A far more important report was sent in to the prince in the same year by his gunner, Mr. Robert Tindal. This gunner was employed by the Virginia Company established in 1606, to make a voyage to America. He set out on December 19, 1606, with Captain Christopher Newport, in a fleet of three ships, and arrived at Chesapeake Bay about the beginning of May, 1607. A letter which he wrote to the prince on his arrival is in the Harleian collection of MSS., together with his journal of the voyage and a map of the James River. In his letter, dated Jamestown in Virginia, the twenty-second of June, 1607, he says: that this river was discovered by his fellow-adventurers, and that no Christian had ever been there before; and that they were safely arrived and settled in that country, which they found to be in itself most fruitful, and of which they had taken _a real and public possession in the name and to the use of_ the King his Highness's father.[74] It seems to bring our young prince nearer to American children, to know that his youthful imagination was fired by accounts of the wonderful unexplored Western land--to think of him poring over the map of Richmond and the beautiful James River. What would he have thought, could he have foreseen a tithe of the wonders which have come to pass on those Transatlantic shores--the marvels of modern civilization; the railroads stretching away into the wilderness of which Robert Tindal only saw the outskirts; the telegraph lines that bind together Europe and America; and, above all, the great nation that has grown out of the first bands of hardy adventurers who went out to Virginia with the prince's gunner, or who fled from King James's stern rule a few years later to the bleak New England coast.