Editing Old Point Comfort (section)

===17th and 18th centuries===
[[File:Detroit Photographic Company (0848).jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Old Point Comfort, {{Circa|1900}}]]
For more than 400 years, Point Comfort served as a maritime navigational landmark and military stronghold.

According to a combination of old records and legend, the name derived from an incident when the Jamestown settlers first arrived. Captain [[Christopher Newport]]'s flagship, ''[[Susan Constant]]'', anchored nearby on 28 April 1607. Members of the crew "rowed to a point where they found a channel which put them in good comfort".<ref>"Virginia, A Guide to the Old Dominion, (1952), pg.483, By Federal Writers' Project</ref><ref>[http://www.search.com/reference/Old_Point_Comfort Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Edition, Search.com]</ref> They named the adjacent land '''Cape Comfort'''.<ref name="New Point Comfort">{{cite web |url=http://www.newpointcomfort.com/home.html |publisher=InterMarket Advertising. |title=New Point Comfort |access-date=4 February 2011}}</ref>

Point Comfort formed the beginning of the boundary of the [[Virginia Colony|Colony of Virginia]]. The Second Charter of the Virginia Company, granted in 1609, gave the company:<blockquote>all those Lands, Countries, and Territories, situate, lying, and being in that Part of America, called Virginia, from the pointe of lande called Cape or Pointe Comfort all alonge the seacoste to the northward two hundred miles and from the said pointe of Cape Comfort all alonge the sea coast to the southward twoe hundred miles; and all that space and circuit of lande lieinge from the sea coaste of the precinct aforesaid upp unto the lande, throughoute, from sea to sea, west and northwest . . .<ref>[http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1601-1650/virginia/chart02.htm The Second Virginia Charter (May 23, 1609)]</ref></blockquote>

Because of the ambiguity as to which line was to run west and which northwest, the charter gave the Virginia Company either about {{convert|80000|sqmi|sqkm}} of eastern North America, or about one-third of the entire continent, extending to the [[Pacific Ocean]].<ref>[http://www.virginiaplaces.org/boundaries/charters.html Boundaries and Charters of Virginia]. Accessed 2010.08.27.</ref> The Colony of Virginia chose the interpretation which gave it the larger area, and the [[Commonwealth of Virginia]] continued to claim much of the [[Ohio Valley]] and beyond, until after the American Revolution. In 1784, Virginia gave up most of these claims, and the relinquished area was organized as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio (commonly known as the [[Northwest Territory]]) on July 13, 1787. In 1789, the remaining claims were abandoned when Virginia allowed [[Kentucky]] to become its own state, which it did on June 1, 1792.

In the fall of 1609, a [[John Ratcliffe (governor)|Captain John Ratcliffe]] built the first English fort in the area, known as [[Fort Algernon]].  

In August 1619, the [[First Africans in Virginia]] arrived in what was then known as the Colony of Virginia (although the first people of direct African descent on [[San Miguel de Gualdape|mainland North America]] were enslaved by a Spanish colony in [[South Carolina]] in 1526,<ref name="peck01">{{Cite journal |last=Peck |first=Douglas T. |date=2001 |title=Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón's Doomed Colony of San Miguel de Gualdape |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/40584407 |journal=The Georgia Historical Quarterly |volume=85 |issue=2 |pages=183–198 |jstor=40584407 |issn=0016-8297}}</ref><ref name="mil17">{{Cite book |last=Milanich, Jerald T. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1021804892 |title=Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. |date=2018 |publisher=Library Press at UF|isbn=978-1-947372-45-0 |location=Gainesville |oclc=1021804892}}</ref> and the first ''recorded birth'' with direct African ancestry took place in Florida in 1606<ref name="staug">{{Cite web |title=Civil Rights in Colonial St. Augustine (U.S. National Park Service) |url=https://www.nps.gov/articles/staugustinecivilrights.htm |access-date=2020-08-07 |website=www.nps.gov |language=en}}</ref>). Those enslaved arrived in the ''[[White Lion (privateer)|White Lion]]'', a [[privateer]] owned by [[Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick]], but flying a [[Netherlands|Dutch]] flag, which docked at Point Comfort. The approximately 20-25 Africans had been enslaved during a war fought by [[Portugal]] and some local African allies,<ref name="painter">{{Cite book |last=Painter, Nell Irvin. |url=https://archive.org/details/creatingblackame00pain/page/23 |title=Creating Black Americans: African-American history and its meanings, 1619 to the present |date=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-513755-8 |location=New York |pages=[https://archive.org/details/creatingblackame00pain/page/23 23-24] |oclc=57722517 }}</ref> against the [[Kingdom of Ndongo]], in modern [[Angola]], and had been taken off a [[Portuguese people|Portuguese]] slave ship, the ''São João Bautista''.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Deetz |first1=Kelley Fanto |title=400 years ago, enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia |url=https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2019/07-08/virginia-first-africans-transatlantic-slave-trade/ |publisher=National Geographic |access-date=2021-05-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190820001354/https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2019/07-08/virginia-first-africans-transatlantic-slave-trade/ |archive-date=2019-08-20 |date=2019-08-13}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Waxman |first1=Olivia B. |title=The First Africans in Virginia Landed in 1619. It Was a Turning Point for Slavery in American History—But Not the Beginning |url=https://time.com/5653369/august-1619-jamestown-history/ |access-date=2021-05-18 |magazine=Time |date=2019-08-20}}</ref>

The humid conditions and exposure to Atlantic coastal storms caused the plank and timber forts at these locations to constantly deteriorate. In 1630, [[Samuel Matthews (captain)|Capt Samuel Matthews]] was commissioned to rebuild the fort at Old Point Comfort, and it was completed by 1632.<ref>{{cite book|last=Tyler|first=Lyon Gardiner|title=Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography.|location=New York, New York|publisher=Lewis Historical Pub. Co.|date=1915|pages=48-49|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CWiel4PVkEkC}}</ref>

In 1665, Colonel [[Miles Cary]], a member of the [[Virginia Governor's Council]], was assigned to place armaments at the fort during heightened tensions resulting from the [[Second Anglo-Dutch War]]. Cary was hit by a cannonball from a [[Dutch Republic|Dutch]] [[frigate]], and died of those wounds on June 10, 1667.<ref name="Miles Cary">{{cite web |url=https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cary_Miles_bap_1623-1667 |publisher=Virginia Humanities |title=Miles Cary |access-date=2 August 2019}}</ref>