Timeline: The World of 1607

Published Thursday, May 03, 2007 in British Heritage  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

This morning’s television newscast brought into our homes live video reports from London and around the world. Four hundred years ago in 1607, however, people in England did not know that half the world existed. It would be more than a century before Captain Cook explored the South Pacific. It would be 200 years before Lewis and Clark would cross the American continent. There were no toaster ovens, newspapers or cell phones, no GPS or jumbo jets, no electricity or refrigeration, let alone television or instant global communications. Word traveled no faster than a horse or a sail.

Among the many events surrounding America’s 400th anniversary this year is the opening of dramatic new exhibition galleries at Jamestown Settlement—a signature event in the Jamestown 2007 celebrations. The freshly constructed halls contain 30,000 square feet of exhibit space dedicated to “The World of 1607.” A new introductory film, 1607: A Nation Takes Root, provides an overview of the first two decades of the Virginia colony and the cultures that converged there: the indigenous Powhatan Indians and the first documented Africans from Angola, as well as the early English settlers.

Jamestown’s waterfront discovery area highlights 17th-century water travel, commerce and cultural exchange, with interactive exhibits on navigation and cargo. Exhibits also explore overseas trade and colonization, and advances in cartography and ship design. The story of the Virginia Company is told in a re-created English manor house. (British Heritage readers who visit can decide for themselves how much the re-creation resembles the original Otley Hall [see British Heritage November 2006].) A short film, The Crossing, describes the historic 1607 voyage to Virginia. More than 500 artifacts from the 17th century enhance the exhibits, videos, dioramas and reconstructions in the new Jamestown Settlement galleries.

Artifacts and re-creations can only go so far, however, in conveying a sense of time and place over the distance of 400 years and 4,000 miles. What was the world really like in 1607?

About this time of year four centuries ago, 104 young men and boys aboard Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery were making their way toward the tidewater of Chesapeake Bay. The Virginia Company of London had won its charter, and the tiny flotilla had set sail from London in December 1606. Its purpose was to establish the first English settlement in the New World. The fleet admiral was Christopher Newport, sailing on Constant. The motive force behind the Virginia Company, however, was Vice Admiral Captain Bartholomew Gosnold aboard Godspeed. His story, of course, we have told (British Heritage November 2006).

The London they left behind was in some turmoil. King James I had come down from Edinburgh a few years before, after the death of Queen Elizabeth. He was still putting his personal imprint on the monarchy, filling his court with Scottish favorites, spending lavishly and giving out honors and titles with unprecedented generosity—and unnerving the English political establishment.

Before he came down from Edinburgh, where he was King James VI of Scotland, James had written The True Law of Free Monarchies, in which he defended the divine right of kings as an insoluble part of apostolic succession. His belief in his own divine right brought him into real conflict with an English Parliament that had long ago limited the power of its monarchy, especially when it came to taxes. James’ belief in his royal prerogatives not only created policy conflict, it also gave him an attitude.

Out in the shires, and back in the East Anglian villages of Essex and Suffolk, where most of the young Virginia Company adventurers called home, life remained largely unchanged from monarch to monarch, year to year, generation to generation. It would be another half-dozen generations at least, before the first effects of the Industrial Revolution would begin to draw people off the land to the towns and emergent factories and mills, bringing such things as manufactured cloth, dishes and tools.