more than half are classed as “gentlemen,” and the remainder as laborers, tradesmen, and mechanics. Two “chirurgeons,” Thomas Wotton, or Wootton, and Wil. Wilkinson, are included; the service of the first of them in a professional capacity is afterwards noted. Sailing by the old route of the West Indies, the Virginia coast was reached on the 26th of April, and in Chesapeake Bay on that night the instructions from the King were examined. These, with a mystery well calculated to promote mischief, had been confided to Newport, in a sealed box, with the injunction that it should not be opened until he reached his destination. The councillors found to be designated were Edward Maria Wingfield, Bartholomew Gosnold, John Smith, Christopher Newport, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and John Kendall. Wingfield, a man of honorable birth and a strict disciplinarian, who had been a companion of Ferdinando Gorges in the European wars, was chosen president; and Thomas Studley, cape-merchant, or treasurer. On the 29th of the month a cross was planted at Cape Henry, which was so named in honor of the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King James; the name of his second son, then Duke of York, afterwards Charles I., being perpetuated in the opposite cape. The point at which the ships anchored the next day was designated, in thankful spirit, Point Comfort. On the 13th of May, 1607, the colonists landed at a peninsula on the northern bank of the river known to the natives as Powhatan, after their king, but to which the English gave the name James River. Upon this spot, about fifty miles from its mouth, they resolved to build their first town, to which they also gave the name of the English monarch. The selection of this site is said to have been urged by Smith and objected to by Gosnold. The better judgment of the latter was vindicated in the sequel. Smith—at this time not yet twenty-eight years of age, a man the most remarkably endowed among those nominated for the council, and whose administrative capacity was to be so prominently evidenced—was at first excluded from his seat because, says Purchas, he had been “suspected of a supposed mutinie” on the voyage over.[228] This proscription in all probability had no more warrant than in the jealousy which the recent adventurous career and the confident bearing of Smith may be supposed to have excited, since he was admitted to office on the 10th of June following. The colonists at once set about building fortifications and establishing the settlement. Newport, Smith, and twenty-three others in the mean time ascended the river in a shallop on a tour of exploration. At an Indian village below the falls was found a lad of about ten years of age with yellow hair and whitish skin, who, it has been assumed, was the offspring of some representative of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony left by White, of which it is narrated that seven persons were preserved from slaughter by an Indian chief.[229] On the 26th