Captain Christopher Newport led 144 men and boys aboard three small vessels bound for Virginia under a charter from the Virginia Company. Delayed weeks by weather in the English Channel before truly getting underway, the expedition would eventually establish Jamestown in May 1607, a settlement that survived famine, disease, and conflict to become the foundation of English colonization in North America.
The voyage almost didn't happen on schedule at all. After departing the Thames, the fleet was becalmed and battered by storms in the English Channel for six frustrating weeks before finally reaching open Atlantic waters, testing the patience and provisions of everyone aboard.
Among the passengers was John Smith, arrested during the delay on suspicion of mutiny and nearly hanged before the ships even reached Virginia. He would later become the colony's most famous chronicler and, briefly, its president, credited with keeping the starving settlement alive through sheer stubbornness and negotiated peace with the Powhatan Confederacy.
The Virginia Company's investors expected gold and a shortcut to Asia; they found neither. Instead the settlers found disease-ridden marshland, hostile winters, and a death rate so brutal that of roughly 6,000 colonists sent to Jamestown in its first two decades, only 1,200 survived. Yet the colony endured, planting the seed of English-speaking settlement in North America and, with it, the tobacco economy and slave labor system that would shape the continent's future.
Key people: Christopher Newport, John Smith