hi there and welcome back to Hymas history in the last lecture we talked about the American continent and its character and its shape before the Europeans arrived to settle it but it is England and her colonies that are most significant for our purposes in American history so let's look at the English colonies in America time to kick it old school now in order to understand all that went into English colonization at the time you also need to know what was going on in England at the time and in order to know what's going on in England at the time you need to know what was going on in Europe say hello to Martin Luther in 1517 he nailed 95 complaints called the 95 theses against the Roman Catholic Church to the Vinton burg church door long story short those ideas spread far and wide over the German countryside and ignited what we know today as the Protestant Reformation which separated Catholics from Protestants forever and not too long after the Reformation took hold in continental Europe it spread to England and that's when you get Henry VIII aids the King of England who because he wanted a divorce and the Pope would not grant him one decided that he'd become Protestant and established his own church the Church of England over which he was the head and when you know it the church granted him a divorce following him to the throne a little bit later was Elizabeth the first was a very popular monarch and finally consolidated England as a staunchly Protestant nation and now what you've got is a strong national state under a very popular monarch a measure of religious unity and a surging sense of nationalism and pride in addition to all this you've got a huge economic depression in the late 1500s which put large numbers of the population out of work and who are now roaming the streets all shift alike and the people who worried about such things started worrying that all this surplus population would eventually cause some trouble if only they were a place like 3,000 miles away across an ocean with hostile native inhabitants that we could send those people wait a minute there is sounds like a recipe for colonial exploration if I've ever heard one now the way England explored the new world was different from the other countries all the other countries went to their monarchs and the Monarchs footed the bill for the exploration but the English came up with a new way to finance the journey something called a joint-stock company it was assumed that planting colonies would be a lucrative venture so lots of investors got together pooled their money in one pot and then they financed the journey across the sea and the establishment of colonies expecting that when the colony did turn a profit they would get their money back and then some now that seems commonplace to us because that's basically how every major public corporation works today but for them it was new it was novel nobody had ever tried it before now there were several of these joint stock companies and the one I want to tell you about is the Virginia Company now it may have already occurred to you that if a company is sending people they don't really care about whether the people thrive and survive they only care that the people can work and turn a profit and put some boom boom back in the pockets of the investors and so on May 24th 1607 a group of about a hundred English settlers pushed on the shore and what would later become known as Virginia and it wasn't really a great place unless you like being infected with malaria by mosquitoes the size of your face or if you're just really into dysentery which when being defined means an infection of the intestines resulting in severe diarrhea with the presence of blood and mucus in the feces land of the pilgrims pride indeed and after they starved for a little while and got sick beyond measure and pooed their brains out they established a little settlement and named it Jamestown after King James the first and this was the first English settlement on American soil now I've already hinted at this but this was not a hospitable place to live for these early settlers I love the way David Kennedy puts it he says the early years of Jamestown were a nightmare for all involved except the buzzards settlers began dying off by the dozens from disease and starvation and malnutrition if it wasn't for the leadership of Captain John Smith who is the first name you recognize in this lecture thanks Disney the colony would have been a total failure but he whipped them into shape and got the colony working in proper order even so Jamestown was a rough place to settle starvation continued to be a problem and the colonists died in droves hey whatever they could find they could be dogs cats rat mice they even dug up corpses and ate them and there was a particularly morbid case in which a man killed his wife salted her body and ate her and just in case you're wondering the powers that be in the colony said that is not okay they tried that man they executed him and then they salted his body and ate him to show that you do not kill people and eat them I'm kidding they didn't eat him but they did kill him and of the four hundred settlers that made it alive to Virginia by 1609 only sixty of them had survived by 1625 eight thousand people had traveled across the sea to make their home there and only twelve hundred of them were still alive to which I say dang but then oh my a change in fortune someone discovered that Virginia soil was perfect for planting and raising tobacco and then everything turned around and as shiploads of Virginia leaf arrived on the English shores the people of England began smoking like Indonesian toddlers and that's how you get a prosperous economy but the prosperity could also be ruinous you see the tobacco plant leached the soil of all of its nutrients and then if you planted it year after year after year eventually the soil would be sterilized and that led to a search for more and greater tracts of land so that they could plant bigger crops which meant more workers were needed but where were those workers going to come from I mean you could dig people up to eat them but you certainly couldn't dig people up and make them harvest tobacco well it just so happened that in 1619 a Dutch warship appeared off the coast of Jamestown carrying within its hull a cargo that would solve all the Virginians planting and harvesting problems listen as John Rolfe the leading Virginian tobacconist of the time describes it about the latter end of August Dutch man of war of the burden of 160 tunes arrived at Point Comfort and the commanders named captain Joe and his pilot for the West Indies and one mr. Marmaduke an Englishman he brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes which the governor and cape merchants bought for victuals here was a cargo of 20 and odd men captured in Africa sold into slavery survived the treacherous journey across the Atlantic were immune to malaria and could stand long hours of work in the southern heat it was a bargain too good for the Virginians to pass up and it was a bargain that in the coming decades and centuries would cascade into the most violent rupture our nation has ever known but I'm getting ahead of myself and so we'll end it there and I will see you next time