Sent by the Virginia Company, three ships carrying settlers landed at a defensible spot on the James River. The site's brackish water and mosquito-ridden marshes proved deadly, and within nine months two-thirds of the colonists were dead from disease and starvation. Despite the catastrophic losses, Jamestown survived and became the seed of English colonization in America.
The colonists chose the site for its deep water anchorage and defensibility against Spanish ships, not for its livability. That decision nearly doomed the venture: the peninsula's water supply was contaminated by salt and human waste, and the surrounding marshland bred mosquitoes carrying malaria and dysentery.
By the time supply ships returned in 1610, only 60 of the original 500 or so colonists (counting later arrivals) were alive, a period so brutal that survivors called it the 'Starving Time,' during which some resorted to cannibalism. Captain John Smith's leadership and, later, the cultivation of tobacco as a cash crop kept the colony from being abandoned entirely.
Jamestown's survival set the template for English settlement in the New World, for better and worse: it introduced representative government to America with the 1619 House of Burgesses, and in that same year brought the first enslaved Africans to English North America, linking the colony's founding to the origins of American slavery.