Bartholomew Gosnold: The Man Who Was Responsible for England’s Settling the New World
By Dana Huntley

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For the next several years, Gosnold promoted and schemed to get another colonial voyage organized. In 1603 the death of the aged queen brought a new dynasty to the throne in the Scottish monarch James I. The new king brought not only a new circle of power to London, but emboldened new economic ventures as well. From the family’s Suffolk seat at Otley Hall, Gosnold recruited supporters, patrons and colonists to his venture, including Edward-Maria Wingfield and John Smith.

By 1602 Hakluyt was prebendary of Westminster and shortly thereafter elected archdeacon. His removal to London may have enabled Hakluyt to actively promote the efforts at a colonization plan being worked upon by Gosnold at Otley Hall. In 1605 Hakluyt secured the living for the prospective colony of Jamestown. Sir Thomas Smythe, cousin of Gosnold’s wife’s and one of London’s richest merchants, and Hakluyt were chief promoters of the petition to the king for patents to the Virginia Company the next year. By 1606 planning was completed, and a royal charter by James I created the Virginia Company of London on April 10, 1606.

That December the three-ship fleet set sail from London. The company included 104 male settlers and 55 crewmen. Its colonists included a curate, Robert Hunt, supplied by Hakluyt. They were all young men and boys. In part to separate authority for the voyage from the governance of the colony, and in part because of Gosnold’s political connections to the late unfortunate Essex, Christopher Newport was named admiral, aboard Susan Constant, and Vice Admiral Gosnold commanded Godspeed. Gosnold would stay with the colony, while Newport would return to England. It was a miserable voyage, becalmed for six weeks at the mouth of the Thames by storms.

Sailing via the Azores, in late April the fleet finally arrived in the lower regions of Chesapeake Bay near the mouth of the James River. The company opened its sealed instructions that named a seven-member Royal Council, which would elect its own governor for the Crown. Gosnold’s name was first on the list.

The island of present-day Jamestown was the site chosen for the settlement. Through spring, the company erected a triangular palisade fort. During early summer, they fought off the local Powhatan Indians. Gosnold is credited with winning a battle against an attack of some 400 Indians by mounting Godspeed and scattering the attack with its heavy cannon.

By August the colonists were beginning to die. The wet, low-lying, mosquito-infested island was rife with dysentery, malaria and swamp fever. Malnutrition, high humidity and temperatures in the 90s week after week began to carry them off. Fifty of the 104 settlers died that summer.

In late August, Bartholomew Gosnold died; he was 36. After a funeral with full military honors in accordance with his rank, Gosnold was buried outside the fort and forgotten. The adventurer’s younger brother and cousin, both named Anthony after his father, also were among the expedition’s settlers to die in the New World.

It’s pretty clear now that through those difficult summer months in Jamestown, though Wingfield had been given the role of governor, Gosnold had been the de facto leader of the settlement. On Gosnold’s death, Wingfield was deposed, and ultimately John Smith became governor. Being a leader by nature and something of a self-promoter, Smith has gone down in the history books as the bright light in the disaster that was the early Jamestown colony.

In his own accounts, however, Smith justly gives the credit for the Virginia settlement where it belongs: “Captaine Bartholomew Gosnold, the first mover of this plantation, having many years solicited many of his friends, but found small assistance, at last prevailed with some Gentlemen, as Maister Edward Maria Wingfield, Captaine John Smith, and divers others, who depended a yeare upon his projects….”

There has never been a lack of corroborative evidence detailing the role Bartholomew Gosnold played in the foundation of what would become British colonial America. Thirteen years after Gosnold’s death, Mayflower would follow the northern route across the North Atlantic that he pioneered, following his charts into Cape Cod Bay. Finally, after three decades of struggle in the fetid climate of the Tide-water, Jamestown and subsequently Virginia would thrive under the governorship of William Berkeley in the 1640-60s.

Tags: American History, British Heritage, Great Migrations, Historical Figures

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