They were hopeful at first. In the spring of 1607, English settlers began arriving on the James River in the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia to build an English settlement in the New World and begin a fresh life. But life was proved to be devastating- by 1611, more than 80% of the 500 settlers who arrived four years before, had perished. The question is: why did so many colonists die in early Jamestown? It can be answered by three main reasons: lack of clean water, shortage of good workers, and poor relations with the Powhatan Indians.

First of all, water caused death in three ways. For example, the water was found to be too salty for drinking (Document A). In addition, human waste tended to cluster rather than flush away, leading them to fester in rivers in Jamestown (Document A). Historians also found that droughts were evidenced in the tree-ring patterns of old cypress trees growing near Jamestown throughout the winter of 1609 to 1610 (Document B). These pieces of evidence prove that the water caused sickness, due to the moon tides affecting the water’s saltiness, and the filthy garbage in the water would have caused disease. Droughts were another contributor …show more content…
For instance, most of the men that came were gentlemen, as in, men of wealth who did not work (Document C). Neither were there barely any people employed in the medical field to aid settlers (Document C) or farmers to provide food (Document C). These pieces of evidence show that there were nearly 50 gentlemen who did not help find resources or build any structures, explaining why Jamestown lacked so many needy occupations. Furthermore, having only one surgeon was not enough to aid hundreds of ill settlers and no farmers at all ended up with no one to grow the crops, meaning there was no food supply. Without certain skills, the settlers’ survival was complex. Without a doubt, the shortage of good workers caused death in several