The huge 400th anniversary party this weekend commemorating the founding of Great Britain’s first permanent settlement in North America would have happened elsewhere if a group of would-be colonists had not been captured as they sailed through the Caribbean on their way to the New World.
The three-day celebration finished Sunday with a program that included a speech from President Bush and traced the United States’ roots to Jamestown, the little colony on the banks of the James River near Williamsburg.
“It should not be lost on anyone that this event is being held on Mother’s Day,” said Thomas Norment, a state senator whose district includes Jamestown and Williamsburg. “Jamestown is the mother of America.”
But if all had gone as planned in the 17th century, the events that attracted 65,000 attendees would have been located in Popham, Maine.
Two ships, one named the Richard, left Britain four months before the trio of vessels headed for Jamestown. The two ships took different routes — one northern while the Richard went south — and were to meet off the coast of modern-day Maine. But Spanish sailors captured the Richard and enslaved its crew, and the northern boat turned back after reaching the rendezvous point and not seeing the Richard.
“If either of those first two boats had landed, we might be commemorating Popham this year instead of Jamestown,” said Janet Gallagher, an interpreter who spent the weekend at Jamestown giving 20-minute talks on the Maine colony. “We have been able to learn so much from Popham about how English colonization worked that it definitely deserves a place in this celebration.”
The Jamestown colonists came ashore May 13, 1607, several months after the Richard and another ship had expected to reach the North American coast. Instead, settlers did not arrive in modern-day Maine until August. A year later colonists abandoned Popham after the settlement’s president returned to England to claim a sizable inheritance.
The gala was not solely about looking back on the odds-defying survival of the colonists. NASA had a visible presence during the weekend, linking the “spirit of exploration” that gripped the 17th-century pioneers to today’s space program.
“The courage and commitment that brought explorers from England to Jamestown in 1607 drives us today as we strive to set up an outpost on the moon,” astronaut Sunita Williams, aboard the International Space Station, told the crowd via satellite before Bush’s speech.
