This episode looks at the prophecy that animated Powhatan’s consolidation of power in the region, the violent first encounters between the Virginia Company expedition and the indigenous peoples at the mouth of the Chesapeake, internal squabbles within the English leadership, and the bizarre decision by Jamestown’s president Edward-Maria Wingfield to disarm unilaterally, in the fruitless hope of winning the favor of the locals. We also take a first look at the staggering body count that would pile up over the first eighteen years of the Jamestown settlement.

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

Selected resources for this episode

Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699

James Horn, A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America

David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” The Journal of American History, June 1979.