The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth. They didn’t know how to care for the fishing nets, so they rotted, and then didn’t know how to fix them.
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some context.
John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.
Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
The soil may have been brackish, but this wasn't their main setback.
The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival. Their first ship brought jewelers and smiths to work the gold they assumed they'd find, but didn't have a real plan for agriculture. The majority died of starvation and disease, but the survivors were sustained by meager leftover travel supplies from newly arriving ships, and by raiding neighboring natives for their corn.
Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors. The Pilgrims settled in a higher latitude with a shorter growing season, but during their first drought they had already stored enough supplies to share with local natives.
Jamestown could have been on a similar footing if they'd prioritized survival and diplomacy over finding treasure for the crown, the chartering company, and themselves.
>The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival
Source? I'm pretty sure they planted corn and wheat as soon as they could, in the first month of arrival. "The 15th June we had finished our fort... we had also sown most of our corn on two mountains. It sprang a man's height from the ground." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Maria_Wingfield
By the third year (1609) they had cleared and planted at least 40 acres https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/2/hh2b2.htm
> Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors.
And, as I understand it, settled into areas which had previously been cleared and cultivated by the natives but had been relatively recently abandoned.
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Pilgrims-and-the... "The Pilgrims decided to establish their colony in an area that had been cleared and abandoned by the Patuxet Indians. One colonist remarked, “Thousands of men have lived here, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same."
That's one amazing head start. And, had they not had it, the Pilgrims probably would have died, too.
This mostly fails a sniff test to me? And indeed, reading the linked article doesn't support your editorializing. To quote: "There is some evidence that they had poor fishing skills, but other factors may have contributed more to their failures"
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
From the article:
‘They suffered fourteen nets (which was all they had) to rot and spoil, which by orderly drying and mending might have been preserved. But being lost, all help of fishing perished.’ (25)
(25) Strachey, W. 1998b [1610], ‘A True Reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony then, and after under the government of the Lord La Warre’, in Haile 1998, p. 441
I originally learned this by talking with a Jamestown National Historical Park docent. I said that, having grown up in Virginia in the 20th century and knowing what tidewater Virginia was like in the 17th century, it would have been very hard to starve to death. American chestnut was still the dominant forest tree, and provided literally tons of nuts per tree. Black walnut and acorn were also plentiful and make good survival foods if you know how to prepare them. The Chesapeake Bay had enormous oyster beds, with oysters being described as "the size of dinner plates", and John Smith said that he thought he could have walked across it on the backs of fish, and if you know how to dry or salt fish it doesn't matter that the sturgeon and rockfish are seasonal. Mussels and crab, likewise, would have been plentiful, and unlike fish, accessible year round. Deer, turkey, rabbit, groundhog, squirrel, opossum and raccoon were plentiful, and passenger pigeon were also around, not having suffered the overhunting they did in the early 20th century.
She indicated that the majority of the English settlers weren't farmers or fishermen and didn't have the hands-on experience to make use of the resources at their disposal. I went home and did a bit of internet research on that statement, and it seemed fairly accurate.
I do not claim to be a trained historian of colonial Virginia; I just grew up there.
You are still strengthening the claim beyond the paper, is my point. The paper, specifically, has several other explanations beyond "they didn't know how to care for nets."
For example:
The colonists’ performance in fishing in
the first years, in common with all other activities,
must also have been severely hampered by their
generally poor health, malnutrition and subse-
quent lack of energy. For a period of five months
there are said to have been only five men healthy
enough to man the bulwarks of the fort against
hostile Virginia Indians. During such difficult
times it is likely that fishing would have been
restricted and perhaps would have been halted
altogether.
The low stock of salt and not having the same dry season that they were used to from the other side of the Atlantic almost certainly played much more heavily, as well. (And to be clear, that paper covers these as heavy influences.)
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be. Our food supply is supernaturally clean, nowadays.
At any rate, my main gripe here is the mental image of "second sons that didn't know how to do anything" that you conjured. Certainly possible, but feels far overstated, to me. They had managed to survive a ship across the ocean. Something that was not a passive cruise journey.
Like most disasters, there were many causes for this one. The general unpreparedness of the Jamestown settlers is, however, an important one, and probably the primary causative one (although see edit #2 for a strong contrary argument).
We know for a fact that the proportion of wealthy nobles to manual laborers was really, really high compared to the population of England at the time, and there werent' enough of the latter to keep the colony afloat (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-... and https://www.jyfmuseums.org/visit/jamestown-settlement/histor...). These were largely second sons of wealthy families (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Families_of_Virginia). Most of the rest were the gentlemen's manservants, e.g. they were also urbanites (source: https://bandbwilliamsburg.com/jamestown-settlement/#:~:text=...
Regarding the quote from the paper:
The colonists’ performance in fishing in the first years, in common with all other activities, must also have been severely hampered by their generally poor health, malnutrition and subsequent lack of energy.
Note that a primary reason for the poor relationship with the native Americans was that the settlers didn't have their own food sources, and resorted to theft and assault to get native's food supplies -- which, as a result of the drought, weren't all that great (source: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...)
They also didn't have the skills necessary to (for instance) prepare acorns or harvest pine bark cambium. Survival foods would have been foods that noble Englishmen hadn't ever even eaten, much less prepared themselves.
From the Wikipedia article on "The Starving Time":
Although they did some farming, few of the original settlers were accustomed to manual labor or were familiar with farming. Hunting on the island was poor, and they quickly exhausted the supply of small game. The colonists were largely dependent upon trade with the Native Americans and periodic supply ships from England for their food.
As a consequence of the deteriorating relationship with the natives, the Jamestown colonists' ability to do any land-based (as opposed to water-based) subsistence activities was severely curtailed, and, one assumes, their ability to hire natives to fish for them also eroded. But they did have one major advantage, an actual oceangoing ship that they could have sailed into the Bay and used to fish. The natives had only canoes and could not possibly have constituted a major threat on the waters of the Bay. But that only works if you know how to fish, which they didn't. Once the nets rotted due to the colonists not understanding the importance of drying them, that advantage was also neutralized, and starving was inevitable in the absence of relief supplies from England or the Caribbean.
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be.
The colonists were ill primarily because they didn't practice good hygiene wrt situating their toilet facilities away from their drinking water and ended up with dysentery, a problem that the native Americans managed to avoid (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-...).
Summary: the original contingent of Jamestown settlers had bad luck (drought, several supply ships being wrecked or otherwise not showing up on time) but their primary problem was that they didn't intend to live off the land at all, either by fishing and farming or by foraging. They didn't have the right supplies to do so, and mostly didn't have the knowledge needed to do it as a backup plan when the original plan of trading with the native Americans failed (due to poor diplomatic skills and poor diplomatic decision making.)
EDIT: to head off argument on this score, the poor relationship with the native Americans wasn't inevitable. The Roanoke Colony settlers, when their food ran low, joined the local tribe and the evidence indicates that they were adopted as members, intermarried, and survived there. (source: https://www.whro.org/arts-culture/2025-01-20/new-artifacts-o... and https://nypost.com/2025/06/07/us-news/researchers-discover-e...)
EDIT: Here's the best contrary argument, that it was primarily the drought that was to blame and not the incompetence of the English settlers: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rethinking-jamestown-...
My main lack of trust for this is the over leaning on "incompetence" as the explanation. I'm fully ok with the idea that they made mistakes and were not ready for the vastly different climate. I'm even comfortable with the idea that they may have thought to get more in trade than they were able to get.
That said, I think this vastly overstates how much people got their food from trade. Spices and some goods were, of course, big in trade. Mainline food? Not so much. Most people were not able to stockpile large quantities of food. Some cities maybe could. But it would have been grains/seeds or actual live stock. Not meats or anything that needed refrigeration. For... well, obvious reasons. Even cured meats typically have a very short timeline. So, fishing and hunting and basic gardening would have remained something that people had to do. Pretty much everywhere.
And indeed, this is inline with your edited in article. What were they trying to trade for? Corn. Why did they need to get it by trade, because their crop was bad. Why was the trade not working well? Because nobody had excess corn to trade. Long term stockpiles just couldn't exist to the scale that we think of today. And a lack of rain meant everyone was having a bad crop.
Finally, I want to be clear that I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that I'm just flat out wrong here. I've just grown super doubtful of a lot of the "these morons were able to sail across the atlantic, but were too stupid to do anything that would have resembled living off the land." Despite most living at the time looking like what we would call that.
Two things… one, they didn’t sail across the Atlantic. They hired ships and professional sailors to sail them across. They were passengers. That crossing wasn’t necessarily an easy one, but it was much more like what happens today with wealthy people who pay sherpas to help them climb Everest. The climbers have to have some knowledge and experience, but they aren’t the experts, and without the sherpas they'd be pretty lost.
Second, the point of this whole thread is that even at home, these were not people who were living off the land. They were wealthy Londoners. They lived in the city. They weren’t even raising their own kitchen gardens, they had people for that.
Wealthy Londoners bought their food just like you and I do. They had food markets. They used currency to buy grain, vegetables, and meat.
FYI, salted meat and fish will last for years and, if stored in a reasonably cool place like a root cellar, for decades. I personally have had Virginia hams that were over ten years old. Dried corn will last for centuries if stored properly.
The reason the settlers made so many diplomatic mistakes with the natives was because their leadership was primarily former military, and they saw the natives as a military problem. This made some sense because when they set out, they thought their primary challenge was going to be fending off military attacks from the Spanish. But that assumption turned out to be tragically wrong.
I'm not saying these people were all incompetent buffoons. Some of them were trained military officers. Some were craftsmen — there’s ample evidence of metal work and glassmaking at Jamestown. They were all experienced horsemen, and they were comfortable with firearms and bladed weapons. But what they weren’t was outdoorsmen, or even farmers, and in hindsight that’s what they needed to be. Once they got actual farmers on site, their immediate problems started to clear up.
On this, I would have to see much stronger proof.
I can grant that very dense cities such as London had food markets necessary to supply the city. With the huge caveat that those markets had to have fairly rapid turnover for all of their offerings. Don't forget that most city dwellers had maybe a single shared room with others that they could call home. Such that they likely consumed the food on purchase, with nowhere else to really take it. Even "wealthy" dwellers that did have a place to take food likely couldn't take much. Where do you think they would be able to store it?
And passenger ships in the 1600s were very very different than any sort of passenger ship today. Sure, they were not responsible for ship duties. But they were likely on their own for basic survival on the ship.
Salted meat and fish can last for years if stored in modern containment techniques, sure. With what they would have had in the 1600s, I have serious doubts that you'd get such results. Especially without the resources of a full city at your disposal.
Again, I'm comfortable that I can be wrong on all of this. I would have to see much stronger proof, though. Most of what we call "living off the land" today was largely "typical rural life" for a long long time.
Jamestown also starved because they tried collective farming (communism). It didn't work for them any more than it worked for anyone else.
So did the Pilgrims for their first year. They starved, too.
Walter, I appreciate your comments but you surely have to know Jamestown settlers were in no way practicing communism as it's understood today.
Google "did jamestown use communal farming?"
And they did. After it utterly failed, they moved away from it to individual ownership of farms.
Google "does communal mean communism".
Conflating them in the same sentence, then doubling down on that, is either intellectual dishonesty or ignorance.
Always the same excuse, that it wasn't "real" communism.
Quoted from your reference:
"Communism is ... a stateless, classless society where resources are owned communally" which, if you read about Jamestown, was the situation with their agriculture.
Jamestown was hardly a dictatorship of the proletariat where workers owned the means of production, nor was it stateless or classes. It was quite literally a strong state's company town that was kept afloat by investors, where rich colonists had servants that grew cash crops lol
The farming was done as a communal activity. Jamestown abandoned it after the first year, and switched to the far more successful system of privately owned plots where the owner could sell the produce as he saw fit.
This information is all easily found online.
Marx didn't write about communism until a couple centuries later. The ideas were very similar though.
It's funny how the father of communism was basically an intellectual who leeched off of his wealthier capitalist relatives (the family behind Philips NV).