Replica Jamestown ships, The Susan Constant, center, Godspeed, right, and Discovery

We in Virginia this month are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of America, at Jamestown on May 14, 1607.

AFP:

When 104 men and boys sailed across the Atlantic 400 years ago to become the first permanent English settlers in the New World, little did they know that their odyssey would give birth to history’s biggest superpower.

The small group of high-born, but ill-prepared colonists who set up camp along the James River on May 14, 1607 on a swampy, mosquito-infested swath of land in Jamestown, were seeking gold and a water route to the Orient.

Instead they found famine, disease, drought and hostile natives whose fate would forever be altered by the Jamestown settlement, the 400th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year.

“The settlement of Jamestown is a tremendous legacy,” Jeanne Zeidler, executive director of “Jamestown 2007,” the committee organizing the celebrations, told AFP. “This is the true story of America. …

The highlight of the quadricentennial celebrations will be a visit by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on May 3 and 4, followed by three days of festivities on May 11-13 that will include stage productions, a ceremonial sailing by replicas of the three ships that transported the settlers and a concert by a 1,607-member choir and an orchestra of 400 musicians.

The queen, who will be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, also attended the 350th anniversary events in 1957 which marked her first visit to the United States as a monarch.

US President George W. Bush is also due to attend the ceremonies which have been 10 years in the planning.

Ignore the PC-rubbish served up in the rest of the article by those idiot journalists.

Queen Elizabeth will also be attending the America’s Cup of Polo at Morven Park in Leesburg.

This year is the four hundredth anniversary of the first successful English-speaking settlement in North America: the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Those Johnny-Come-Lately Puritans arrived at Plymouth in 1620.

But, as Mona Charen explains, the contemporary intelligentsia find nothing to celebrate.

… emblematic of our troubled understanding of our past and our present discomfort with our national identity, the powers that be in Virginia have decided not to refer to (the anniversary events) as “celebrations.” Instead, they will be called commemorations. “You can’t celebrate an invasion,” declared Mary Wade, a member of the Jamestown 2007 organizing committee. The native people were “pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes were annihilated. A lot of people carry that oral history with them, and that’s why they use the word ‘invasion’ . . .”

Virginia is expecting many visitors to the reconstructed Jamestown settlement — and it is worth the trip. We’ve taken the children a couple of times. But the timid, apologetic tone of some of the exhibitions detracts from the experience. As Edward Rothstein reported in The New York Times, “The Indians, we read, were ‘in harmony with the land that sustained them’ and formed an ‘advanced, complex society of families and tribes.’”

Rothstein continues: “English society — the society that gave us the King James Bible and Shakespeare . . . is described as offering ‘limited opportunity’ in which a ‘small elite’ were landowners.” England, they tell us, suffered from social dislocation, unemployment, difficult working conditions, and so forth. The exhibit goes on to suggest that Virginia’s history evolved out of the “interaction” of three different cultures: British, Native American and African.

This sort of hokum has become de rigueur…

Read the whole thing.

Recent excavations in a well discovered last fall at Jamestown, Virginia have produced a number of interesting artifacts from the earliest English settlement in North America. The well, located within the 1607 stockade, is believed to be the earliest at the Jamestown colony.

The finds included a brass Scottish pistol, a ceremonial lead halbard bearing the arms of Lord De la Warr, leather shoes, and a small lead tag bearing the stamped inscription “James Towne.”

Times Dispatch

Virginian Pilot