If I had any hair on my shiny bald pate, it would have stood up on end. I certainly had goose pimples aplenty on my arms.
I was in Historic Jamestown, Virginia. I stood on the bank of the James River, totally alone, looking south-east to Newport News (the oldest English city name in the Americas), Chesapeake Bay and, ultimately, the open sea.
All I could see were sky, scrub, trees and deep grey waters. The view hasn’t changed in centuries.
This is what Bartholomew Gosnold, Christopher Newport, John Rolfe and John Smith saw when they arrived here in May 1607.
After five months at sea aboard the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, they established the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. They called it Jamestown, after James I. Virginia was named after Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
This is where America was born. But Jamestown is strangely understated for so important a spot. There’s a small visitor centre, museum, a ruined 17th-century church and excavations.
An obelisk – the Jamestown Tercentennial Monument – was erected in 1907 to commemorate ‘The Birthplace of Virginia and the United States’.
There are statues of John Smith and Pocahontas (1596-1617), the Native American girl who saved Smith’s life and went on to marry John Rolfe, before dying in Gravesend, Kent, of all places.
Other than that, it’s just forest, reedbeds, marsh and swamp. I had a mooch about and tried to imagine what it was like over 400 years ago.
English settlers, Powhatan Indians and African slaves came together in what was the colonial capital from 1616 until 1699 – when the capital moved to Williamsburg. By the 18th century, Jamestown was abandoned.
I threw a stone in the water for luck and headed off. As I wandered back to the car park, wondering where everyone was, a harassed looking family arrived.
‘But there’s nothing to see!’ whined the smaller of two kids.
‘But, look, there’s Pocohontas,’ said the mother in despeaation.
‘The cartoon’s nothing like her,’ replied the brat, stomping off in a huff, arms tightly folded.
They should have joined me at nearby Jamestown Settlement, a bustling reproduction of how the original English colony and its fort are thought to have looked.
Here re-enactors dressed as Powhatans were splitting logs, preparing fishing tackle, cleaning animal skins and making dug-out canoes.
English colonists pottered about inside the replica fort, complete with armoury, church and half-timbered cottages. They occasionally set off their cacophonous matchlock muskets, much to visitors’ and their own ashen-faced consternation, crying, ‘Ooh-aah’ in approximations of grizzled, 17th -century English.
A life-size replica of Discovery lay alongside the jetty, manned by a few swarthy-looking crew.
Goodness, at just 40 feet long, it was tiny. How the heck did 21 folk live – let alone survive – on board for 5 months? Remarkably, only one of the 104 souls who set off in the three ships failed to make it. Immigrants in small boats; some things never change…
Jamestown forms part of Virginia’s so-called Historic Triangle, along with Colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown.
As I struggled in the breeze to flatten my road map on the bonnet – sorry, hood – of my rental car (who needs satnav when you’ve got a good map?), a kindly guy got out of his station wagon to ask if he could help.
I explained that I was heading back to my hotel in Williamsburg and was trying to get my bearings.
Hearing my accent, he grinned and said, ‘So, you’re missing out Yorktown? Don’t blame you. You’ve seen where you guys started it all. Why bother seeing where you screwed it all up?’
Jonathan Ray is drinks editor at the Spectator
