- [Instructor] In the last video, we talked about
the short-lived and highly unsuccessful
English colony at Roanoke Island,
which disappeared pretty much without a trace,
and even today is still known as the Lost Colony.
So as late as 1585, England has still not successfully
established a New World colony.
Well, all of that is about to change.
In 1607, when the Virginia Company,
a joint-stock company, or an early precursor
to the modern corporation, which spread out
both the shares, the wealth, and the risk
of an expedition like one headed to the New World.
They received a charter for New World exploration
from King James I, who had now taken over
for Queen Elizabeth, and their goals were kinda the same
as many of the goals of explorers in this time period.
They wanted to find gold.
They wanted to find a passage to the Indies
that might make it easier for them to get
the luxurious materials like spices and silk
that were so expensive to get over the land route
that was the silk road.
And, James in particular was hoping that they could
maybe get one up on the Spanish,
who had been doing so well for more than 100 years
in the West Indies.
Now one of the important things to note about this
is that no one who went to Virginia
expected to set up a colony there
and live there for the rest of their lives.
What they expected was to go for a couple of years,
mine tremendous amounts of gold, which they hoped
were lying in giant piles all over the ground.
Get tremendously wealthy, and live like kings
for the rest of their lives in Europe.
So this Virginia Company expedition was intended
to be short-term.
But, as it'll turn out, that will not be the case.
So how did things go for the Virginia Company
compared to the Roanoke Island colonists?
Well, not terrifically better.
They sailed in early 1607 into the Chesapeake Bay,
and they spent some time looking for what
might be a good place to settle,
and they eventually chose a site here on what they'll name
the James River, for King James, and in the town
that they'll call Jamestown for the same reason.
It's hard to overstate how terrible the land
that they chose at Jamestown was,
and it was terrible for a couple of reasons.
One reason is that the soil isn't terrifically good there.
It's marshy, it's not great for growing subsistence crops,
which you'll need to survive.
And more importantly, it's buggy,
and by buggy I mean that there are tons of mosquitoes,
and mosquitoes carry diseases like yellow fever,
malaria, and those mosquito-borne diseases
will have a tremendous effect, a huge death toll
for the early settlers at Jamestown.
The other thing I can't overstate about the colonists
at Jamestown was just how incredibly unprepared
and unsuited they were to be colonists in the New World.
Remember, this was essentially a get rich quick scheme.
Well, who are the sort of people
who'd like to get rich quick?
Investors, for the most part.
These were gentlemen, and the English definition
of a gentleman is really someone who has title,
someone who has status, someone who does not
work with his hands, and all through that first summer
when they probably should've been planting crops
to try to survive through the winter,
instead, these gentlemen were busy looking for gold,
which means that when winter rolled around,
things got pretty dire at Jamestown,
and we'll talk about that in the next video.