Early Jamestown: Why Did So Many Colonist Die? Essay 10//07/2013
In the matter of four years, almost every colonist died in Jamestown. In 1607 English ships sailed The Chesapeake Bay, and later made their way to Jamestown in Virginia. Powhatan Indians. By summer of 1609, 524 colonists would have arrived in Jamestown. But by 1611, over three hundred would be dead! There are three main reasons why this horrible incident happened were; lack of water, lack good workers, and poor relations with the Powhatan Indians. The water became a major problem for the colonists because it was not fresh water; it was a harsh mixture of saltwater and freshwater enough to do some damage. This was also known as brackish water. The colonists tried to dig wells for fresh water, but these were subject to drought, and/or saltwater intrusion. Especially, with droughts it caused poor corn crop to grow. Droughts are a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall, or a shortage of water resulting from this. From that you can tell that if it were too dry, or never rained much it’d be a problem, for crops to grow. This also led to the problem of early colonist, dying of starvation, and/or hunger. (Doc B) According to Caviler Earle, what happened to human waste that got dumped into the river was fester, or in other words flushed away. Since the colony dumped all of their waste in the water source, it became even more toxic as the weeks passed, and could have also contributed to disease. (Doc A) The headcount began to rapidly drop, and several of the deaths were caused by saltwater poisoning. In general most of the water was not healthy for colonist. It seems water was an important factor in the hardship of the colony, but it is not the only one. Another, main reason early colonist died in Jamestown were because of unskilled workers. Most, if not all, travelers that were brought to ‘Early Jamestown’ were very inexperienced. In early Jamestown there were more useless workers rather than needed workers. There were only twelve laborers