Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 10.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

When the reader shall have advanced a few lines further in this paper he will appreciate the significance and force of the argument I now adduce against Beverly's careless assertion that Newport planted fifty men at his own charge on Newport's News in November, 1621. To say nothing of the singular coincidence of the fact of Newport's planting at Newport's News, at his own cost, the same number of men that Gookin planted, in the same month and year, at the same place, and at his own cost too, how are we to account (if such was the fact) for the utter silence, as to Newport and his company of settlers, manifested by the Colonial authorities in their letter of 20th January, 1622, to the London Company? If Gookin's expedition (no larger nor more important to the Colony than was this alleged expedition of Newport's) was deemed worthy of particular mention in that letter, it is, I think, simply absurd to suppose that the Colonial authorities would have omitted even the slightest mention of Newport's expedition had they known anything of it, and to suppose that, if it really took place, they were in total ignorance of it as late as the 20th January following the November in which it is supposed to have landed, is simply to manifest the most extreme degree of idiocy.

Of course Beverly was as far from the fact as he could have been when he said Newport landed an expedition on Newport's News in November, 1621. Newport was not even the master, as some might possibly think, of Gookin's ship in that year and month, or on that expedition, for we have the name of the actual master of that ship in the following extract from a letter of 20th January, 1622, written by the Colonial authorities to the Company in London:

Mr. Pountis hath had some conference with ye Master of the Irish Shipp, a Dutchman whose name is Cornelius Johnson, of Horne, in Holland.

How early the promontory became known by the name Newport's News, I have not been able to ascertain, but that it was so known prior to the advent into Virginia (autumn of 1621) of Sir William Neuse, we have the following very good reason to believe.

At page 274 of Neill's History begins a long letter from the Colonial Authorities to the Company in London, dated 20th January, 1622. In it is the following passage: “There arived heere about the 22d of November, a shipp from Mr. Gookin, out of Ireland, wholy uppon his owne adventure¹ withoute any relatione at all to his contract with you ”