Death_in_Early_Jamestown

Death in Early Jamestown 110 Englishmen arrive in the spring of 1607 excited about their new life to come, but what they don’t know is that even after the third supply of colonists brought to Jamestown, less than a hundred would actually survive in 1611. So In early Jamestown from 1607 to 1611 why did so many colonists pass' The answer is this; the problems with water, their occupations, and Indian relations. So the first major problem the permanent English colony was with their water. “Disease in the early years to Jamestown’s position at the salt-fresh water transition, where the fifth introduced into the river tended to fester rather than flush away.”(Doc. A) Which means that they dumped their waste into the river which would just go downstream and then mix with the water, only to come back around. So they were pretty much drinking their own waste. Document B shows that whenever the colonists arrived they were in a period of drought. So that limited their growing capacity of food because of no rain. The second major problem in early Jamestown was with the colonists jobs. The first settler’s occupations included a majority of Gentlemen, but all they had was 1 surgeon and no apothecaries (Doc C), which this could cause many problems because they didn’t have any medicine to treat the sicknesses that the colonists tend to get. The third major problem that the colonists had was problems with the Indians. The documents clearly show that when the colonists got there the Indians immediately did not like them, but it wasn’t their fault. When the colonists were running out of food they went to the Indians and ended up having to chop a couple of their heads off to get the grain.(Doc D) But also in Doc E it shows that the Indians attacked them a lot ,for example, “Aug.-Oct. – Of 100 men at Nansemond, Indians kill 50.”(Doc E) This shows they definitely didn’t like them. Apparently, the first permanent English colony, Jamestown, had an excessive amount of bad luck and chose the wrong time to come to America. The lack of rain, dirty water, scarcity of food, lack of drugs, and Indian attacks led to most of Jamestown colonists dying.