Vocabulary

 

 
 
 
 
 

Video

 

 
 
 
 

Transcript

 

The first English colony, Virginia, was founded in 1607 by members of the Virginia Company of London. Their story was in many ways typical of the early colonists, while in others it was not.

The 104 men and boys who made the voyage to Virginia planned to search for gold and to try to find a new route to Asia.

As the ships left England to cross the Atlantic, many of the passengers had worried about the long voyage that lay ahead of them.

But by the spring, after four-and-a-half months at sea, they had safely reached the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.

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After exploring, they found an island in a large river that flows into the bay and decided to build their settlement on it.

First, they had to cut down trees, clear the land, and make wooden beams from which to build houses. They filled the spaces between the beams with woven branches and mud, a building method called daub and waddle, and they made thatched roofs from reeds that grew in the nearby swamps.

When they were done, the houses of the settlement they named Jamestown after King James looked a lot like those they had known in England, but most of them were quite small and had only one room.

As time went by, the colonists also built barns where they could store supplies, and they built a new church where regulations required them to worship twice a day.

They even sharpened logs to make a wall all the way around the first English town, or fort as they called it, for protection against both hostile tribes of American Indians and from the Spanish soldiers that lived to the south in Florida.

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Most of the work of building Jamestown was done by the poor colonists. The other half of the colonists were wealthy members of England’s upper class who, according to the old English ways of doing things, were not expected to work.

This caused many bad feelings at the colony, but that was just one problem Jamestown faced.

Another was that it was built on swampy land that was bad for farming. Most of the drinking water was no good. The swamps were filled with disease carrying mosquitoes, and because of these things, as well as starvation, around 440 out of 500 colonists had died by the spring of 1610.

It is not surprising that Jamestown almost failed, not only because of illness and starvation, but because no gold had been discovered and because the colonists hadn’t found any good ways of making a living.

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But just when they were the most discouraged, new people came from England, and they settled on healthier lands where they could farm.

The Jamestown colonists were led for many years by this man, Captain John Smith. He was an excellent governor as well as an explorer and mapmaker.

Smith put the upper class colonists to work. He kept everyone from starting in by buying corn from the Native Americans and also by learning how they hunted animals for food.

One day, while John Smith was out exploring, he was captured and threatened with death by Warriors from an unfriendly tribe — only to be saved by the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas. Later, she married one of the colonists and began dressing like an English woman.

Her husband, a plantation owner named John Ral, had worked for years developing a mild, sweet kind of tobacco.

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The English settlers in Virginia started raising lots of tobacco plants, and they grew quite well. After the leaves were harvested and dried, the tobacco was shipped off to Europe, where the dangerous habit of smoking was just becoming popular.

As the years passed, tobacco farming brought the colony great prosperity. In 1619, the people of Jamestown elected an assembly of men called the House of Burgesses to make laws for their growing colony.

That turned out to be a very important year because it was the beginning of representative government in America.

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Unfortunately, 1619 was important for another reason as well. It was the year the first African slaves were sold to Virginia tobacco planters by a Dutch trader.

After that, thousands of more slaves were put to work in the colony’s plantations, and this allowed their owners to live in fantastic luxury.

By the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, a powerful society of large plantation owners controlled the colonial legislature in Virginia.

Two of the most famous of these Virginia gentlemen were George Washington, who maintained his beautiful plantation of Mount Vernon alongside the Potomac River, and Thomas Jefferson, whose Grand Plantation called Monticello stood far to the west in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Both plantations had hundreds of slaves.

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Questions

 

Virginia. The first English colony in North America was founded in 1776 in New York. True or false?

North Carolina. Was it a four-week voyage by ship? Did the original colonists of families with children? Did they originally set out to create farming communities?

Massachusetts. The colonists settled on the mainland. Is this right or wrong? Did they build stone-walled houses? Were they large and spacious?

Rhode Island. Were the colonist religious? Were all the natives friendly? Were the English the first Europeans to settle in North America?

Connecticut. After three years, the colony had become very successful and prosperous because everyone worked very hard. Is this correct or incorrect?

Maryland. Because of all the calamities, did all the settlers return to England?

Pennsylvania. Who was John Smith? Was he an ordinary settler? What did he do? What happened to him?

New Hampshire. Was Jamestown an ordinary farming settlement? Did the colony prosper because of wheat, cabbage and potato cultivation?

Vermont. Was Jamestown a feudal society, serfdom, a democracy, oligarchy, all, neither, in between?
 
 
 
Maine. Are you familiar with St. Augustine, Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth?

New Jersey. I would like to have been a settler or colonist in North America, South America, or Australia. Yes or no?

South Carolina. Were the colonists and settlers “right” in what they had done?

Georgia. What might happen in the future?

Florida. What could or should people, governments and businesses do?