Virginia - A Third Way Back

I've been reading William Kelso's book on Jamestown, Virginia and revisited Ivor Noel-Hume on Martin's Hundred plus roaming on the web and I think that early American colonial history is often lacking in documents so that we must turn to archeology to gain knowledge of this early period. But there is another, a third way, to gain knowledge of early conditions. This third way is to study the actual group from which the colonists or the colonial enterprise came and what happened to that predecessor group just before the colonizing enterprise.

For example, when we study Jamestown Fort, we can ask where the soldiers who built it had fought just before they came to Jamestown. Edward Maria Wingfield who built the fort and other soldiers with him came from the English regiments fighting in the Dutch - Spanish wars. More specifically they fought in the siege of Ostend. So how did the fort at Ostend influence the fort at Jamestown? and how did the experiences of the English regiments at Ostend influence the Jamestown experience? Information about Ostend and he English regiments is on the web. The Jamestown Fort resembles a part of the Ostend Fort while sickness, starvation and mutiny were common experiences for the regiments in Holland.

To take another example, the iron industry in the colonies began when a group of English iron manufacturers founded the Principio Company to mine and refine iron ore in the Chesapeake Bay in 1720. If we look at the foundation of the company we see that the initial impetus came from iron-makers who were worried about being cut off from supplies of Swedish iron. This suggests that we should look at Sweden rather than Staffordshire for the mining and refining model Principio was trying to emulate. Furthermore, some Swedish iron ore was especially well-suited for steel-making because it was low in phosphorus and high in manganese and the ore deposit Principio was organized to exploit was exactly like this special Swedish ore. When made into steel Akerby iron was in particular demand for use by the Royal Navy but Birmingham manufacturers also needed steel. They were competing with the Navy and with other parts of Europe for the limited supply from this special Swedish ore deposit when Joseph Farmer, a Birmingham manufacturer, found a similar deposit on the Chesapeake and organized Principio to develop it. So the history of Principio can be related to the much better documented history of Swedish steel.

Then if we ask about the Africans seized for the slave trade we see that they were farmers farming soil similar to the soil in the Southern states. Plate tectonics tells us that the European, American and African coasts were once closely adjacent in the middle of Pangea. The northern US states and Europe were then covered by glaciers so that their soil is similar to each other and dissimilar to Africa and the southern states (which are similar). So the African farmers were needed to farm effectively in the South - slavery was a technology transfer