Chesapeake absorbed thousands of poor laborers considered superfluous and dangerous in England.

African slaves became a better investment for the Chesapeake planters

with fifty acres of land. Given that a sturdy (page 60)p. 60beggar could never obtain land in England

Too poor to afford the £6 cost of a transatlantic passage,

The Virginians developed the strategy, practiced in subsequent colonial wars,

The colony also benefited from John Rolfe’s development of tobacco as a cash crop that could bear the high cost of transportation to market in England. Consumers would pay premium prices to satisfy their craving for the addictive nicotine. Because tobacco plants prefer a long, hot, and humid growing season, the crop thrived in Virginia but not in England, giving the colonial farmers a comparative advantage. Virginia’s tobacco production swelled from 200,000 pounds in 1624 to 3,000,000 pounds in 1638. Drawn to Virginia by tobacco’s profits, the colonial population surged from only 350 in 1616 to 13,000 by 1650. As tobacco cultivation expanded and the population grew, the planters needed more land, which they took from the Indians.

The colonists responded with escalating violence, burning villages and massacring their men, women, and children.

And to Powhatan’s dismay, the colonists refused to trade the weapons that he so coveted. The Indians lashed back, killing seventeen intruders, stuffing their dead mouths with corn as a sign of contempt.

The swampy location proved deadly, for it bred millions of mosquitoes, carriers of malaria. The colonists also suffered salt poisoning from the brackish water of their wells. Those who lived were often too weak and apathetic to work, so they starved. Of the initial 104, nine months later only 38 lived. Between 1607 and 1622 the Virginia Company transported another 10,000 people to the colony, but only 20 percent were still alive there in 1622.

The English sense of superiority remained impervious to their own follies as colonists in a land long mastered by the Indians.