When English colonists landed at Jamestown, Virginia in May 1607, they stepped into the worst drought the region had seen in nearly 800 years. The settlement’s first years coincided with a brutal stretch of climate extremes: scorching, dry summers, bitterly cold winters, and a chronic lack of fresh water that would kill a staggering number of settlers. The colonists had expected something like English weather. What they got was far more punishing.
The Driest Seven Years in 770 Years
Tree-ring studies of bald cypress trees near Jamestown, conducted by researchers at the University of Arkansas, revealed that the colonists arrived at the start of a seven-year drought stretching from 1606 to 1612. It was the driest period the region had experienced in 770 years. This wasn’t a mild dry spell. Freshwater flow into the James River dropped by an estimated 40 to 50 percent compared to normal levels, fundamentally altering the water supply the settlers depended on.
The drought has since been confirmed through multiple independent lines of evidence: tree rings, fossilized microorganisms in river sediments, pollen records, and the chemical signatures locked inside oyster shells harvested near Jamestown. All point to the same conclusion. The colonists could not have picked a worse time to arrive.
Summers: Hot, Dry, and Swarming
Jamestown sits on a low, marshy peninsula along the James River, surrounded by tidal wetlands. Even in a normal year, Virginia’s Tidewater summers are hot and humid. During the drought years, summer heat intensified. Rain that might have cooled the landscape and replenished streams largely failed to arrive. Corn crops, both those planted by the English and those grown by the local Powhatan people, withered. The colonists had been counting on trading with or taking food from Indigenous communities, but the Powhatan were struggling with the same failed harvests. Tensions between the two groups escalated as a direct result.
The marshy environment also meant clouds of mosquitoes and exposure to waterborne illness, conditions that drought made worse rather than better. With less freshwater flowing downriver, the tidal saltwater crept further upstream. The water the colonists drank from the James River at their fort was brackish, a mix of salt and fresh water contaminated by human and industrial waste that pooled near the settlement. There was no freshwater spring on the island. This toxic water supply is now considered a major contributor to the extraordinary death rates in the colony’s first years.
Winters: Freezing and Deadly
Jamestown’s climate extremes ran in both directions. The settlement existed during the Little Ice Age, a period lasting roughly from 1300 to 1850 when global temperatures dipped and weather patterns became more volatile. Virginia winters during this era were significantly colder than what settlers had known in England.
The colony’s first winter, 1607 to 1608, was severe. Captain John Smith described cold so miserable that “a dogge would scarce have indured it.” Another colonist, Francis Perkins, wrote in March 1608 that one night the James River froze nearly all the way across at the fort, a stretch he compared to the width of the Thames in London. For settlers living in rudimentary shelters with dwindling food supplies, these temperatures were life-threatening. The combination of freezing cold, near-starvation, and contaminated water killed the majority of the original settlers within the first year.
The worst came during the winter of 1609 to 1610, remembered as “the Starving Time.” Roughly 44 percent of the colony died from a combination of food shortages, lack of clean water, and cold. Survivors resorted to eating oysters from the river, which had actually become more abundant because the drought’s saltwater intrusion created favorable conditions for oyster growth upstream near the settlement.
The Salt Problem in the James River
One of the drought’s most dangerous effects was invisible to the colonists. Under normal conditions, freshwater flowing down the James River pushes saltwater back toward the Chesapeake Bay, keeping the water near Jamestown Island relatively fresh. During the 1606 to 1612 drought, that balance shifted dramatically. Salinity levels in the river near the colony rose by an estimated 10 to 15 parts per thousand above what they would be today. The water around Jamestown became consistently brackish year-round, with salt concentrations high enough to make it unsuitable for drinking but not salty enough to taste obviously dangerous.
Analysis of oyster shells from the period, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the saltwater boundary migrated well upstream of Jamestown Island. The colonists were essentially drinking estuary water laced with their own sewage. Salt poisoning, dysentery, and typhoid fever all thrived in these conditions.
Hurricanes and Violent Storms
On top of drought and cold, the Virginia coast faced the same Atlantic hurricane season it does today. In August 1609, a powerful hurricane struck a fleet of ships traveling between Cuba and the Bahamas, bound for Jamestown with supplies and the colony’s new governor, Sir Thomas Gates. The storm raged for 44 hours, sinking one vessel and scattering the rest. The flagship, the Sea Adventure, wrecked on the reefs of Bermuda. All aboard survived but spent ten months stranded on the uninhabited island before finally reaching Jamestown in May 1610. That incident later inspired Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.”
The hurricane’s practical effect was devastating for the colony. The supply ships that did limp into Jamestown arrived damaged and short on provisions, setting the stage for the Starving Time that followed. Violent summer storms, while less well documented than the drought, added another layer of unpredictability to a climate the English were wholly unprepared for.
Why the Colonists Never Saw It Coming
The English who planned the Jamestown venture expected Virginia to have a climate similar to southern Spain or the Mediterranean, based on its latitude. They packed accordingly and assumed they could grow familiar crops and supplement their diet through trade with Indigenous peoples. They had no concept of the Little Ice Age as a global phenomenon, no way to read tree rings, and no understanding that the region was locked in a historic drought.
The Powhatan people, who had lived in the Tidewater for thousands of years, understood the land’s rhythms far better but were themselves under severe stress from the same drought. Their stored food reserves were lower than usual, and their willingness to share with demanding newcomers declined as conditions worsened. The collision of an unprepared colonial enterprise with the worst climate conditions in nearly eight centuries goes a long way toward explaining why roughly 70 of the original 104 Jamestown settlers were dead by the end of their first year.