Contextualization: Jamestown
The article “Serving Time in Virginia” starts out by giving the readers a quick contextualization of what the rest of the article would be talking about, soon after historian, Captain John Adams is used to show the right and wrong ways of recording historic events, and whether or not other historians agree with the way he worked or not. By comparing the way he poorly wrote his stories of the times he was captured by tribe leaders, to the way he would theoretically write a piece on a baseball game between the Boston Red Socks and the New York Yankees; showed us the style John Adams used, to write historic events, was not accurate. This example helped set the scene for Virginia during early 1600s and to how, many historians used evidence from other historians of the time or of things such as journals, letters, and whatnot.
Ever since the Columbuss discovery of the Americas, countries all over the world became anxious to colonize new territory in the Americas. For this reason, King James granted a charter to a group of merchants known as “The Treasurer and Company of Adventures of the City of London for the First Colony in Virginia”. The theory was to sail out to Virginia and extract all of the lands resources, like gold and silver and plant crops that would pay for their expenses. However, their plan kept backfiring on them, several of the crewmen either died on their way there or from starvation and, or nutrition. However, ten years later, the newly elected treasurer Sir Edwin Sandys was determined to dig his “failing colony from the bottom up.” Sir Edwin Sandys used their abundance of land to lure new settlers and new investors for the Virginia Company. They established a new policy which gave settlers who arrived before 1616 one hundred acres of land; freemen received their allotment immediately, in the meantime, the settlers with the company of servants had to wait until service was over to get their land. To lure even more investors, he came up with the “headright” system which promised any Old Planter wanting to invest in the company received 100 acres of land plus 50 more acres for any new and the new tenant whose passage he paid. During 1619, immigrations were off the charts, but this trend didnt last long, about 3500 immigrants never returned, of which 3000 died. Historians can assume that the cause of their deaths was due to Sandys sending all immigrants unprepared, while immigrants had little amounts of food and scarce housing. Once immigrants arrived in Virginia, they were running low on food and money, so many were faced with the option to hire themselves as servants, which could have also been another cause of their deaths.
After ten years, Virginia was still not self- sufficient. The search of letter and company records shows it was easier to grow corn than tobacco, and estimates suggest that “forty- eight hours work could provide a whole