题目内容
After a long war between England and Spain from 1588 to 1603, England renewed attempts to colonize North America. In 1606, two charters were granted—one to a group of Londoners, the other to merchants of Plymouth and other western port town. The London Company was given the right to settle the southern part of the English territory in America; the Plymouth Company was given jurisdiction over the northern part.
So two widely separated colonies were established in 1607: one at Sagadahoc, near the mouth of the Kennebec River, in Maine; the other in modern Virginia. Those who survived the winter in the northern colony gave up and went home, and the colony established at Jamestown won the hard-earned honor of being the first permanent English settlement in America.
Hard-earned indeed! When the London Company landed three tiny vessels at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607, 105 people disembarked to found the Jamestown Colony. Easily distracted by futile "get rich quick" schemes, they actually sent shiploads of mica and yellow ore back to England in 1607 and 1608. Before the news reached their ears that their treasure was worthless "fool's gold," disease, starvation, and misadventure had taken a heavy toll: 67 of the original 105 Jamestown settlers died in the first year.
The few remaining survivors (one of whom was convicted of cannibalism) were joined in 1609 by 800 new arrivals, sent over by the reorganized and renamed Virginia Company. By the following spring, frontier hardships had cut the number of settlers from 838 to 60. That summer, those who remained were round fleeing down river to return home to England by new settlers with fresh supplies, who encouraged them to reconsider. This was Virginia's "starving time”.
Inadequately supplied and untutored in the art of colonization, the earliest frontier pioneers routinely suffered and died. In 1623, a royal investigation of the Virginia experience was launched in the wake of an Indian attack that took the lives of 500 settlers. The investigation reported that of the 6,000 who had migrated to Virginia since 1607, 4,000 had died. The life expectancy of these hardy settlers upon arriving was two years.
The heavy human costs of first settlement were accompanied by substantial capital losses. Without exception, the earliest colonial ventures were unprofitable. Indeed, they were financial disasters. Neither the principal nor the interest on the Virginia Company's accumulated investment of more than £200,000 was ever repaid (approximately $20,000,000 in today's values). The investments in New England were l
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