Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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Historian Avery Craven saw colonial soil degradation as part of an
inevitable cycle of frontier colonization. “Men may, because of ignorance
or habit, ruin their soils, but more often economic or social conditions,
entirely outside their control lead or force them to a treatment of their
lands that can end only in ruin.” 1 Craven thought frontier communities
generally exhausted their soil because of the economic imperative to grow
the highest value crop. The tobacco economy that ruled colonial Virginia
and Maryland was exactly what Craven had in mind.
In 1606 James I granted the Virginia Company a charter to establish an
English settlement in North America. Founded by a group of London investors,
the company expected their New World franchise to return healthy
profits. Under the leadership of Captain John Smith, on May 14, 1607, the
first load of colonists landed along the banks of the James River sixty miles
up Chesapeake Bay. Hostile natives, disease, and famine killed two-thirds
of the original settlers before Smith returned to England in 1609.
Desperately searching for ways to survive, let alone earn a profit, the
Jamestown colonists tried making silk, then glass; harvesting timber; growing
sassafras; and even making beer. Nothing worked until tobacco provided
a profitable export that propped up the colony.
Sir Walter Raleigh is often credited with introducing tobacco to England
in 1586. Whether or not that dubious honor is actually his, Spanish explorers
brought both leaf and seeds back from the West Indies. Smoking
became immensely popular and the English developed quite a taste for
Spanish tobacco grown with slave labor in the Caribbean. Sold at a premium
to London merchants, tobacco offered just what the Jamestown
colonists needed to keep their colony afloat.
Unfortunately, England’s new smokers did not like Virginian tobacco.
With an eye toward competing in the London market colonist John Rolfe
(perhaps better remembered as Pocahontas’s husband) experimented with
planting Caribbean tobacco. Satisfied that the stuff “smoked pleasant,
sweete and strong,” Rolfe and his compatriots shipped their first crop to
England. It was a hit in London’s markets, comparing favorably with premium
Spanish tobacco.
Soon everybody was planting tobacco. Twenty thousand pounds were
sent to England in 1617. Twice as much set sail in the next shipment. Captain
Smith praised Virginia’s “lusty soyle” and the colonial economy
quickly became dependent upon tobacco exports. On September 30, 1619,
colonist John Pory wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton that things were finally
turning around. “All our riches for the present doe consiste in Tobacco,
w estward hoe