After nearly five months at sea, one hundred four Englishmen landed here at dawn on April 26, 1607, named the site Cape Henry in honor of their prince, and planted a wooden cross. Fearing rival Spanish vessels, they then headed up the James River in search of a more sheltered settlement site and chose Jamestown Island because it was easy to defend and offered deep mooring areas for their ships. The settlers soon faced severe challenges as the local Paspahegh Indians resisted the intrusion into their homeland and hunger, disease, insects, heat, and humidity took a deadly toll, leaving nearly half the colonists dead by late September. In the early 1600s, Captain John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay and the James, Chickahominy, and York rivers in search of precious metals and a passage to Asia, and from Jamestown in 1608 he led two major expeditions in a primitive thirty-foot boat that sailed and rowed nearly three thousand miles as far north as the Susquehanna River. Although he found neither gold nor a river passage to the Pacific, his accurate map and detailed observations of American Indian societies and the region's abundant natural resources guided future explorers and settlers. At the time of Smith's exploration, an estimated fifty thousand American Indians lived in the Chesapeake region, where for thousands of years their ancestors had built sophisticated societies with arts and architecture, systems of government, extensive trade and communication networks, shared spiritual beliefs, and economies based on hunting, fishing, farming, and gathering from the land and waterways.
