THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 13, 1996 TAG: 9609130548
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: JAMESTOWN LENGTH: 153 lines
For more than 100 years, the conventional wisdom was that the original Jamestown Fort of 1607, site of the first English settlement in America, had disappeared through erosion into the James River.
For the past two years, a small group of unconventional thinkers has worked to prove otherwise.
They were right.
The remains of the original fort are right here where they've been all along, just beneath the surface on the western tip of this small swampy island.
Well, most of the remains. The conventional wisdom was about 20 percent right. That much of the crude palisade walls apparently has been carried away by the relentless waters of the James.
On Thursday, Gov. George F. Allen and assorted other dignitaries assembled to celebrate the achievements of a team of archaeologists, led by Dr. William M. Kelso, whose work has confirmed that most of the fort remains in place.
If you've been to the Jamestown Island park, administered jointly by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the National Park Service, you probably already know most of what has been happening here. Signs posted near the project beside the old church have advised visitors about the progress of the dig.
About the only thing new revealed Thursday is that they've got a body on their hands.
And it threatened to steal the show. More about that in a minute.
Offshore, the Godspeed, a replica of one of the wooden sailing vessels that brought the first 104 English settlers to these shores, its sails slack in the damp, calm air, fired a resounding two-gun salute.
Well, it's a very small ship, and that's all the guns she had.
Allen called the unearthing of the remains of the original Jamestown Fort a monumental discovery. ``Here is America's birthplace,'' he said. ``Here our nation drew its first breath of life.''
David Evans, the British cultural attache to Washington, said the Jamestown Rediscovery project has ``reached through nearly four centuries to touch the lives of the first English in America and the Native Americans who greeted them.''
Dr. William Pittman, curator of artifacts at Colonial Williamsburg who was here not as a scheduled speaker but as an interested professional observer, said, ``This is the Holy Grail of Anglo-American culture.''
Dr. George Stuart of the National Geographic Society, which has helped support the excavation, said, ``In terms of difficulty, peril and sheer impact, the settlement at Jamestown was the moon landing of its time. And the newly discovered fort was the beginning of it all.''
Stuart went on to say, ``In my 35 years as a professional archaeologist, I had never seen a public celebration of an archaeology site. Today it finally happened. There are many more people here today than ever lived here at that time.
``And this is not a great pyramid or a gold-and-jewel-encrusted tomb. This is the most unspectacular sight I've ever laid my eyes on.''
Kelso, 55, the star of the day, is the APVA's director of archaeology. He has made significant finds in early African-American archaeology at the Mulberry Row slave quarters at Monticello and the first known slave house at nearby Kingsmill.
He is stocky and muscular - a hands-and-knees, shovel-and-trowel worker on a project - with thick white hair and trim mustache that set off his archaeologist's tan. Fittingly, in a crowd of dignitaries in coats and ties with pagers on their belts, Kelso was dressed in shirt sleeves and sneakers.
For some time he had said, ``No other American site pre-dates Jamestown in national historical significance.''
Today he called the ``footprints of a fortification, a military outpost'' that he and his team have uncovered, ``the symbolic cornerstone of America. From this tiny, isolated island evolved our political institutions, our language, our commerce, and much of our culture.''
He also pointed out that the 1903 seawall erected by the APVA, over which the storm surge of Hurricane Fran crashed less than a week ago, had, in fact, saved the material cornerstone of that symbolic cornerstone. His team has found portions of two sides of the triangular fort described in William Strachey's account of the 1607 structure, written in 1610. And they have found, where the two sides converge, a curved feature that can only be a corner bulwark.
``But,'' Kelso said, ``we have only just found the box and peeked inside. There is so much more left.''
His most interesting find so far?
``An entrenching tool,'' he said after a moment of thought. ``It looks like an elongated hoe. It was a tool made especially for building the palisades. Then somebody apparently threw it away, figuring they wouldn't need it again.
Well, what about the body lying about 2 feet below the surface in a rectangular excavation about the size of a modern-day coffin? The one everybody is bending over to get a better look at and photograph.
It is a white male, about 25 years old, with a bullet in his knee. The bullet seems to have broken a bone. No apparent effort had been made to mend the break. He was buried in a coffin, so he must have been of some importance.
OK, you've seen Indiana Jones. You've watched Quincy. Let's see if we can figure this out.
This guy's been shot. Indians didn't have guns. Who does that leave? Did he shoot himself? Did he hate this place so much he tried to get out by shooting himself in the foot with one of those big matchlock guns . . . and miss by 18 inches?
Could he have died of a bullet wound to the knee? Well, yes, given the state of medicine in those days, particularly in this place.
But Bly Straube, the Jamestown Rediscovery project curator, sheds some more light. He had another wound in the upper body that may have been the result of a gun shot. Straube also said there was some sort of clasp beside his head that could have held - are you ready for this? - a blindfold.
This guy could have been executed - the first recipient of capital punishment in English North America.
The APVA people aren't near ready to attach a name to these bones, but when they do, don't be surprised if it's Capt. George Kendall.
Kendall, a gentleman of some note, was an English Catholic pretending to be Protestant (in an age when that was best to do), who also was a double agent - spying both for the British secretary of state and the king of Spain.
George H. Tucker, Norfolk's foremost antiquarian, dealt with Kendall in his book ``Cavalier Saints and Sinners.''
Briefly, according to Tucker's research, ``Kendall sailed for Virginia with the first Jamestown settlers and later was named as one of the original councilors of the colony. Meanwhile, he kept tabs on the progress of England's tentative colonial expansion. When matters began to go from bad to worse, he plotted with the sailors of the Discovery, the ship Capt. Christopher Newport had left in Virginia when he returned to England.''
Kendall intended to run off to Spain and tell Philip III about the sorry plight of the Virginia experiment.
``The plot,'' according to Tucker, ``was revealed by James Read, the Jamestown blacksmith, and when Kendall attempted to escape in the Discovery he was stopped by the guns of the fort. Tried and condemned as a secret agent, Kendall was executed by a firing squad.''
It may not have been a particularly accurate firing squad, but if this guy is Kendall, apparently it got the job done.
The remains seem to be there to prove it. ILLUSTRATION: Map
VP
BILL TIERNAN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
A body unearthed at the fort could be that of Capt. George Kendall,
an English gentleman who spied for the king of Spain and was
executed by firing squad.
Among those on hand Thursday for the festivities at the site were,
from left, Lucio Almada, Dick Cheatham (portraying Colonist John
Rolfe), Debra ``White Dove'' Custalow (portraying Pocahontas) and
June Byrd Brown.
Photos
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
For the past two years, a small group of archaeologists has worked
to unearth the remains of the Jamestown Fort, built in 1607.
Portions of two sides of the triangular fort have been found.
Dr. William M. Kelso led the team that excavated the fort.
KEYWORDS: JAMESTOWN ARCHAEOLOGY EXCAVATION
FORTS by CNB