Colonial America: Jamestown vs. Plymouth | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU

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Transcript:
Colonial America: Jamestown vs. Plymouth
Presented by Thomas Kidd

What would make a seventeenth-century European leave the relative comfort and safety of the Old World for a perilous life in the New?

This “New World” wasn’t just new, it was utterly unknown. Getting there was incredibly dangerous. Imagine taking an ocean voyage on a small wooden ship equipped only with sails and simple navigational tools.

And once you arrived — if you arrived — then what? How would you survive? What would you eat? Were the natives friendly or hostile?

These are only a few of the daunting challenges and questions that faced the first American colonists.

Their motivations for coming were complex. But for our purposes, we can put them into two broad categories: financial and religious.

The financial was represented by the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607.

The religious was represented by the settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, established in 1620.

By comparing these two colonies, we can learn much about the origins of America.

The colonists who established Jamestown in 1607 were sponsored by the Virginia Company of London, a profit-making venture. 104 intrepid souls made up the first group. There was not a single woman among them, suggesting they had little intention of settling down, but hoped to make some easy money and return home to England as wealthy men.

That hope was based on the naïve belief that gold would be so