Virginia Company Charters and Challenges
Program Information
Series: Jamestown: A Fruitful SoilDuration: 00:01:59
Year Produced: 2008
Description:
Over its seventeen year life span, the Virginia Company struggled to plant a colony far from the edge of European civilization and to make it yield a profit. To some extent they were making it up as they went along. "Jamestown: A Fruitful Soil" provides a historical overview of the people and events of 17th-century Virginia.
For more information visit: http://historyisfun.orgTranscript
Over its seventeen year life span, the Virginia Company struggled to plant a colony far from the edge of European civilization and to make it yield a profit. To some extent they were making it up as they went along.
I’m Steve Clark with Jamestown: A Fruitful Soil, a celebration of Virginia’s Quadricentennial sponsored by Jamestown Settlement, a living history museum in the Williamsburg area of Virginia.
With great hopes but little colonial experience, he Virginia Company, in 1607, planted a settlement in Virginia. Its goals were ambitious: Find a Northwest Passage to the rich Far East, secure England’s financial future with gold and silver discoveries, plant the English flag ahead of European competitors, tap the New World’s natural resources, develop industries and convert Indians.
The Powhatan Indians were largely resistant to the rather feeble English attempts to introduce Christianity, and the Company’s idea of peaceful settlement disintegrated into what was little more than hostile invasion. The relationship between the English and the Powhatan Chiefdom was tense and tenuous. Occasional outbreaks of violence on both sides made the first decades of settlement perilous ones for all parties.
Other Company goals were simply illusory… no gold, no silver, no Northwest Passage. Wine and silk industries failed, as did glass production. Only tobacco was lucrative and then not because of anything the Company did to establish it.
There were creative company efforts…new stock offerings and even a public lottery… but both fell far short of meeting the colony’s financial needs. By the Virginia Company was bankrupt. One original goal, however, was achieved: The establishment of a permanent outpost of English power in North America. It occurred, though, not as a business enterprise, as originally intended, but rather as a royal colony.
To learn more, visit history is fun dot org.