“A continuall and dayly Table for Gentlemen of fashion”: Humanism, Food, and Authority at Jamestown, 1607–1609

Abstract

THE STORY OF JAMESTOWN’S FIRST YEARS is often told as a tardy, frail, and fumbling beginning for English settlement in the New World. Undermined by its leaders’ stubborn and often brutal pursuit of unrealistic plans, Jamestown found salvation in the form of tobacco monoculture, which the Virginia Company neither intended nor fully embraced. The logic of tobacco cultivation led to an insatiable desire for land and labor that culminated in the violent expulsion of the Chesapeake’s native population and the establishment of African slavery. The turmoil and violence of Jamestown’s beginning, in this telling, were problems that prefigured their solution in the establishment of a regime of racial exclusion and exploitation. Recent literature has put forward a substantially different interpretation by situating Jamestown in a broad sixteenth-century context. For promoters of English settlement such as the Reverend Richard Hakluyt, the Virginia Company’s project was the culmination of a lifetime’s work collecting, translating, and publishing travel accounts. Hakluyt and others applied the lessons learned from Dutch, Portuguese, French, and especially Spanish efforts to the settlement at Jamestown, drawing also on English experiences in the Mediterranean, in Ireland, and elsewhere in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, what makes Jamestown important is not its singularity as the first permanent English settlement, but the links between the Virginia Company’s effort and those that came before it. Jamestown represents an especially well-planned and well-documented project that offers valuable insights into the political and social ideas that shaped the early English Atlantic world as a whole.1