They had been on land barely two weeks, living in tents behind a crescent fence of brush, when about 200 Indians attacked the settlers leaving two dead and 11 wounded. After 19 days of furious labor the colonists were safer but utterly exhausted. Under frequent arrow attack from Indians in the surrounding grass, they had dug more than 900 ft. of trenches, cut down and hauled hundreds of trees and upended them to form a triangular enclosure of about an acre. Once inside, “scarce 10 among us could either go or well stand, such extreme weakness and sickness oppressed us,” John Smith reported. Built, burned, rebuilt, expanded, abandoned, revived: James Fort never stayed the same for very long.

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TIME graphic by Lon Tweeten, Jackson Dykman, and Feilding Cage
SOURCES:James Horn, vice president of research, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation;
William Kelso, director of Archaeology, Historic Jamestowne; J. Frederick Fausz, “An ‘Abundance of Blood Shed
on Both Sides’: England’s First Indian War, 1609-1614” in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1990);
maps courtesy Jamestown Settlement history museum; Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities;
National Park Service; Writings with Other Narratives by Captain John Smith (2007; Library of America)