After nine months on the islands, these fearless and undaunted men, with a stout determination to finish the voyage they had begun nine months before, set sail in the two pinnaces on May 10, 1610, and after eleven days, arrived at Point Comfort. "On the three and twentieth day of May, we cast our anchor before Jamestown." BOATBUILDING BEFORE 1612 The few available records of early boatbuilding in the Virginia colony differ so materially that one cannot make a statement as to number or kind of vessels with any degree of accuracy. That the first vessel constructed in Virginia was built earlier than the year 1611, and was of twelve or thirteen tons capacity, seems to be an accepted fact as given in the Spaniard Molina's _Report of a Voyage to Virginia_ in 1611. The report also referred to a galley of twenty-five benches being built there. In his _Short Relation_ to the Council of the Virginia Company in June, 1611, Lord De La Warr spoke regretfully of the fact that the three forts he had erected near Point Comfort were not properly manned because of a lack of boats, there being but two, and one barge in all the colony. The fishing, too, had been hindered because of this shortage. No mention was made of the galley that was said to have been in the process of construction. ARGALL'S SHIPYARD AT POINT COMFORT In a letter to Nicholas Hawes, written in June, 1613, Samuel Argall (later Sir Samuel Argall) tells of a voyage to Virginia in 1612, and some of his activities there. On the 17th of September, he arrived at Point Comfort with sixty-two men on the ship _Treasurer_, his course being fifty leagues northward of the Azores. From the day of his arrival until the first of November, he spent the time in helping to repair such ships and boats as he found there "decayed for lack of pitch and tarre." About the first of November, he carried Sir Thomas Dale in the _Deliverance_ to Sir Thomas Smith's Island to have his opinion about inhabiting it. They found an abundance of fish there, "very great cod" which they caught in water five fathom deep. They planned to get a great quantity in the summer of 1613, and hoped to find safe passage there for boats and barges by "a cut out of the bottom of our bay into De La Warr Bay." This is an early mention of the need for a canal connecting these two bays. That the Sir Thomas Smith's Island referred to was not the island known by that name lying near Cape Charles is evident from the reference to large cod fish caught there, and the desire for a passage between the bays for a shorter route.