Transcript for:
English Colonization and Jamestown

all right so this lecture is going to go over jamestown uh this is definitely one of the more famous settlements because uh spoiler alert it was the first successful settlement that the english had uh before we get too far into the jamestown narrative i do want to talk about england's colonization method because it's as you're going to see it's very different from the way that the spanish tried to colonize and it's these differences that are going to explain why england is so successful in north america where previously they had not been these changes and developments take a time take a bit of a bit of time for the english to figure out but once they figure out a method that works they stick with it and then of course like i said we're going to go into jamestown and specifically the virginia company which is the name of the the company which chartered jamestown uh and the relations with uh the native americans there and then of course we're going to go into the very classic and famous uh pocahontas and john smith narrative and then uh the difficulties that jamestown jamestown experienced and then the success that came afterwards uh so a very short span of time here but definitely a lot of information so moving to our first slide here so the english colonization method as was mentioned earlier england did not stop colonizing after their failures at roanoke there's just too much to gain as well as too much to lose if they stop so they they decide to push forward and continue now england was not completely unaccustomed to colonization actually it had recently taken over ireland during the reign of queen elizabeth the first uh england and ireland had had conflicts for quite a while but it was really during queen elizabeth the first reign that there was a successful takeover of ireland uh the conquest of ireland was brutal locals were were killed in an attempt to convert them from catholicism to protestant ireland was and still is today a very heavily catholic uh nation and so uh that really plays into the battle of anglican versus catholic was you know the english attempting to take over the catholic nation of ireland uh the the image that you see to the side there is actually uh irish citizens after conquest that's the name of the image uh so you can see that these people are obviously not very happy about being conquered here uh but the british style of taking over ireland was was very brutal many locals were were killed uh people were subject to the rule of the queen uh they were viewed the irish are viewed as savages as barbarians uh the british in order to try and force the people to become protestant they would uh plant protestant communities within ireland and these these areas were referred to as protestant plantations that's kind of where the word plantation originated was you know creating these little plants of protestant communities and hoping that they would grow up and spread protestantism throughout the region so you can see that this is a very similar uh ideas and ideologies in fact um many of the irish were forced into indentured servitude many were shipped off to the caribbean and would later on be shipped off to north america so you can really see that england's treatment of ireland and the irish people is really just a trial run for how colonization and treatment of the native americans as well as africans would play out it was just kind of a mini version of what would go on throughout the rest of the colonial era and so this is definitely a lot of this kind of the the groundwork for what would come later on so as we have really seen from the spanish form of colonization there's a lot of large-scale military conflict and you know battle heavy is a lot of it it's it's conquest the conquistadors uh the the english model is is pretty different and we're going to go kind of into these differences here first off colonization for the english is going to be led by two different groups mainly by churches and religious groups and companies as opposed to the monarchy the spanish it was the crown that was initiating everything they were sending over the soldiers and such but the english as we will see particularly have what are called joint stock companies these companies are searching for wealth in the new world so instead of having one individual funding or financing a voyage to go to the new world which is a huge risk a group of investors come together to fund the colony if the investment fails each investor only loses a small amount of money instead of one investor losing everything but if the colony is a success the rewards are going to be exponential and the increase of what they originally had would be grand so that's what really helps to convince a lot of people to invest in these joint stock companies is because if it fails oh well you lost a bit of money but if you don't then this is going to be a huge increase in your wealth um and then of course uh there's also religious individuals who come looking for independence and liberty in that regard uh now the colonies another difference is that the colonies created by the english were much more self-sustaining the spanish sent in like i said military conquerors they constantly needed resupplies they had huge amounts of land but they really relied on the native american people to give them what they needed the english colonies later on as we'll see and still when they're trying to figure out things for this first jamestown colony it's not quite this way but later on the english colonies are going to be settled by farmers and other people who are willing to work to survive in some cases especially with jamestown we're going to see it takes a moment to get people motivated but once they figure out a system that works they stick with it the colonies were also much smaller and more compacted and so this makes self-sustaining much much easier because you're not trying to reach a huge amount of land also the english colonies are going to have a much greater population uh this helps with the farming this helps with the self-sustaining but it also helps make it easier to control or maintain control over native american populations uh we will see this with jamestown specifically how the population ratio at the beginning versus at the end or later end of jamestown settlement and how that affects interactions with native american individuals there's also a difference between spanish and english on the types of individuals who are coming to the new world again spain they're soldiers they're adventure seekers they're conquistadors whereas the british encourage lower class citizens the poor the religious dissenters the social rebels people who are homeless people that don't own land and debtors to settle in the new world this is an attempt to alleviate a lot of the social and economic tensions that were growing in england but it also includes thousands of indentured servants uh as well as some who were prisoners people who were indentured against their will so because of this uh america or the in north america and in the english colonies there's already kind of a rebellious attitude from the very beginning because you have people that are you know the riff raff that are the ones that are coming to the colonies so that's going to create a different attitude and that's something that we're definitely going to see uh but also these are people that are willing to work these are people that are you know they have had to scrape and claw just to stay alive in england so they're familiar with having to do the same thing in the new world it's not a huge change of life for them and then also english colonies in general feature a greater number of female settlers again this is not initially how it is in jamestown but they learn that they learn that this has to change that you need to have women in colonies to help them survive in fact women actually came to english colonies specifically to look for husbands and we'll talk more about that in this lecture today but this also again this helps the the population becomes self-sustaining but it also means that a very small portion of english men intermarry or have sexual relations with native american women so there are going to be mixed-race children being born but they're they're few and far between and so because they're so minimal there's no uh there's no english equivalent of the mestizo class you know that middle mixed race class uh and that there's no recognition of that like there was in central and south america this also means that english colonists are not going to be as open-minded towards half-white half-native children as the spanish are so there's still a little bit more of a solidified relig or racial barriers that exist it's not as fluid as it was in central and south america uh now although the spanish they did have some plantations growing crops especially in the caribbean for example sugar is a big crop grown in the caribbean the main profit that the spanish have from central and south america is going to be gold and silver a lot of which was stolen from the native american people uh the colonies in north america don't have that same supply of gold and silver it just doesn't exist so instead the wealth is going to come from new resources uh specifically raw materials uh timber is an excellent one as i mentioned in the last lecture england had cut down all their trees so they really needed huge timbers to build ships specifically also we're going to talk about the growth of new crops sugar is another one when england gets started in the caribbean sugar plantations are a huge deal tobacco cotton these things are going to come up are very important crops uh and of course we'll we'll get into this specifically when we talk about triangular trade but this is really the fact that england is going for crops and resources is very different as to gold and silver because the gold and silver dries up for spain it's not a continual thing that keeps coming again this is england chooses something that's more self-sustaining so these differences really impact how the individual colonies grew and and really the success of english colonies compared to the spanish the spanish gained wealth and power quick and fast but it dried up almost as quickly as it rose up whereas england's method was much more self-sustaining so it lasted longer and had more support financially economically militarily for the the english crown so moving on to the actual uh settlement at jamestown so james the first ascends to the throne after the death of queen elizabeth the first in 1603 now james was the son of mary queen of scots who was elizabeth's cousin because elizabeth herself had no heirs she was unmarried and had no children james the first took a strong interest in american colonization and in 1606 he gave a charter to a joint stock company called the virginia company there were two divisions of this company the first colony of london and the second colony of plymouth the virginia company was the first to organize an expedition and they uh they dispatched a flotilla of three ships the godspeed discovery and susan constant which carried 105 settlers they spent four months at sea and arrived off the chesapeake on april 26 1607. so the proprietary governors these are the the people that kind of own the charter under the virginia company uh the proprietary governors uh they appointed a man by the name of edward maria wingfield uh as the first president and leader of the colony after their arrival they decided uh that wingfield decided to sail inland to establish a fort in a more secure location uh you don't want to be at the very end of the river because if the spanish sail by they can see us they might attack we want to have a little bit more of a defensible location and so they sailed into what they named the james river of course after the king and they finally made landfall on may 4th 1607. so the first thing they did upon arriving was building a fort to defend themselves against the native americans so we're seeing some of the similar ideas here that we saw with roanoke you know an expectation for violence and expectation to defend ourselves and this is going to be a problem as we will see the fort was triangular shaped as you can see in that artistic rendering there this is very easily defendable it's easy to build and it was right on the edge of the river so it was easy to see who was coming up and down the water uh and in fact there is a rebuilding of the fort that you can actually visit today as well as the archaeological remains of jamestown that you can visit so this is something that a lot of people like to check out it's it's pretty fun and pretty cool uh so similar to roanoke the men that came were adventurers they were soldiers but they did have some farmers uh but again it's just men there were no women they haven't quite learned the importance of having women in their colonies yet the city was named jamestown of course after the king and so this the the city grew up around the fort so the fort was kind of at the center of it now accompanying this first group of settlers was a man by the name of john smith he's depicted there in the image to the top right smith was an adventurer he was a sailor he had done a lot of traveling in his time now while they were crossing to get to uh north america smith had actually attempted a mutiny so he was shackled and kept below deck and he was actually going to be hanged as punishment once they arrived in virginia however a sealed letter was given to wingfield and it was to be opened upon arrival to the colony and would have the names of who would be the leaders of the community and smith was listed as a member of the council and therefore was considered a leader and was granted a reprieve of execution uh so he's definitely smith is definitely a bit of a an adrenaline junkie if you will uh he's looking for adventure he's seeking out things and he's definitely a strong headed person a very stubborn individual uh so jumping back into our narrative here is at the time the english came to settle jamestown it should obviously come as no surprise that they were native american people already living in the area uh the specific group was the powhatan confederacy or just simply referred to as the powhatans uh and as was mentioned before they had known about europeans word of europeans had traveled up of course the native americans at roanoke who had encountered the english would have shared their stories uh in fact the chief of the powhatans had even uh falsely claimed that he had killed the people of roanoke so so they had known about europeans they knew that they existed and now the powerton confederacy was actually one of the most powerful indian groups along the atlantic coast at the time the english are coming to virginia in fact the confederacy spanned over 10 000 square miles in the chesapeake bay and tidewater virginia region and it was composed of 30 or so algonquian tribes with a population of about 15 000 people so this is a pretty good-sized confederacy here uh each tribe has its own chief uh with a man by the name of wahoon seneca uh who was the head chief of the powhatan he in the movie pocahontas you just hear him called powhatan but his name was actually wahoon seneca he was their their main leader the head chief and so many of the tribes within the confederacy were subservient tribes to wahoo and seneca they actually paid tribute to him and his tribe he ruled by the threat of force as well as marriage alliances in fact he had many wives up to around 100 or so and many children so he would marry women who were prominent members of their own tribes to solidify alliances with those tribes and of course the most well-known of his children is pocahontas who we will talk about uh later on in the next slide now the powerton people themselves were described as the english as being tall and straight and very indeed ingenious very intelligent people they wore animal furs in the winter and almost nothing in the summer months and they had separate spheres of work for men and women men and women were actually treated pretty much equally but they each had their own individual spheres of of culture and society and what they were allowed to do now initially the poutines had generally good relations with the english but they may they mostly maintain their distance you know we'll we'll observe you from afar but we're not going to be too close but this is going to change because of certain things that we will see now the settlers to jamestown were definitely not prepared for difficulty of the life on on the frontier uh but also they just had really bad timing they arrived in virginia during a severe drought and in the first nine months only 38 of their initial settlers had survived uh but lucky for them smith uh john smith was very skilled with negotiating with the poutines for food and so that really helped but the situation gets a little bit complicated as we will discuss here so first off the image of pocahontas that most of us are familiar with of course comes from the disney film uh but it shouldn't come as a surprise that this depiction is completely false uh of course you know disney is disney so they're going to tell their own story they're going to add some you know some creativity and some romance to it but the interpretation specifically of the conflict between the natives and the settlers of jamestown is actually pretty good there was a lot of violence uh that's that's true they they kind of disliked each other very strongly uh but the story of you know pocahontas and john smith the love story him her saving his life and stuff is is definitely very different and it's really strongly based on john smith's perspective uh so let's go on ahead and move to the more historically accurate version of this tale so matawaka or amenute uh as she was referred to um and john smith here's here's kind of the background information before their story starts so as was previously mentioned the settlers of jamestown had interacted with the pair the powhatan tribes several times they had been friendly um but they had really maintained their distance but in december of 1607 uh a hunting party led by wahoon seneca's brother a man by the name of oppa can canal that you see up there uh actually ran into smith who was leading an exploration party of the chickahominy river oh picancano was very untrusting of the english and much more prone to violence than his brother so he actually attacked smith and his men and killed everyone except for smith smith was of course taken as a hostage smith was then presented to the chief his his hands were bound he was tied up his head was placed on a stone uh the chief wahoon seneca approached him with a club another account says that it was just a large stone with the intention according to smith to quote dash out his brains it was at this point that a young girl who is called pocahontas rushed up to smith and put his head in her arms and covered his head with her own head to supposedly protect him from being killed by her father smith was spared by the chief and deemed a friend of the powhatans and was initiated into trading with them so a couple of things here what what what are some possible explanations as to why this happened well first one is it it occurred exactly as smith said his life was spared by a young girl she didn't want him to die she had seen too much violence she was curious about these strange english people she was a little girl with a crush sure that's definitely possible but probably not probable some historians believe that this was possibly a ritual of acceptance to initiate jamestown and its settlers as one of the tributary tribes uh so we you know we have this ritual we take him and the chief could have killed him but he chose not to so now you owe your life and your tribe owes me you have to pay me tributes now it's it was a symbolic ritual it was he was never in any harm or any danger um also some other historians suggest that this was possibly a tactic to embarrass smith to put him in a position of of you know placing him below you know you're supposed to be this brave english warrior and we captured you we killed all your men and by the way your life was saved by a little girl like how pathetic is that so uh definitely some some interesting uh interpretations there's also uh some people that think he perhaps made it up or at least parts of it up we do know that his memoirs express a very similar event where he is sent as a slave to a turkish nobleman's mistress the mistress falls in love with him and helps him escape so this is how many times can a woman fall in love with you and save your life uh this is definitely something that is is questionable in fact the incident is not recorded until several years after it supposedly took place uh it's first mentioned in a letter and human memory itself is faulty so he thought something happened a certain way but then he remembered it wrong um that there's also a slew of other possibilities you know many explanations for why this happened the way that it happened but but the disney version is definitely a very inaccurate representation uh now as far as we know about pocahontas uh her real name is the one that you see listed above amanute was her public name her name used uh in in her culture and society but matawaka was actually her private name this was known to her tribe and her family so that's why you'll hear me actually refer to her as matawaka more often than pocahontas because pocahontas was actually just a nickname that her father gave her means playful one or a little troublemaker she was of course the favorite daughter of chief powhatan and historians believe that she was actually the daughter of his first wife who had died in childbirth giving birth to matawaka so we do know that she was born around 1596 and it's estimated that she was anywhere from 10 to 13 years old when the captivity incident with smith occurred and although the english referred to her as a princess because her she was the daughter of a chief she was not actually able or even really close in line to inherit the you know the throne if you will of her father uh this is really just a misunderstanding of native american culture as we discussed native american women and men although they are equals or or more equal they have two separate spheres in which they can act so she would have never been able to take the the chiefdom from her father because that was not something that women could do they had separate spheres of power so she did have status she did have privileges as the daughter of a chief but but not in the same way you think of of a princess now despite being as young as she was matawaka actually became an intermediary of sorts between the people of jamestown and the powhatans and this will end up causing some some interesting aspects as we will see uh and also an important point to know is that despite you know her saving john smith's life and john smith talking about what happened smith himself never indicated that there was a romantic relationship between the two this idea that pocahontas or matawaka saved him because she loved him actually came during the colonial revival this was after the american revolution uh and was during the antebellum era when there was this increased appreciation for the the colonial era how you know the good old days if you will and so it was an idealization of the past so john smith himself actually never said that the two had romantic interests at all now moving on more towards the history of jamestown uh so there is going to be some serious problems uh which come in the form of what are called the starving times so despite the fact that uh john smith was spared by powhatan uh the chief powhatan things would not be easy for him or the people of jamestown they did have several ships to bring supplies as well as new settlers in fact in 1608 the first two women arrive at the colony and this is actually the same year that john smith is made the leader or the president of the colony uh so as was mentioned women arriving to the colony is definitely going to be a game changer uh because that helps make the population more self-sustaining but actually what's really interesting is these initial two women actually came to the colony for the explicit purpose of getting married uh you have to remember this is a you know a colony of you know 50 100 young single men and there's two women here so you kind of have your pick of the the cream of the crop so it's actually for for a lot of women it's actually a good idea to come to the colonies because of the need for wives uh now uh as was mentioned earlier many of the settlers that came wanted to just reap the benefits and wealth of a colony they didn't want to uh work for the good of the colony as a whole or for the group for survival they just wanted to come get rich and leave so when john smith takes over the colony is actually failing in order to curb this negative behavior john smith institutes a very strict policy he orders quote he that shall not work shall not eat basically no work no food so this was not a popular method of enforcement with the people despite it actually saved the colony from failure for quite a bit of time because people just weren't willing to work they just wanted to to get the wealth and so he had to motivate them to work by withholding food but smith because of it was not a very popular guy a lot of people disliked him for it in fact things got worse for smith when in the late summer of 1609 the virginia company sent 300 new settlers which included men women and children however they did not give plans or logistics on how to support these people or help them survive and these settlers had actually been part of a resupply mission but the ship was caught in a hurricane and pretty much all of the supplies had been lost so you've given them about 300 new settlers but no supplies to support these settlers so this is going to be a huge problem the people that are there right now are already having issues with supplies and you've just added a whole new issue now things get worse if you can believe it when smith is injured in a gunpowder explosion so he has to go back to england in october of 1609 for better medical treatment and although his tactics weren't unpopular they worked they kept the colony alive they kept people working to do what they needed to for success now the man that took over after smith was a man by the name of john ratcliffe ratcliffe attempted to keep up with smith's strategies and the strict nature of dealing with native americans and the strict you know no work no food policy uh but he did not have the same rapport with the poutines of smith smith was viewed as you know the the leader by the powhatans and so when somebody else took charge the the poutines were not as willing to work with ratcliffe and so also the native americans their patience was was starting to wear thin the settlers were far too dependent in in wahoo seneca's mind the jamestown people were supposed to give tribute but we're doing this the wrong way we the poutines are giving you stuff it's not supposed to work that way so they were getting increasingly angry and increasingly frustrated and eventually ratcliffe is captured and tortured to death so the next leader that takes over is obviously terrified by this so he decides he is not going to be as strict and he's not going to keep up with smith's intense policies but this is going to be a problem so in conjunction with the issues of politics the relations with the native americans the lack of supplies the new arrivals virginia is also still in the middle of that really bad drought so this makes crops die and food in the region is very scarce the people of jamestown were too dependent on trade with native americans for food and this actually increased after the departure of smith so the poutines decide to just stop trading with the people of jamestown there's just not enough food to go around and powerton is going to um the chief is going to work on feeding his own people instead of helping these leeches of a settlers that are here so this is of course not only going to increase uh problems within the colony for hunger starvation but it also severely increases the tensions and hostilities between the colonists and the powhatans this the tensions came to blows when the poutines decided to lay siege to the fort of jamestown and this is actually what initiated what was called the starving time it lasted from about the winter of 1609 to early 1610 mid 1610 during this time the poutines killed about two out of every three colonists so two-thirds of the colonists were killed just by warfare and this decrease in population is going to make it harder for people to work people to get food this just makes survival even more difficult there's less people to help with the survival of the colony uh also this as was mentioned this this time of constant attack by the palatines this siege is referred to as the first poutine war but it was definitely more of just a long-term siege than an actual conflict the settlers of jamestown were just too weak and too hungry to really do much fighting uh and the siege made things worse because it prevented colonists from hunting anytime a colonist would venture outside of the fort to hunt for deer or other animals they would just be killed by the palatines so this lack of food this lack of diet causes malnutrition which results in illnesses and diseases like dysentery and typhoid fever things are not looking good for jamestown in fact starvation was so rampant that the survivors turned to eating anything and everything they could get their hands on in fact accounts and archaeological evidence show that they ate horses dogs leather and even people historians believe that this is a phenomenon what's called survivor cannibalism uh basically this is this is different than our typical idea of murdering people and eating them it's actually basically the group kind of agrees that when one person dies of natural causes usually of starvation or illness that the survivors will eat that person uh this is done in intense survival situations and essentially everyone agrees to the terms and conditions uh it's missing from the historical record nobody seemed to write about it and that's what makes historians think that it was agreed upon is because everyone also agreed to keep it out of the record keep it out of their journals because eating people is a very taboo thing it's seen as you know very wicked um and just just not a right thing to do so so that's why even though they turned to it to survive that's why it was kind of missing from the record it's because everybody agreed okay if we do this we can't tell anyone about it and the the link that you see here uh is actually to a really interesting video uh from actually from the jamestown archaeological site about the skeletal remains they found of a teenage girl that had signs of cannibalism so if you want to type in that link in your internet browser it's a very interesting video and i encourage you to watch it now in may of 1610 another group of settlers arrives at jamestown uh england really wants this to succeed and the specifically the uh virginia company wants it to succeed so they just keep sending settlers and settlers hoping that having enough people will make it work uh this group of settlers had actually intended to come to jamestown much earlier but they had actually been shipwrecked by a hurricane in uh and they actually uh had been shipwrecked for quite some time so it took him a while to get there but the leader of this group of 142 castaways is a man by the name of thomas gates now when gates arrives he finds only 60 of the original 500 colonists that were supposed to be there and the 60 that are there are starving and half dead they're sick it's it's a very very ugly scene that he arrives on so gates makes the decision that they're going to gather the settlers and the castaways together and they're just going to leave the colony we're going to abandon the fort go back to england regroup and figure this thing out so they actually start to make their way down the james river towards the chesapeake bay so they can get back to england and now unaware of what was going on in jamestown like i said the virginia company wants this group to succeed so they had actually sent another group of settlers and supplies several weeks earlier and they actually this group ran into thomas gates and his his castaways and survivors about 10 miles down river the leader of this most recent resupply group was a man by by the name of thomas west he was the third baron de la ware also called lord delaware now he ordered as you know as a baron he was able to order everyone to return to the fort and so he took charge as leader of jamestown and actually led a counter-offensive against the powhatans with the new settlers uh because these individuals that had come they were healthy they were um of course nowhere near the sickened state that uh the settlers of jamestown and even the the um castaways with gates were so they were able to successfully push off the powertons and end that first war um and he provided or he was actually able to be a good and effective leader to really help revive the colony so it definitely had he not arrived gates the castaways and the settlers of jamestown probably would have left and the fort would have been abandoned so the timing was actually really really good on his part now things despite looking dark uh things actually do improve for the jamestown colony uh specifically um in the form of a man by the name of john rolfe among the castaways that arrived with thomas gates was mr john rolfe ralph was a businessman who had hoped to come to virginia to farm tobacco specifically to undercut the spanish monopoly of it spain had discovered tobacco in south america and it was incredibly popular in europe as um actually the four main plants traded in the colonial exchange tobacco was used more than any other plant so tobacco was more popular than corn more popular than potatoes and more popular than tomatoes we know now today that it's the addictive nature of nicotine found in tobacco which helps to make it popular but overall there was a huge huge tobacco craze throughout europe throughout especially the high class the the monarchy the nobles they loved it it was an expensive commodity that they just couldn't get enough of but at the time spain was the only country exporting tobacco now of course it took some time and a lot of effort to rebuild jamestown after the failure of the storm starving times but rolfe had actually acquired some tobacco seeds from the caribbean uh and he uh there there was a native version of tobacco in virginia and much of north america it was actually commonly used by native american people uh but europeans did not like the north american variety it was too bitter it had a low nicotine content and in general it was just not a popular brand a popular type of tobacco but ralph had been experimenting with tobaccos in around 1611 and had been kind of mixing and blending things and his first major tobacco crop harvest was in 1612. uh he was described by friends and in the historical record to have taken really great care and pains to make sure his tobacco crop worked uh he and his friends smoked the first leaves that they harvested and then the rest was sent off to england uh it was described as being sweet having a strong flavor as well as having a pretty high nicotine content of course again this is something that we know now uh that they wouldn't have known at the time but it was immensely popular in england in fact it turns out that the climate and soil in virginia is actually really good for growing to this particular variety of tobacco and they were able to grow it in large quantities so very quickly john rolfe and his orinoco tobacco as he called it uh was actually competing with the spanish market and doing quite well in fact tobacco would be the crop that saved jamestown and so it was actually a cash crop that really became the important staple uh so a cash crop is a crop that is not a crop use for food but specifically a crop you grow to sell so things like you know tobacco obviously cotton things like that jamestown became a tobacco town and wealth increased very quickly and with this increased wealth there also came increased settlers who were coming to jamestown to make money off tobacco farming roth established a plantation and this would be the model that many other farmers would follow to grow tobacco of course we'll talk more about the plantation model when discussing the origins of slavery as well as southern culture um but that's definitely you know he kind of initiates the specifically the tobacco plantation now despite the success of tobacco conflicts with native americans continue to be a problem in fact on april uh excuse me april of 1613 some colonial soldiers had kidnapped matawaka as and kept her as a prisoner of war they were hoping to trade for english captives that the poweringtons had as well as guns that he had taken so matawaka was left under the charge of a reverend who taught her english and during her time in captivity she met john rolfe rolfe had actually been widowed his wife and child died during the hurricane that had stranded him and and the people that arrived with gates and he had actually acted as one of matawaka's educators he helped to teach her english and she also expressed interest in christianity and the reverend as well as ralph helped to teach her that and it was during this time that the two fell in love now this is according to rolf and english accounts but it does say that uh matawaka was married to a poutine man by the name of kokwam since about 1610. she would have been about 16 maybe 14 years old at the time and they were actually still married when she was kidnapped but in april of 1614 matawaka told her father that she wanted to marry john rolfe uh and so kokomom and matawaka got a divorce which was actually allowed in powhatan society as was mentioned women actually had quite a fair amount of native american women had quite a fair amount of rights compared to european women uh and so she was free to marry john ralph which she did matuaka was also baptized and chose to take the christian name of rebecca which actually means the mother of two people so she started to act as really an intermediary between the people of jamestown and the powhatans so this is another one of those things where we don't know for sure her thoughts her feelings was it an attempt to establish peace did she really fall in love with him was her conversion a true conversion or was it for strategic purposes uh we we just don't know perhaps a little bit of everything uh and this a little bit of this a little bit of that uh but we do know that their union initiated two full years of peace between the powhatans and the jamestown settlers and of course the settlers are continuing to enter the colonies in droves as tobacco is just increasing in success uh and the plantations are getting larger this means you need more settlers to work on the plantations and more people are trying to get a piece of the pie now um john rolfe and rebecca rebecca had a son that they named thomas rebecca was not just a plantation mistress however as i mentioned she acted as an intermediary between the poutines and jamestown settlers and it was really her work that helped to maintain peaceful relations between the two groups uh in 1616 the raw family decided to travel to london and they traveled across the country and rebecca even met king james the first and his wife queen anne although she was not actually a princess she was given that status while in england and was treated as a princess so she was very respected highly uh regarded and was basically again acting as an ambassador to england on behalf of the powhatan people it was actually while she was in england that she ran into john smith again and she had actually thought that he was dead she had heard news that he had passed uh she and smith were were kind to each other at first but after he started talking to her she actually got angry with him and chided him for the way that he had treated her father and her people and she kind of accused him of abusing their kindness and their hospitality now in march of 1617 the royal family boards a ship in london to make their way back home back to virginia unfortunately they only made a short way down the thames when rebecca became gravely ill and she actually died several days later historians are not quite sure what killed her um people suspect of a wide range of diseases possibly smallpox pneumonia even tuberculosis but some even suggest poison some people in in their prejudice and racism against native american people thought you know she shouldn't live she was you know someone who was causing more problems and so but that unfortunately that has not been strongly supported by historians but it is a theory nonetheless uh she was buried at the parish of saint george's church underneath the um the main area of the church but unfortunately the church suffered a fire in 1727 so the final location of her grave is unknown today because of that incident now rolf did return back to jamestown after her death took his son with him their their child with him and the colony continued to succeed but things changed when oahu and seneca died in 1618. his brother oppakan canal was his successor this is the same man that captured john smith and killed that party and but now obacant canal is again much more violent much more hostile and specifically rebecca is no longer there to act as an intermediary between the powen and powhatans and the colonists so war rose up again but by this time the novel the number of settlers is so much in jamestown that they are able to withstand the attack and people continue to come and so the the native american people just can't keep up really uh and so in a reversal of what happened before the powhatan population is decimated uh so whereas the first time the poutines were able to almost eradicate the english this time the english almost completely eradicate the palatines now in 1619 the virginia colony establishes an elect assembly to rule into order so this is very significant significant because it is the first government body within the colonies to run and operate the colonies so instead of running and operating from england and being given your instructions we're allowed to run and operate here but eventually the house becomes what's called a bicameral or two house government body and this is of course is hugely significant uh this is because you know we have a bicameral legislature today and so that that is something that goes very very far back in america's history and the name of this house was the house of burgesses and so by 1642 it is a bicameral house an assembly so that is also very significant so despite the initial failures of the jamestown colony and these very difficult times of you know warfare the starving times uh at the end of the day the colony is a success and this success is great not just for jamestown not just for the virginia colony but this success spurs on other individuals to settle in north america if jamestown can do it if jamestown can succeed so can we let's give it a shot let's give it a try so because jamestown works other people decide we need to try to settle as well