English in Virginia
...f men, women, and children died of both malnutrition and starvation. George Percy explains how more people die from starvation rather than the diseases or the brutal war with the Powhatan Indians Doc(A). When the settlers first found animals for food, the animals were not the typical hunting game. They ate “dogges, catts, ratts, and myce”, just in order to survive. Even more tough to fathom is how one man ate his wife as a meal after she had committed a sin. When only sixty of the four hundred colonists who survived the winter of 1609 prepared to leave and return to England, a relief party came and the settlers turned back to Virginia. Luckily, John Smith took over Virginia and stated everyone must work in order to eat. Therefore, the mindset of working men was finally in place. By 1612, John Rolfe had perfected the method to growing perfect tobacco so that all the Europeans were now demanding it. Prior to the tobacco industry, there was nothing in Virginia that anyone back in Europe had any interest in. The Virginians relentlessly planted the tobacco seeds anywhere there was land, even if it was between two graves. Tobacco finally put Virginia on firm economic foundations. The colony had an income, something it never had before. To help encourage the tobacco business, many false statements were made about tobacco. These statements included such thing as smoking tobacco will make your life better and longer Doc(B). Without the sudden boom of tobacco, Virginia would never have had any economic growth. Finally, with all of the deaths to the colonists because of the many problems, there were not enough colonists to do all of the labor and work. First, when starting a colony one needs many trained people in order to be able to start a normal lifestyle. Since there were not enough Englishmen to take care of these deeds, they tried to force the Native Americans to do work. Yet, these men were not very good workers so the Englishmen killed them and moved on to their next group of people, the blacks. There were two ways to gain control of a black man. As an indentured servant, blacks were held to a contract where they had to serve for a certain number of years and were then released as a free man with land Doc.(C). On the contrary, slaves were bought and were the property of that buyer for a lifetime. The English sent these soon to be slaves over i...