ABSTRACT
By 1630, the English had created several small niches of settlement in the Americas: Virginia in the Chesapeake Bay region, the Plymouth colony in New England, a few tiny fishing villages in Newfoundland, and some very small colonies in Bermuda and the islands of the eastern Caribbean. Of these, Virginia had attracted the largest number of English migrants, mostly servants taken there to provide labour for planters in the tobacco boom of the 1620s. But even this, England’s largest colony in the Americas at this time, had only a tiny population, due to the high mortality of newcomers and the tendency of survivors to return to England. Thus, although about 8,500 immigrants moved to Virginia in the 1620s, to add to the 700 settlers already there, by 1630 the population was still only around 3,000 people. In the north, New England had around 1,800 inhabitants, and Newfoundland no more than a couple of hundred. The island colonies of the Caribbean, in Barbados and the Leeward Islands had about 3,000 English settlers between them, while the Atlantic island of Bermuda had another 2,000, So, two decades after the foundation of England’s first settlement at Jamestown, there were fewer than 10,000 surviving English colonists in the whole of the Americas. 1
