Archaeology and the Birth of the American Chemical Enterprise

Jamestown

Although the Roanoke voyages failed to establish a permanent English presence, they furnished sufficient information about the tidewater region of modern North Carolina and Virginia to inform planning for the next round of attempted colonization, at Jamestown in 1607. The artifacts recovered from Jamestown reflect the number of chemical practitioners in the colony, including an apothecary, barber-surgeon, physician, alchemist or metallurgist, and other metal-related tradesmen, such as refiners, goldsmiths, and blacksmiths. Also present, the artifacts tell us, were artisans skilled in glass manufacture.

The apothecary’s artifacts attest to vigorous experimentation with Virginia flora. Numerous drug jars, mostly Dutch in origin, relate to the work of the apothecaries, men who, trained through apprenticeship, constituted an elite group both in Europe and in Virginia. It is clear that Jamestown’s medical practices stemmed from Paracelsians, who advocated chemical drugs. One such physician, Johannes Fleischer, was German, and he earned a medical egree at the University of Basel the year the Jamestown colonists departed England. A medical tool for relieving constipation owing to impacted fecal matter, a spatula mundani, has been recovered and is known to have been rovided in a surgeon’s chest prepared by John Woodall, a Paracelsian physician who later became surgeon general o the East India Company. Woodall’s medicines and treatments make extensive reference to the Paracelsian tria prima, or three principle medical materials: salt, mercury, and sulfur. Woodall’s medical treatments and medicines may also be reflected in other early Jamestown finds: a skull bearing the mark of a trephining tool (the cranial piece having been removed during a postmortem examination) and a piece of sulfur.

Jamestown’s colonists had established the first glass factory in the New World, an enterprise that employed Germans and Poles—some of the many foreign specialists and artisans who were recruited for the Jamestown and Roanoke settlements. Archaeologists found the location of glass furnaces that attest to glassblowing, and Jamestown’s sand was high in metallic oxides with high lime content, a key ingredient in glass.

The search for metals was a priority in Jamestown. Colonists intended to establish a trading center, and they were “not permitted to manure or till any ground” but instead were required to invest their labor in profitable activities. In fact, letters patent to the colony leaders instructed the settlers “to dig mine and search for all manner of mines of gold silver and copper.” Archaeology has provided insights into colonists’ intentions regarding metals.

Assesment of Early New World Chemistry

The artifacts uncovered at Roanoke, Jamestown, and Baffin Bay require us to reconsider who the colonists were, particularly the specialists and their sponsors. About a quarter of the people who entered Jamestown during its first year had an association with metalworking. German involvement with English merchant voyages dates to a half century before Jamestown, when German investors agreed to finance English mining. At all three sites Germans were present, and German technology and expertise were employed.

Jamestown’s artifacts tell a story of industrial research and development aimed at fusing English and Virginian natural resources into products for European consumption. We see a pattern of intense chemical experimentation for the metallurgist especially; chemical apparatus were both imported and manufactured on-site under direction of both English and German experts. Settlers may not have come to North America solely for lack of economic opportunity in England; rather, America might have furnished opportunities for the early chemical professions, which were backed by patrons who drew from the best philosophical and practical learning available.