Jamestown
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50 free Jamestown trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Thirteen years before the Mayflower, 104 Englishmen planted a fort on a swampy island in the James River and called it James Fort. The site had no fresh water, plenty of mosquitoes and arrived in the worst drought in 700 years, and within three years most of the settlers were dead. Yet Jamestown survived to grow tobacco, seat America's first elected assembly and serve as Virginia's capital for 83 years. These 50 questions cover the whole story: the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, Christopher Newport's four-month voyage, Edward Maria Wingfield and John Smith, the Starving Time of 1609–10, the Sea Venture wreck that stranded the relief fleet on Bermuda, the Day of Providence, Pocahontas and John Rolfe, the 1619 assembly, the Polish strike and the White Lion, the 1622 attack, Opechancanough, Bacon's Rebellion and the move to Williamsburg. There are questions too on the 1907 exposition, Queen Elizabeth II's 1957 visit, and the 1996 dig that proved the fort had not washed into the river. Easy questions stick to the ships and the dates; the hard tier asks which future Mayflower passenger was wrecked on Bermuda, who shot Opechancanough, and what the Virginia Company demanded in writing. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Jamestown followed which English colony, found deserted in 1590?
Roanoke
Roanoke's governor came back from England after three years to find the village empty and a single word, CROATOAN, carved in the wood; the settlers were never found.
Q 02Jamestown was England's first lasting American colony, but which Spanish town in Florida is 42 years older?
St. Augustine
St. Augustine was founded by Spain in 1565 and has been lived in ever since, which is why Jamestown's claim always carries the words "permanent English".
Q 03The Virginia Company that founded Jamestown in 1607 was a group of investors based in which English city?
London
London's company had a twin: the same 1606 charter set up a Plymouth branch, whose 1607 colony in Maine was abandoned the following year while Jamestown hung on.
Q 04Which three ships carried the first Jamestown colonists?
Susan Constant, Godspeed, Discovery
Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery carried 104 men and boys; the two larger ships sailed home that summer, leaving little Discovery behind for the colonists to use.
Q 05Into which bay did the first Jamestown colonists sail in April 1607 before choosing their river site?
Chesapeake Bay
Chesapeake Bay had drawn Europeans before: Spanish Jesuits planted a mission there in 1570 and were killed, a generation before the English ships arrived.
Q 06What name did the Jamestown colonists give their first landfall in Virginia in April 1607?
Cape Henry
Cape Henry honoured the king's elder son and heir, who died at eighteen and never reigned; the cape opposite took the name of his brother, the future Charles I.
Q 07Jamestown and its river were both named in 1607 for which reigning monarch?
James I of England
James I of England is the same king who sponsored the Bible translation that bears his name, published four years after the colonists landed.
Q 08What was the elected chamber of Virginia's colonial assembly, which grew out of the 1619 session at Jamestown, called?
House of Burgesses
The House of Burgesses lasted until 1776, when independence turned it into the House of Delegates, which still sits as the lower house of Virginia's legislature.
Q 09Why did the first colonists choose swampy, mosquito-ridden Jamestown Island for their fort in 1607?
To evade Spanish naval patrols
To evade Spanish naval patrols, the colonists picked a spot far upriver that was easy to defend, but its salty, slimy river water soon made many of them fatally ill.
Q 10What did the rings of ancient cypress trees reveal about Virginia around the time Jamestown was founded?
A severe, years-long drought
A severe, years-long drought, the worst in centuries, began in 1606, just before the colonists landed, and withered the harvests of English and Powhatan alike.
Q 11Which crop, traded for or seized from the Powhatan, kept Jamestown's first colonists fed?
Corn
Corn came first as gifts from Chief Powhatan; when the English kept demanding more, he ordered his people to stop trading it, and the fort went hungry.
Q 12Virginia, the colony that began at Jamestown, was named in the 1580s most likely to honour which English monarch?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen", is the usual explanation for the name; back then it covered the whole coast from the Carolinas to New England.
Q 13Among the craftsmen who reached Jamestown in 1608 were specialists in making which product?
Glass
Glass was meant to repay the investors, and samples went home on the next ship; like the colony's pitch, tar and soap ash, it never turned a profit.
Q 21Which giant fish, swimming up the river each summer, was a key food for Jamestown's colonists?
Sturgeon
Sturgeon were once so plentiful in the river that they kept the fort fed in summer; overfished for their caviar in later centuries, the species was declared endangered in 2012.
Q 22Whose relief fleet met the departing Jamestown colonists in June 1610 and turned them back?
Lord De La Warr
Lord De La Warr arrived with fresh supplies just as the survivors were sailing away; his title, worn smooth by English tongues, later named Delaware Bay and the state beside it.
Q 23What shape was James Fort, the palisade the Jamestown colonists finished building in June 1607?
A triangle
Q 14Besides gold, the Virginia Company ordered Jamestown's settlers to look for a river passage to which ocean?
The Pacific
The Pacific, which they called the South Sea, was the hoped-for short cut to Asia; within weeks of landing they had sailed upriver in search of it, as far as the falls where Richmond now stands.
Q 15Which Jamestown council president told the colony's backers to send labourers and craftsmen instead of gentlemen?
John Smith
John Smith had landed as a prisoner, accused of plotting mutiny on the voyage and nearly hanged; sealed orders opened on arrival named him to the ruling council anyway.
Q 16Why was Jamestown's third council president forced to sail home to England in 1609?
An explosion burned him badly
An explosion burned him badly when gunpowder went off in his boat; he sailed for England that October to be treated and never saw Virginia again.
Q 17What is the winter of 1609–1610 at Jamestown called?
The Starving Time
The Starving Time came when a Powhatan siege penned the colonists inside their fort; they ate horses, dogs, rats and shoe leather, and only about 60 were alive by spring.
Q 18A girl's cut-marked skull, found at Jamestown in 2012, confirmed reports of what?
Cannibalism
Cannibalism: her remains had been thrown out with butchered horse and dog bones in the terrible winter of 1609–10.
Q 19The 1609 wreck of the Jamestown-bound ship Sea Venture is widely thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?
The Tempest
The Tempest opens with a storm that casts a ship's company onto a strange island; the Sea Venture survivors' story reached England shortly before the play was first staged in 1611.
Q 20What did the shipwrecked Sea Venture survivors name the two small ships they built to reach Jamestown?
Deliverance and Patience
Deliverance and Patience were knocked together by the castaways, who planned one ship and found they needed two; they reached Jamestown in May 1610 to find barely 60 colonists alive.
A triangle with a cannon-armed bulwark at each corner, it was thrown up in under three weeks after a Powhatan attack on the open camp killed at least one settler and wounded eleven.
Q 24Kidnapped by the English in 1613, Pocahontas converted to Christianity and married which Jamestown colonist a year later?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe's marriage to her in April 1614 brought eight years of peace between the colonists and her father's people; their son Thomas was born the following winter.
Q 25Pocahontas was only a nickname; which secret personal name did she reveal to the English when she was baptized?
Matoaka
Matoaka stayed secret until she was a captive: kidnapped by the English in 1613 and held for ransom, she revealed it when she was baptized as Rebecca.
Q 26Where was the Sea Venture, flagship of Jamestown's 1609 relief fleet, wrecked in a hurricane?
Bermuda
Bermuda was uninhabited when the admiral ran the leaking ship onto its reefs, saving all 150 aboard; within three years the Virginia Company had claimed the islands for England.
Q 27Which cash crop, first exported in the 1610s, finally made the Jamestown colony pay?
Tobacco
Tobacco of a milder Spanish strain replaced the bitter local leaf, and within a few years its exports turned a colony that had only lost money into a paying one.
Q 28Where did Pocahontas die in March 1617?
In England
In England: she died at Gravesend just as her ship was setting off down the Thames for Virginia, and her infant son was left behind to be raised there.
Q 29Which rule did Jamestown's council president impose in 1608 to get the colony's idle gentlemen working?
No work, no food
No work, no food: his actual words were "he that will not work shall not eat", a line borrowed from St Paul, and the gentlemen duly took up their tools.
Q 30What did indentured servants receive in return for years of unpaid labour in early Virginia?
Passage across the Atlantic
Passage across the Atlantic was the bargain, and from 1618 it paid twice: whoever covered a servant's fare could claim fifty acres of land for doing so.