by Carol H. Morgan

Created on: November 02, 2009

Anything that happened four hundred years ago will be difficult to reconstruct accurately. Add to that problem that all of the parties involved had different perspectives about what happened and who was to blame when things didn't go so well. But in the story of the famous relationship of Pilgrims and the Native Americans, one of the key differences in the luck of Early European settlers with Native residents was where those colonies happened to be and their own goals for settling, as well as, the attitude of the Natives around them.

RELATIONS BETWEEN PILGRIMS AND INDIANS IN THE VIRGINIA COLONIES

The Pilgrims that settled around today's Virginia had a rough going of things in general, and their relations among the Indians was only one of their big problems. The first attempt at a colony, on Roanoke Island, vanished entirely and their fate is not known to this day. But even though the story of the most famous of these settlements, Jamestown, has been glorified and been made into a theme-park of sorts over the years, some of the experiences here represented the worst of the bunch.

Recent discoveries have placed the settlement of Jamestown in about the year 1607, about 13 years before Plymouth, and its exact location is debated. But what is known is that about 104 made the rough and perilous journey to scout the area during the first voyage, whose Captain described it like being "tossed around in a dark closet." Even though their adventures inspired everything from living history exhibits to Disney movies, the real stories of these men, less than forty of whom would be alive in a year, and those that would come later, involved things as awful as starvation, cannibalism, murder - both within the colony and on the two sides of the conflict with the natives.

With this in mind, it is little wonder that this group's dealings with the natives were perhaps on the bad extreme of the various attempts of the two very different colonial areas to get along with each other. New museums have opened recently that display skeletons in cabin foundations with bullets or arrows in their bodies, and are among the first from beyond the grave to tell the extent of the problem they aced remaining alive at the hands of nearby natives even if they could survive what nature might throw at them.

The biggest problem that the Jamestown residents (naming the settlement and nearby river for King James who had given them the charter) was that several miscalculations had made their own basic

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