Jamestown Matters

Four hundred years ago, on May 14, 1607, 108 colonists stepped ashore on land occupied by the Powhatan tribe. Over the next fifteen years, the Virginia Company of London sent four or five thousand more colonists. The colony bungled on and the colonists and their supporters founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the swampy bit of Virginia named after the English King, James I. 

In this exhibition, marking the 400th anniversary of the English settlement at Jamestown, the John Carter Brown Library showcases a gathering of "foundation" books in our collection. In order to encourage "adventurers" (investors) and "planters" (colonists) the Virginia Company of London published nine tracts between 1609 and 1615 that described in glowing terms the opportunities presented by the new colony on the James River in Virginia. These publications are one of our most important sources of information about the early years of the colony, and until 1997 the Library had all of them but one. In that year we were fortunate to receive from Mr. Paul Mellon the gift of Richard Rich's Newes from Virginia, London, 1610, which completed the collection.