Christopher Newport Quotes

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.

communion was celebrated. "We had comunion. Captain Newport dined ashore with our diet, and invited many of us to supper as a farewell." The next day, Christopher Newport raised anchor and began the return trip to England. He took letters from those remaining in Virginia and carried accounts describing Virginia and the events that had occurred. The settlement had been made, and the future seemed promising.

When the orders were opened after arrival in Virginia, it was found that the governing body in the Colony was made up of seven councilors. Edward Maria Wingfield, of gallant service in the Low Countries; Bartholomew Gosnold and Christopher Newport, both seasoned seamen and captains; John Ratcliffe, who piloted the to Virginia; John Martin, an earlier commander under Drake; John Smith, already an experienced adventurer; and George Kendall, a cousin of Sir Edwin Sandys who later was to play a dominant role in the Virginia Company.

Sir George Somers, an experienced mariner, was put in charge of the fleet. Roughly sixty years of age, Somers, from the town of Lyme on England’s southwest coast, had a resume that included service under Essex, Sir Francis Drake, and the privateering Sir John Hawkins.30 A member of parliament, he was an accomplished mariner and navigator. His second in command as master of the fleet’s flagship was Captain Christopher Newport, whose maritime pedigree was every bit as impressive as Somers’s. About forty-nine years of age in 1609, Newport had gone to sea as a young man, sailing to South America and the Caribbean as a privateer. In 1590, when he was about thirty years of age, Newport had been in a sea battle with two Spanish treasure ships off the coast of Cuba. In that battle, Newport lost his right arm but persevered. For the next thirteen years, he was an active Caribbean privateer and was a leading participant in the capture, in 1592, of the Spanish treasure ship the Madre de Dios, a prize that carried about half a million pounds in gems, spices, silks, and other goods. Newport’s long experience as a privateer helped him establish strong links with English merchants. He was also known to King James I, having presented the monarch with two live crocodiles and a wild boar following one of his New World voyages. In 1606, he was named commander of the first Virginia expedition and sailed as captain of the Susan Constant, flagship of the first Virginia fleet.31 By the time he was named sailing master of the flagship of the 1609 fleet, he had made three crossings between England and Jamestown.

The bad blood that pitted Archer and Ratcliffe against Smith had its beginnings in 1607, in Jamestown’s earliest days, when the three men served together on the colony’s ruling council. In the months when colonists were dying of hunger and illness, Smith discovered that the duo, along with a few others, were planning to steal supplies and a small boat they could use to flee Virginia for the safety of England. While Smith would almost certainly have been happy to see the last of the two men he thought of as cowards and traitors, he knew the colony could not survive without the boat and that the supplies the men were about to steal were sorely needed by the hungry colonists. Smith, in typical John Smith fashion, soon spiked those plans when he ordered several of the settlement’s cannon turned on the boat and ordered those on board to come ashore or be shot out of the water. Neither Archer nor Ratcliffe was the type of man to take such effrontery lying down, especially from a man they would have considered their social inferior. A few weeks later, the two saw an opportunity to even the score. At that time (it was after Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas, when he returned to Jamestown), Archer and Ratcliffe used the Bible as a legal text and charged Smith with murder under Levitical law. Ludicrous as it seems, the two argued that the “eye for an eye” verse made Smith responsible for the deaths of two of his men who had been killed when Smith was captured by the Powhatan people. It is a measure of Smith’s unpopularity with the “better sort” of colonists (not only Ratcliffe and Archer) that he was—within hours of his return to Jamestown—charged, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to die, with the execution scheduled for the next morning. That night (it was in early 1608), Smith was saved from death when Captain Christopher Newport, the man who later served as the Sea Venture’s captain, unexpectedly sailed up to Jamestown with a handful of new colonists and a shipload of food and other supplies. Newport, who recognized Smith’s value to the colony even if some of the other leaders did not and who, no doubt, saw the idiocy of making Smith responsible for the death of the men who had been killed by the Indians, immediately ordered him freed and all charges against him dropped.

A shrewd notary from Extremadura, turned colonist and adventurer, and a one-armed ex-privateer from Limehouse, in the county of Middlesex. Eighty-seven years separate the expeditions, led by Hernan Cortes and Captain Christopher Newport receptively, that laid the foundation of the empires of Spain and Britain on the mainland of America.

One of President Wingfield's first acts in May, 1607, after the construction of James Fort was underway, was the dispatch of a party to explore the river above Jamestown. Twenty-two men under Capt. Christopher Newport left on May 21 and proceeded inland to the falls of the James. in six dayes they arrived at a [Indian] Towne called Powhatan, consisting of some twelve houses, pleasantly seated on a hill; before it three fertile Iles, about it many of their cornefields, the place is very pleasant, and strong by nature ... To this place the river is navigable: but higher within a mile, by reason of the rockes and isles, there is not passage for a small boat, this they call the Falles.

A perhaps more relevant example is taken from a 1999 Gallup experiment (see Newport 2004), which asked respondents what the federal government should do with the budget surplus. When respondents were given a choice between “tax cuts” or “increased spending on government programs,” nearly three-quarters of respondents chose the tax cut option. But when the question was reframed as a choice between tax cuts and spending on specific government programs such as Medicare and public education, the percentages were very nearly reversed. While citizens often express considerable enthusiasm for “cutting government,” that enthusiasm very nearly vanishes when they are asked to consider “government” at the operational level – that is, at the level of specific programs that the government undertakes.

His Narragansett cousins who protested the Thanksgiving holiday were being silly. Christopher Columbus and the Europeans did not slaughter natives because Europeans were evil — they did so because they were mighty, just as Native Americans had attacked and conquered one another for centuries.