"Countrymen, the long experience of our late miseries I hope is sufficient to persuade everyone to a present correction of himself... He that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers." — Captain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), recounting his rule at Jamestown c. 1608
Which later development most directly transformed Virginia from the conditions described above into an economically viable colony?
- A
Spanish Crown subsidies extended after the 1670 Treaty of Madrid
- B
Discovery of major silver deposits along the James River fall line
- Ccheck_circle
John Rolfe's cultivation of marketable West Indian tobacco beginning around 1612
- D
The Massachusetts Bay Company's relocation of Puritan craftsmen southward
Explanation
Rolfe's introduction of a sweeter Caribbean tobacco strain gave Virginia its first profitable cash crop, drawing investment, indentured laborers, and later enslaved Africans, and ending the chronic subsistence failures of Smith's era.