A body blow to the hunt for Mr America
Experts dig up wrong grave in check on U.S. pioneer’s DNA
THE quest to identify the remains of America’s forgotten founding father had taken them from Virginia to Suffolk.
There, among the graves at All Saints Church in the hamlet of Shelley, the archaeologists were exhuming a woman’s body.
They believed she was the sister of 17th century English adventurer Captain Bartholomew Gosnold and intended to use DNA technology to prove they had found his resting place in Virginia.
That grave, discovered in 2003, lies in Jamestown, the first Englishspeaking settlement in the New World, founded some 13 years before the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in 1620.
Sadly for the historians, however, the question of whether it is Captain Gosnold’s grave remains unresolved and their hard work in the Suffolk churchyard has come to nought.
For the woman turned out not to be the captain’s sister, or even a blood relative. DNA testing established the woman died when she was around 50, whereas Gosnold’s sister Elizabeth Gosnold Tilney lived to 75.
The samples fit the profile of Lady Anne Framlingham, who married into the Tilney family and died 70 years earlier in around 1601.
Nick Clarke, from the diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, said: ‘ The Tilneys had their own chapel at Shelley Church.
‘By the time Elizabeth died, space for family burials in the chapel had been used up and she would have been buried just outside.
‘ Excavations found skeletal remains of a woman and at the time it was reasonable to assume it was a potential match. But science has unfortunately turned against us.’
Although Jamestown was established well before the Pilgrim Fathers arrived, the settlement was lost over time and with it Captain Gosnold’s fundamental role in founding modern America.
Gosnold first travelled to the New World in 1602, when he visited the Maine and Massachusetts coasts, naming Cape Cod after the plentiful fish there, and Martha’s Vineyard, in honour of his daughter who died in infancy.
Five years later, he was second-incommand of a fleet that carried 107 settlers to Virginia. They named their settlement after James I. Gosnold died three months later in August 1607, but was credited with saving the fledgling colony – particularly through his design for a rugged triangular fort that kept out the native Americans.
The colony would survive skirmishes with the natives, disease and starvation to expand into new settlements by 1611.
Last night Dr William Kelso, director of archaeology for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, said: ‘ I am absolutely convinced that we have found Gosnold. In the future we hope to look again for his sister’s remains at the church in England.
‘We have reconstructed his facial characteristics from the skull and want to compare them with portraits of other family members.
‘We are not going to stop looking for a positive identification. Gosnold was too important. He was the main person in this first colony and he has been relatively unknown to history. He was a giant in this country’s history.’