Two rocky beginnings: Jamestown and Plymouth

Jamestown, founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company as a business venture seeking profit, sat on land belonging to the Powhatan Confederacy, led by Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Chief Powhatan. The colony nearly failed: during the brutal "starving time" of the winter of 1609-1610, most colonists died of hunger and disease. Captain John Smith's strict leadership -- his rule was often summarized as "he who does not work shall not eat" -- helped the colony survive its earliest years. Powhatan's daughter, whom the English called Pocahontas, visited the colony as a girl; years later, in 1613, English colonists captured and held her, and in 1614 she married colonist John Rolfe, a marriage that brought a few years of uneasy peace. Rolfe also introduced a sweeter strain of tobacco that became Virginia's first profitable export, finally giving the struggling colony a real economic reason to survive.

Plymouth began very differently. In 1620, a group of Separatist Pilgrims, seeking to worship apart from the Church of England, sailed on the Mayflower and signed the Mayflower Compact before landing, agreeing in writing to make and follow fair laws together. Their first winter was even harder than Jamestown's -- about half of the roughly 100 Mayflower passengers died. The nearby Wampanoag nation, led by Massasoit, chose to help the survivors, in part through Tisquantum (often called Squanto), a Wampanoag man who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain years earlier, taken to Europe, and eventually made his way back home, only to find his own village wiped out by disease. Tisquantum taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and fish local waters, skills that helped them survive; in the fall of 1621, roughly fifty Pilgrims and about ninety Wampanoag men, including Massasoit, gathered for three days of feasting later remembered as the "first Thanksgiving." That peace, however, would not last, as you will see in a few weeks.