The Virginia Company founded the Jamestown colony after they came into the New Land. In this new land, they decided to establish their settlement on an island peninsula. The main reason behind such a decision was to avoid any surprise attacks from their Spanish rivals. However, this decision proved to be a disastrous one as the marshy, wooded land where they settled was a breeding ground for ominous diseases like malaria. Soon they were also overtaken by bouts of dysentery, typhoid, and yellow fever. Moreover, the gentlemen who were the leaders of the expedition knew nothing of cultivation, and neither did the servants and craft workers who accompanied them. Under such circumstances, they hardly had any food to survive. These were the basic reasons, which made an early settlement in Jamestown so difficult for the colonists.
Cash crops were certainly to earn the colonists more profit. For this reason, the Jamestown colonists began to produce tobacco. This definitely earned them a lot of profit and was indeed a boon in that sense. However, the boon soon became a bane for them as it began to claim more lives of the settlers. In one way, the production of tobacco denied lands for food crop production to the settlers. This led to death due to a lack of food. On the other hand, often hard-pressed for food, the settlers attacked the Native Americans, who were forced to retaliate, and in the ensuing skirmishes, the lives of more settlers were lost. So, in one way or the other, tobacco became a bane for the Jamestown colonists, soon to be abandoned as a productive enterprise by them.