Thomas Shelburne 1

One morning you wake up on the streets of London. The next you find yourself on a ship bound for this place you've never heard of called Virginia.

1607 wasn't a particularly good year if you lived in Wales. Wales is the part of Britain on the left side that faces Ireland. They are not English. They have their own language, Welsh. They are descended from the Celts, like the Irish and the Scottish.

In 1607, the south of Wales was decimated by flooding. The north of Wales had a wee touch of the plague. It was a good time for a 12 year old to sneak out on your father's small farm one morning, stuff a bag full of wool, and head for London. After all, when you're the fourth son, you don't have much to look forward to except work, work work. Work for your father now, work for your brothers later.

Wool was the main thing England exported out of the country. As 1607 languished into 1608, naive Thomas Shelburne figured he could sell his wool in London and get enough money to do something. He didn't know what, but something.

London in 1608 was beyond anything a poor Welsh farm boy could have dreamed. Imagine, a bridge that had something like 200 buildings on it, some of them seven stories high. Fearsome were the tarred remains of traitor's heads, stuck on iron spikes on London Bridge. He didn't know names like William Wallace, Thomas More, or Thomas Cromwell, but he got the message clear enough.

The Tower of London was more majestic than any castle he had ever seen before. He wrongly imagined that the new King James lived there, king now for five years. But the kings of England had not lived there for hundreds of years. It was a prison more than anything else.

Thomas knew nothing of its most famous prisoners. He did not know about Guy Fawkes or the recent plot to blow up the houses of Parliament, just three years earlier. He did not know anything yet about Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned comfortably with his family at the time. Raleigh had tried and failed to start a colony in America twenty years previous.

He didn't speak much English, only enough to do some basic trading. When he woke up that morning on the first of August, 1608, he figured he would go down to the Pool of London, just east of London Bridge on the Thames River, and sell his wool. He had slept on it every night since he left Wales a couple weeks before. The pool was lined with ships, under the shadow of the Tower of London.

When he got to the river, he looked for the biggest boat. If he could have read, he would have seen the name Mary and Margaret on the side of the humongous 150 ton ship. Surely someone here would buy some wool. He'd sell it cheap enough for them to make a profit wherever this ship was headed.