Drought May Have Doomed First Colonists

The worst droughts of the past 800 years probably were responsible for wiping out the first British settlers who tried to colonize North America, according to researchers who have reconstructed the weather of the era when European colonists struggled for a toehold in the New World.

“If the English had tried to find a worse time to launch their settlements in the New World, they could not have done so,” said Dennis B. Blanton, director of the William and Mary Center for Archeological Research.

Severe drought may have doomed Britain’s first settlement, known to history as the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island, N.C., the researchers report. And, but for a timely and prolonged rainy season in 1612 that ended an unusually severe seven-year drought, the second attempt, at Jamestown, Va., might have succumbed as well.

At the height of the epic Jamestown drought, the “starving time,” as the colonists called it, “these folks literally packed their bags and were prepared to call it quits,” Blanton said.

The new research, published today in the journal Science, is helping historians gain a growing appreciation for how even the fate of nations can turn on the whims of weather.

It comes at a time when scientists are increasingly voicing concern about the potential for human activities to influence future weather patterns by causing an overall warming of the Earth’s climate.

Working with Blanton, scientists at the University of Arkansas used a unique, natural archive formed by the growth rings of ancient cypress trees still growing in the swamps of Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina to document the annual climate from 1185 to 1984, including the conditions that prevailed during early colonial history.

The research already has prompted a dramatic reassessment of the hardships facing colonists in the country’s first English settlements.

The researchers discovered that the most extreme drought season on record coincided with the first English effort to colonize the New World--the abortive settlement of Roanoke Island in 1587. By the time their supply ship returned from England in 1590, the 120 men and women of the Lost Colony, including the first English child born in America, had vanished almost without a trace.

There is no direct historical evidence that explains what happened to the colonists. They left just a single enigmatic word--”Croatoan”--carved on a tree for their associates to discover. Their fate is one of the most provocative mysteries of the colonial era.

Driest Period in 800 Years

Based on the tree ring data, the researchers said that the unusually severe drought should be considered a strong factor in the colonists’ demise. In all, the Lost Colony drought lasted three years--the driest episode in the entire 800-year period documented by the cypress trees.

Drought conditions were almost as bad two decades later, when English settlers tried again to establish a permanent colony in North America, this time at Jamestown, the researchers said.

Between the time that Jamestown was founded in 1607 and the end of the drought in 1612, so many colonists starved to death that survivors were driven to cannibalism. Of the colony’s first 6,000 settlers, 4,800 died.

Unable to understand how people could fare so badly in the fertile Virginia countryside, historians traditionally have castigated the early colonists as ill-prepared and hapless adventurers more intent on seeking profits than ensuring their own survival.

In light of the new climate data, however, scholars are quick to conclude that the men and women of Jamestown were overwhelmed by conditions that no one could have anticipated.

“The Roanoke and Jamestown colonists have been criticized for poor planning, poor support, and a startling indifference to their own subsistence,” the researchers said. “But the tree ring reconstruction indicates that even the best planned and supported colony would have been supremely challenged by the climatic conditions.”

The prolonged Jamestown drought--the worst in 770 years--did more than devastate the crops on which the colonists depended. It also affected the quality of the water supply at Jamestown, which is located on a brackish estuary, and aggravated tensions with the native Powhaton Indians, Blanton said.

Had those conditions forced the Jamestown colonists to quit the area, the move would have had profound consequences for a country that today owes so much of its political organization and dominant culture to the English colonies from which it sprang.

“It is really quite superb work,” said Malcolm Hughes, director of the University of Arizona’s tree ring research laboratory.

“One has to be intelligently cautious about interpreting the effects [of weather] on human events, but there are few situations that are likely to be as clear-cut as the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies,” Hughes said. “It sounds pretty damn convincing to me.”

In 120 bald cypress trees rooted in the wetlands along the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers in southeastern Virginia, the University of Arkansas scientists found a remarkably precise and ancient climate record stretching back almost 1,000 years.

Gordon Jacoby, an expert at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York who has used tree rings to reconstruct the earthquake history of the San Andreas fault, said cypress trees are especially sensitive to annual variations in precipitation and temperature.

That makes their annual growth rings a remarkably accurate diary of drought and other seasonal conditions.

“There is no guesswork here,” said David W. Stahle, director of the University of Arkansas tree ring laboratory in Fayetteville, who analyzed the tree ring records. “It is like the bar code at the supermarket checkout stand. You get these precise fingerprints of climate variability,” he said.

Several scientists said they were impressed that Stahle and his colleagues had examined a part of the country usually overlooked by those who specialize in tree ring research. There are few surviving old-growth forests in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States where trees of sufficient age can be found.

“They have looked somewhere where conventional wisdom would tell them not to bother,” said Hughes.