Christopher Newport

Christopher Newport was the captain who brought the Virginia Company’s 1607 expedition to Virginia and helped establish Jamestown, the first enduring English settlement there. His recurring voyages linked the struggling colony to its sponsors in England, carrying supplies, directives, and John Smith’s appeal for a different kind of settlement. Newport’s missions reveal the early collision between the company’s extractive ambitions and the realities of a place where food, not precious metal, was the crucial wealth—and where Indigenous leaders could refuse English demands.

The expedition and Jamestown’s founding

Shortly before the end of 1606, Newport sailed from England with three vessels, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. The expedition was undertaken under the auspices of the Virginia Company, and its colonists reached Chesapeake Bay before proceeding up a river they named the James, after the reigning English monarch, James I. On May 14, 1607, they founded Jamestown. Newport’s role was therefore not confined to command at sea: he delivered the people and enterprise that launched England’s first successful attempt to establish a permanent colony in Virginia.

The settlement was conceived within a wider imperial contest. The English had arrived late to the Americas: territories with abundant Indigenous populations and gold and silver mines were already occupied. Virginia offered no easy equivalent to the riches extracted in Mexico and Peru. Yet the colonists initially brought an approach shaped by those conquests, hoping to capture a local chief and compel the surrounding population to supply food and wealth. Newport’s voyage put that ambition ashore, but the colony’s precariousness soon made its assumptions impossible to ignore.

A colony dependent on uncertain supply

As winter approached in 1607, Jamestown ran short of food. Newport sailed back to England for supplies and more colonists, leaving a settlement whose appointed leader, Edward Marie Wingfield, could not manage the worsening situation. John Smith, despite having been imprisoned aboard the Susan Constant for mutiny after defying Wingfield, had been named to Jamestown’s ruling council in the Virginia Company’s sealed orders. Once Newport was gone, Smith organized trading missions that obtained provisions from Indigenous communities.

On one such mission Smith was captured by Opechancanough, Wahunsunacock’s younger brother, and taken to the Powhatan leader’s capital, Werowocomoco. Accounts differ over what happened there, but some say Wahunsunacock’s daughter Pocahontas intervened to save Smith’s life. Smith was freed on January 2, 1608, and returned to Jamestown, still short of food. Newport returned from England later that same day. The near coincidence of Smith’s return and Newport’s arrival underscores how closely the settlement’s immediate survival depended on both local dealings and the uncertain arrival of supplies across the Atlantic.

Orders, failed ceremony, and Indigenous resistance

In April 1608 Newport sailed to England carrying a cargo of pyrite, or fool’s gold. The episode was an apt measure of the gap between the Virginia Company’s hopes for mineral wealth and what the colony had actually secured. Newport returned at the end of September with instructions to assert firmer control over the Indigenous population. The company’s plan was to crown Wahunsunacock, in the hope that the ceremony would make him subordinate to James I.

Wahunsunacock refused the invitation to go to Jamestown, suspecting that it was a trap that might leave him captured. Smith recorded his answer as a declaration that he too was a king, that Virginia was his land, and that James’s representative should come to him rather than expect him to enter the English fort. Newport and Smith consequently went to Werowocomoco to carry out the coronation. The ceremony proved a fiasco. Rather than establish English authority, it helped persuade Wahunsunacock that the colony should be removed. He imposed a trade embargo, cutting Jamestown off from a source of provisions and seeking to starve the settlers into submission.

Smith’s appeal and Newport’s final voyage

Newport sailed again for England in December 1608, this time carrying a letter from Smith to the Virginia Company’s directors. Smith argued that Virginia could not be made profitable by a quick extraction of gold, nor could its Indigenous inhabitants simply be forced to provide food and labor. If the colony were to endure, the settlers themselves would have to work. He urged the company to send practical tradespeople and producers—carpenters, farmers, gardeners, fishermen, blacksmiths, masons, and others—instead of another thousand colonists like those already sent. Newport’s voyage thus carried more than a report of failure: it conveyed a direct challenge to the company’s assumptions about what colonization in Virginia required.

The company did change its governing arrangement after two disastrous years without profit, replacing Jamestown’s ruling council with a single governor and appointing Sir Thomas Gates. But this change came amid a crisis Newport’s voyages had not resolved. Smith, whose resourcefulness had helped the settlement through its first two winters, returned to England in autumn 1609, dissatisfied with the new regime. During the winter of 1609–1610, known as the starving time, Wahunsunacock’s restrictions on the food supply and Smith’s absence coincided with catastrophe. Of the five hundred colonists who entered the winter, only sixty remained alive by March; the survivors resorted to cannibalism. Newport’s expeditions had repeatedly brought the colony back from immediate want, but neither shipments from England nor a ceremony asserting English sovereignty could substitute for a sustainable way to live in Virginia. The colony’s survival depended on confronting that fact.