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The first English people to settle permanently in the Americas included early scientists, known as 鈥渃hymists鈥�, who battled hunger and disease in an ill-fated bid to find and mine gold.

In the early 17^th century, the English were eager to explore and exploit North America. It had been just over 100 years since Christopher Columbus鈥檚 first transatlantic voyages, and during that time, the Spanish had mined large quantities of gold and silver from South and Central America.

The English failed to find gold 鈥� but while this has previously been attributed to a lack of skill, it turns out geology was to blame.

A team led by Umberto Veronesi at University College London and Marcos Martino虂n-Torres at the University of Cambridge has completed an analysis of 400-year-old scientific equipment unearthed at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.

The team studied fragments that came from crucibles 鈥� vessels in which rock samples can be heated and melted to analyse their chemistry and reveal valuable metals and minerals 鈥� and examined the residues stuck to the interior walls.

It found a number of different chemicals, suggesting that the Jamestown chymists analysed a variety of rocks and experimented with different chemical additives in an effort to work out how to extract the maximum amount of gold or silver.

The crucible residues also suggest the settlers might have succeeded in making brass 鈥� a useful copper and zinc alloy, and bronze, made of copper and tin.

But there were no rich mineral deposits near Jamestown, and the small quantities of precious metals and alloys the chymists did recover failed to impress their financial backers in England. They were accused of idleness and incompetence 鈥� a label that stuck even into the 20^th century, says David Givens, director of archaeology at the .

鈥淚t鈥檚 one of the myths we鈥檝e busted over the past 25 years of research here,鈥� he says. 鈥淣o matter how good you are at your task, if you鈥檙e thrown into a situation where it鈥檚 almost impossible to accomplish, you鈥檙e going to fail.鈥�

The accusations of indolence are particularly unfair given the conditions in which the chymists were working. 鈥淭he colony failed to produce enough food to sustain itself,鈥� says David Killick at the University of Arizona. 鈥淢any of the colonists died of starvation.鈥�

Early scientific experiments by Europeans in North America probably weren鈥檛 confined to geology, says Matthew Eddy at Durham University, UK.

鈥淢uch of the evidence has been lost, particularly for sites in farming communities that were doing experiments on plant-based substances such as dyes, alcohol or fertilisers,鈥� he says.