Jamestown, or Fort Jamestown, was the first permanent English settlement in the current territory of the United States. It was founded in 1607 on the banks of the James River on a peninsula (today Jamestown Island), in the current county of James City, Virginia.
The ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery with 104 men and boys, had left on December 16, 1606 from the Blackwall docks on the River Thames, stopped at the Canary Islands for water, arrived in Martinique on March 23. Later they arrived at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay in April 1607.
They did not stay there long. When they made a reconnaissance of the coast, the natives showed up and chased them until they returned to the ships. But the cartographer Richard Hakluyt had instructed them where they should establish their colony, and on May 14 they had already chosen a site, almost 100 km inland, next to the newly baptized James River, where they built the fort of Jamestown in less than one month. Its location on a small peninsula and its triangular shape protected the settlers from the threat of Spanish ships and attacks and the Powhatan Indians. On May 26 of the same year, the natives who inhabited the areas outside the island, the Paspahegh attacked the settlers, killing one person and injuring another eleven.
In the winter of 1608 there was a fire in the food cellar; on the other hand, a chapel and a warehouse were built. The following winter, a famine killed 200 people surviving only 60 settlers. Up to 1610, 80% of Jamestown settlers die, leading to cases of cannibalism among members of the English colony, such as the case of a 14-year-old girl analyzed at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute.
In 1622, in what was known as the indigenous massacre of 1622, the settlers were attacked by the Powhatan Indians dying around 400 in battle. Later the fort of Jamestown was left to establish the town.
In 1994 a group of archaeologists discovered the site where the Jamestown Fort was located. For years it was thought that the river had taken the fort.
