Greetings all, fellow time travellers who I love so well. We've come a long way together so far on our travels through time and space,

and it's been great to have the company. It's been lovely to be making this journey on family in our family.

This week our travels through history bring us to the 1600s

and another landmark moment in the story of our species.

Now to help support this podcast and to get preferential treatment if you like every week,

sign up to my Neil Oliver site on Patreon.com. It's the financial input there that makes the rest of the

podcast series possible. So I hope to see you there. Okay now it's time to strap ourselves into the time machine as we set off towards

the next stop in my love letter to the world. Recorder, microphone, action. A malarial hellhole, a dangerous and daunting undertaking, a flag raised above the fortifications of what became

Jamestown. A formidable character rose to leadership, establishing aimable

relationships with the indigenous people.

Pocahontas saved his life twice.

Attracting more colonists, important and cementing traditions of individual rights, legal protection and freedom,

and so beginning to write a new chapter in the story of this vast continent. Hi Neil, last week we stood with you beneath the night sky in 1601 as Kepler pushed ahead with the discoveries

that put us Homo sapiens in our place. Where are we this week?

Hello again, Paul. Well, this week, it's a strange one in some respects because on the face of it, it's a very small moment,

a small thing, a small beginning, but one that has gone on to have massive repercussions in the

shaping of the consciousness of part of the world and the development of our species. We're in Virginia.

We're in Jamestown in fact with a band of intrepid colonists desperately trying to

gain a foothold in this vast new world.

We're in North America today, Paul. We've spent some time already in Central and South

America. We've been there with the Spanish and the Portuguese and we've contemplated how much harm

was done to indigenous populations and so on but now we contemplate if not for the first

...