who lived at Jamestown from 1610 to 1614, later sailed back to America aboard which famous ship?

The Mayflower carried Hopkins as its only passenger who had already lived in the New World. He went on to sign the ship's famous compact in 1620.

Which action star voiced the English captain opposite Irene Bedard's heroine in Disney's 1995 film Pocahontas?

Mel Gibson voiced the film's Jamestown captain as a romantic lead. The real Pocahontas was a child of about ten or eleven when the English arrived in 1607.

Which animal's English name was first recorded at Jamestown from a Powhatan word for one that scratches with its hands?

Raccoon comes from a Powhatan word the colonists wrote down as aroughcun. Colony secretary William Strachey heard it differently and spelled it arathkone.

The names of Jamestown's first seven councillors crossed the ocean hidden in what, opened only after landing?

A sealed box on each ship held the Virginia Company's list, so nobody knew who was in charge during the four-month voyage. One man it named was under arrest when it was opened.

Which holiday does Virginia claim was first kept in English America in 1619 at Berkeley Hundred, upriver from Jamestown?

Thanksgiving was ordered by the settlers' charter, which told them to keep the day their ship arrived holy every year. That was about two years before the Pilgrims' harvest feast.

Which Massachusetts colony did the Pilgrims found thirteen years after the English settled Jamestown?

Plymouth began in 1620 with 102 settlers. Jamestown's first 104 arrivals were all men and boys, sent by investors to turn a profit.

Before he sailed to Virginia, Jamestown's best-known captain was captured in battle and sold as a slave in which land?

Ottoman Turkey held him after he was wounded fighting in 1602. He was sent as a gift to a woman in Constantinople, who passed him on to work the land.

The British TV drama Jamestown, first shown in 2017, was made by the producers of which hit period series?

Downton Abbey's makers, Carnival Films, produced Jamestown for British television. The scripts were written by Bill Gallagher.

The glittering cargo sent home from Jamestown as gold in 1607 turned out to be which worthless mineral?

Iron pyrite, better known as fool's gold, was all the cargo held. The fleet's commander sailed home with a second load of false gold the following spring.

Bartholomew Gosnold, a driving force behind Jamestown, explored Cape Cod in 1602 and named which nearby island?

Martha's Vineyard got its name on Gosnold's 1602 voyage, when he also named Cape Cod for its abundant fish. Five years later he helped plant the colony at Jamestown.

Which US president opened the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, a world's fair marking the colony's 300th anniversary?

Theodore Roosevelt opened the fair on 26 April 1907, three hundred years to the day after the colonists first landed in Virginia. Mark Twain was among the visitors.

A vast painting of the baptism of Pocahontas has hung since 1840 in which Washington building?

The US Capitol shows it in the Rotunda, beside scenes of Columbus landing and the Pilgrims embarking. John Gadsby Chapman painted her kneeling in white.

Which biblical name did Pocahontas take when she was baptized a Christian during her captivity among the English?

Rebecca was her baptismal name, and only after taking it did she tell the colonists her private birth name. Pocahontas itself was a childhood nickname.

In which war did troops fortify Jamestown Island to stop enemy warships sailing up the James River?

The Civil War brought the island's owner, William Allen, to Jamestown in 1861 with soldiers raised at his own expense. Gunners later tested armour plate there for an ironclad.

Which college, the second oldest in the United States, was founded near Jamestown in 1693 under a royal charter?

William & Mary took its name from the king and queen who chartered it. Six years later, Virginia moved its government from Jamestown to the college's doorstep.

Which present-day state held Popham, an English colony begun months after Jamestown and abandoned in 14 months?

Maine's Popham Colony stood at the mouth of the Kennebec River. It was given up less because it failed than because its president and its chief backers died.

Which region did Jamestown's best-known captain explore and map in 1614, then name, before the Pilgrims came?

New England got its name from the captain's 1614 voyage along its coast. He promoted it as a place where any hard worker could become master of his own land.

Under a treaty of 1646, Virginia Indian chiefs still pay the state's governor a yearly tribute of which animal?

A deer is the usual offering, often given with pottery or a peace pipe. The tribute began when the Powhatan chiefdom made peace after its last war with the colony.

Which British general ambushed American troops at Green Spring, beside Jamestown, in July 1781?

Lord Cornwallis sprang the trap on the advance guard of "Mad" Anthony Wayne. It was the last major land battle in Virginia before he was besieged and forced to surrender that autumn.

The Powhatan people who met the Jamestown colonists spoke a language from which large Native American family?

Algonquian is the family of Virginia's Powhatan tongue, which died out by the 1790s. A revival effort began in the twenty-first century.

What weather plagued the Virginia colony's first elected assembly in 1619, a six-day session in which one member died?

Stifling heat and humidity hung over the session, which opened on 30 July. The members still managed to pass laws and set a tax to pay the assembly's officers.

Short of investors, how did the Virginia Company raise money at home to keep the Jamestown colony supplied?

Public lotteries were held in towns throughout England until the king banned them in 1621. By then they were almost the company's only means of support.

The first Africans sold in Virginia in 1619 were Mbundu people seized in which present-day country?

Angola was their homeland: they came from the kingdom of Ndongo and were captured by Portuguese slavers. English privateers then took them from a ship carrying more than three hundred captives.

Which Jamestown council president, the villain of Disney's 1995 film Pocahontas, was really killed by Powhatan warriors?

John Ratcliffe was captured and tortured to death in the winter of 1609–10. Disney's version of him is a greedy governor hunting for hidden gold.

Exploring upriver from Jamestown in 1607, Christopher Newport reached the falls where which state capital now stands?

Richmond stands at the falls of the James River. The colonists understood the name Powhatan to come from the chief's home town beside those falls.

A shell-decorated hide cloak linked to Chief Powhatan is kept in a museum in which English university city?

Oxford's Ashmolean Museum holds Powhatan's Mantle, one of the earliest North American artefacts to survive in any European collection.

Which island group off Africa gave the 1607 Jamestown fleet a stop for water and provisions on its four-month voyage?

The Canary Islands were a resupply stop on a long southern route that then ran through the Caribbean. One passenger was nearly hanged there on the way.

Which federal agency runs the Historic Jamestowne site on Jamestown Island in partnership with Preservation Virginia?

The National Park Service took over most of the island in 1934. The private group had held the oldest part since 1893, when its owners donated 22.5 acres including the old tower.

Which Caribbean island, then a Spanish colony, gave the 1607 Jamestown fleet a stop for provisions in April?

Puerto Rico supplied the three ships in early April 1607. They made one more brief landing on small islands nearby, then sailed for the mainland on 10 April.

Jamestown's first settlers belonged to which official faith, the one the Pilgrims of Massachusetts had broken from?

The Church of England, the Anglican faith, came to Virginia with the first settlers. The Pilgrims were dissenters who set up their own Congregational churches instead.

On which charge was Jamestown's best-known captain held under arrest for most of the 1607 voyage to Virginia?

Mutiny was the charge, and the fleet's commander meant to hang him for it at a stop along the way. The company's orders, read on arrival, named him to the ruling council instead.

Which pests, along with damp, ruined the Jamestown colonists' stored grain in the spring of 1609?

Rats infested the colony in April 1609 and, with the damp, destroyed everything in the store. The colony's leader had to send settlers downriver to fish and gather shellfish.

Which aromatic root, used in Europe as a medicine, was one of Virginia's only two exports between 1616 and 1619?

Sassafras shared Virginia's export trade with the colony's new leaf crop in those years. Hopes of gold, silk and other riches had all come to nothing.

Which actor voiced a young settler in Disney's Pocahontas and later played her husband in The New World?

Christian Bale was the voice of Thomas in the 1995 animation. Ten years later he played the settler Pocahontas wed, in Terrence Malick's film of the Jamestown story.

Which Virginia city, downriver from Jamestown, claims to be America's oldest continuously occupied English settlement?

Hampton makes the claim because Jamestown itself was abandoned in 1699. The city is named for the Earl of Southampton, a leading figure in the Virginia Company.

Which First Lady, a Virginian who entered the White House in 1915, claimed descent from Pocahontas?

Edith Wilson is one of many who have claimed the link, among them Virginia's oldest families, the astronomer Percival Lowell and the actor Glenn Strange.

Which Virginia Company scheme, begun in 1618, gave 50 acres to anyone who paid a newcomer's way to the colony?

The headright system let landowners pile up acreage by importing workers, one 50-acre claim per person. Colonists already living in Virginia were given two claims each.

Christopher Newport, who commanded Jamestown's 1607 fleet, had lost what in a fight to capture a Spanish galleon?

An arm was the price of that prize, taken in his years as a privateer. He raided Spanish shipping in the Caribbean more often than Francis Drake had.

Flowerdew Hundred, a plantation upriver from Jamestown, had built English America's first what by 1621?

A windmill of the English post type stood there, paid for by the colony's governor, who owned the plantation. A replica was put up on the site in 1978.

Who was elected first president of Jamestown's council in 1607, only to be deposed and arrested four months later?

Edward Maria Wingfield led from the front when the fort was attacked that May. By September, with food short and men dying, he was made a scapegoat and removed on petty charges.

Which earl's son was president of Jamestown's council through the deadly winter of 1609–10?

George Percy was the youngest son of the Earl of Northumberland. He achieved little in office beyond ordering a new fort built at Point Comfort.

What was Chief Powhatan's capital, whose probable site archaeologists identified in Gloucester County in 2003?

Werowocomoco stood on the north bank of a river one valley over from Jamestown. For years a ruined chimney elsewhere, said to be from a house built for Powhatan, was taken for the site.

Jamestown was built in 1607 on the territory of which Powhatan tribe, who sometimes camped on the island?

The Paspahegh used the island without living on it, which is why the English found it empty. They were among the first tribes to deal with the newcomers.

Which governor called the Virginia colony's first elected assembly to meet in the summer of 1619?

George Yeardley carried company instructions, issued in November 1618, that ordered both the assembly and a new scheme of land grants.

Which deputy governor reached Jamestown in May 1611 with men and cattle and went on to found Henricus?

Thomas Dale brought three ships of supplies and later served two years as acting governor. Henricus was only one of several new settlements credited to him.

What name was given to Jamestown-era Virginia colonists who arrived before 1616 and stayed at least three years?

Ancient planters were also known as ancient colony men. The label mattered because it brought a reward of land when the company's first dividend fell due in 1616.

Which tribe of the old Powhatan chiefdom became Virginia's first federally recognized tribe in January 2016?

The Pamunkey are one of only two tribes that still hold the reservation lands assigned to them by colonial treaties in 1646 and 1677.

The British TV drama Jamestown recreated the Virginia colony mostly on location in which European country?

Hungary stood in for tidewater Virginia. Most of the series was filmed in and around the village of Vértesacsa.

Which archaeologist began directing the Jamestown Rediscovery dig in 1994 that located the lost 1607 fort?

William Kelso and his team used early written descriptions to work out where on the island the fort ought to lie. Preservation Virginia funded the search as a ten-year project.

The slave ship raided in 1619 for Virginia's first Africans had been bound for which present-day country?

Mexico, then New Spain, was the destination of the São João Baptista, which carried more than three hundred captives. Privateers seized some of them at sea and sailed for Virginia.