Page 70-71

    “The English in the guise of the Virginia Company returned to America for the third time in 1607. This venture consisted of 144 men, of whom 105 reached the New World alive. They founded a settlement in the Chesapeake Bay which they Christened Jamestown. Only fifty-three of them lived to see it's first anniversary. A relief convoy was sent from England in 1609, composed of nine ships and 500 men under a new governor, Sir Thomas Gates. Gates was shipwrecked in Bermuda, but the remainder of the convoy reached Jamestown and set 400 men ashore. When Gates arrived in the colony six months later with two ships he had constructed in Bermuda was in ruin and its population numbered only sixty men.

    It seemed that the new colony was destined to suffer the same fate as the first two. Most colonists died within a year of reaching the New World — from disease, from cold, from starvation and from conflicts with Indians who had quickly tired of having to feed them every winter. The response in England to the colonist's failure to support themselves or even stay alive was one of exasperation. They were exhorted to grow vines and weave silk and the Virginia Company which had sponsored the venture issued regulations against idleness. These included the death penalty for any colonist who missed church more than three times in a row.

    However, in 1612, a breakthrough occurred, that was ultimately responsible for the pre-eminence of English culture, language and laws in the most powerful and most imitated nation in history. That year, a Virginian colonist named John Rolfe planted some seeds of Nicotiana tobacum that he had obtained from Trinidad. Two years later, he married a teenage Indian princess named Pocahontas ('the frisky one') who had attracted his eye by turning cartwheels naked through Jamestown's streets. Tobacco and love succeeded in accomplishing what sermons and orders had failed to achieve: a self-supporting English colony in America.”