English settlers establish Jamestown, Virginia

On May 13, 1607, after a voyage that began the previous December, English colonists chose a marshy peninsula some 50 miles up the James River and named their camp Jamestown. The roughly 104 men and boys had crossed the Atlantic in three ships—the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—under a charter from the Virginia Company of London.

The site was picked for defense and deep-water anchorage, not comfort. It proved disease-ridden and short of fresh water, and the early years were brutal; during the “Starving Time” winter of 1609–1610, the colony nearly collapsed.

Tobacco, not gold, finally made Jamestown pay—turning a failing outpost into a profitable one.

Yet Jamestown endured, becoming the first permanent English settlement in the Americas and the seedbed of England’s North American empire. Its later history is inseparable from the colony’s turn to tobacco and the arrival of enslaved Africans, foundations that would shape Virginia for generations.