In 1607, the same year that King James launched his Ulster Plantation scheme, England gained its first precarious toe-hold in north-America by depositing 104 men and boys on the very swampy shores of Jamestown Island, which we’re looking at now in an aerial view, which was taken only a few years ago.

The first settlement at Jamestown was located on the upper left-hand corner of the island there, as we can see in the photograph, and its initial history (and really its history throughout the 17th century) was very much linked with what was happening here in Ulster. One of the reasons for this was chiefly economic: both the Ulster Plantation and the north-American settlement were predicated upon the desire to find marketable resources. For Virginia and Maryland in the Chesapeake colonies, these resources would eventually become tobacco.

In the Early days, however, it wasn’t so clear that tobacco would become the salvation, and funding for both ventures came from the London Companies. The Companies’ money was required by the King in the Ulster Plantation, but at that time they had already pledged money to the Virginia project. Within the first two years of the Jamestown settlement, 55 out of the 56 London Companies who were involved in Ulster, withdrew their funding for Jamestown, so subsequently over half the Jamestown settlers died of starvation or disease.

Now despite the difficulties of these Early years in the Virginia colony, more settlers continued to arrive and, what they did when they reached the lands of Virginia in the Chesapeake, was almost identical to what they were doing when they got to Ulster - and that was to start to build small settlements.

Many of these small settlements employed defensive bawns: what we’re looking at here is an artist’s depiction of the bawn at Wolstenholme town at Martin’s Hundred, which is a small settlement located on the James River, not far from Jamestown. Martin’s Hundred was settled in the Early 17th century by a private company, but it was destroyed in 1622 in a native uprising. Looking at this depiction, you can see the similarities between the architecture of this bawn and the buildings as well, and those that were employed in Ulster: the main difference between these north-American bawns was that they are constructed from timber, rather than from masonry - which means that they still survive here whereas, in Virginia, we no longer see them on the landscape.

Just as the English settlers attempted to apply the same sort of solutions to the landscape, using the same kinds of architecture - using bawns - in these two very different lands, so too did many English chroniclers view the native inhabitants of those lands in similar ways. We can see, you know, depictions of the wild Irish man and the wild Irish woman, and that sort of language was used interchangeably by chroniclers looking at native Americans.

As we look at a depiction of a native American village, and this was a water-colour done by John White, who was the Governor of the failed Roanoke colony in present-day North Carolina (and this was an attempt in the 1580s) - looking at his water-colour, we get a good view into a native American village but we also have a sense of English perceptions. For example, the houses that we see in this map, they appear to have sort-of square corners, even though they’ve got rounded roofs. But, in reality, what we know from the archaeology of these settlements, these houses were actually sub-rectangular and oval in form; so it suggests that the English artist was here imposing his own notions of a house - houses had to have four corners - imposing that onto, what was for him, an unfamiliar form. The same thing also happened in Ireland: and, in fact, we have numerous written descriptions that compare Irish houses which were also sub-rectangular and oval, to native American dwellings - despite the very many differences between native American cultures and Gaelic Irish culture. To many English they were both simply the other.