The English Arrive at Jamestown

When the English planted their first permanent colony at Jamestown in 1607, they entered a land already governed by the Powhatan Confederacy, a paramount chiefdom of some thirty Algonquian-speaking peoples under the leadership of Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan. The newcomers were few, sickly, and unable to feed themselves, and in the early years their survival depended almost entirely on trade with—and the forbearance of—their Native neighbors, who supplied the corn that carried the colony through its starving times.

That uneasy coexistence did not last. As the English discovered the profits of tobacco, their hunger for land grew relentless, and they pressed ever deeper into Powhatan territory. Relations curdled into a long cycle of raids, reprisals, and broken truces. The marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe in 1614 brought a brief peace, but it was the exception. Within a generation the balance of power that had once favored the Powhatan had collapsed, and the pattern set at Jamestown—dependence, then dispossession—would repeat itself along the whole Atlantic seaboard.