Godspeed Living

Four hundred years ago, the Godspeed sailed the Atlantic and founded a colony in Virginia.

Our country is much older than we think.

Four centuries old, as a matter of fact.

The year 2007 is the 400th anniversary of the first English colony in the “New World.”

Don’t be confused, now. This milestone has nothing to do with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Instead, this anniversary goes all the way back to 1607 when the first permanent English colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, beating the Pilgrims to the New World by 13 years.

One of the three ships that brought the colonists to Jamestown was Godspeed, a three-masted square-rigger that sailed the Atlantic for nearly five months to get to Virginia. The ship was just 88 feet long — about the length of a double tractor-trailer — and had a top speed of about 4 miles per hour. The colonists endured what we would consider to be intolerable conditions, with 13 crew members working on the deck and 39 passengers stuck in the cargo hold with 40 tons of supplies.

The smell? It must ...