Jamestown, 400 Years After the First Settlers, Still Surprises

Jamestown, Va., May 2, 2007 — -- They came in three small ships with lyrical names: the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant. We can only imagine how they must have felt, after four months spent crossing the Atlantic, to find solid ground in what is now Tidewater, Va.

But we do have a sense of how difficult they would find it to build a settlement here. Of 104 men who disembarked at Jamestown May 14, 1607, only 38 were still alive by year's end.

"They knew a little bit about the conditions that they might encounter," says Jim Horn, author of a Jamestown history titled "A Land as God Made It."

"But no Englishman had explored this region thoroughly. So to a large extent they were stepping into the unknown when they landed here."

Schoolchildren still read the fables of Jamestown's Capt. John Smith, and of the Indian princess, Pocahontas, who supposedly saved his life.

But only now, 400 years later, is the real Jamestown being unearthed.

Jamestown stands as the first successful English settlement in the New World. The Spanish had put down roots in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565. Earlier English colonies had failed — most notably the lost colony of Roanoke, N.C., where all the settlers mysteriously disappeared.

Why did Jamestown survive? Historians say the written accounts — by Smith and others — are incomplete and sometimes self-serving. Archaeologists could offer little help. For centuries, the accepted wisdom was that the site of the original settlement was long gone, washed away by the James River.

But Bill Kelso had other ideas. In 1993, he became head archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. He had a hunch that the first settlement could still be found on dry land, right in the shadow of a 1704 church tower.

He points to the ground less than 50 feet from the water. "This is the exact spot that we started the excavation," he tells a reporter. "We expanded toward the river and the rest" --