JAMESTOWN—The crowd surged to near-capacity at the Jamestown 400th anniversary festival yesterday as history shared the stage with funk, jazz, bluegrass and rock’n’roll.

The action on the festival’s second day included actor James Earl Jones reading tales of Captain John Smith’s adventures to children, as well as the departure of a reproduction barge on a 1,500-mile voyage around the Chesapeake Bay.

The day also included a protest on Jamestown Island by 40 members of the New Black Panther Party; receptions that drew descendants of early settlers; and a downpour that sent much of the audience running for shelter shortly before the headline concerts by Bruce Hornsby, Ricky Skaggs and Chaka Khan. The rain let up and the concerts went on with only a brief delay.

Today is the actual anniversary of the settlers’ arrival at Jamestown, but how many people will mark it by attending the festival is hard to predict. President Bush is scheduled to tour Jamestown and to give a speech at noon.

But the president’s visit will close part of the historic areas all morning and require sacrifices of time and convenience for people coming to see him. Visitors are advised to be on a shuttle bus by 9:45 a.m. if they want to see him. Details are at http://www.jamestown2007.org.

From the start yesterday, Jamestown was crowded. Organizers said more than 14,000 people bought tickets at the gate, pushing the attendance to roughly 28,000—2,000 short of the day’s limit. But numerous people said the bus shuttle system was efficient and that the crowds did not bother them.

“They did a great job,” Sandra Manak of Laurel, Md., said of the organizers. She was wearing an LED pin she had programmed to spell out “Happy 400th.” The gift shops were jammed.

Hundreds of people stood on the shore as the Captain John Smith Shallop, a 28-foot reproduction of the barge Smith used in 1608 to explore the bay, set out on a planned 121-day tour of community festivals along the bayshore with a crew of 12 volunteers.

The shallop has no motor and must be sailed or rowed. Captain Ian Bystrom, said in an interview that the shallop handles reasonably well but rests heavy in the water. “We don’t cut through the waves, we just kind of slam through them,” he said.

Charles Berkeley, a descendent of Virginia’s first royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, was among the British notables on hand at a reception.

“What a wonderful river,” he said. “You can imagine the ships coming in. . . . There’s something mystical about looking across the river at the trees. It was very moving to me.”

In the afternoon, about 40 members of the American Indian Movement, the New Black Panther Party and the Black Lawyers for Justice staged a 90-minute protest against the Jamestown celebration. The group condemned the enslavement of African-Americans and the decimation of the Indian population at the hands of the settlers and their descendants.

“Black Power! Red Power!” they shouted. “Shame on Jamestown!” Malik Z. Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, said the Indians erred in helping the settlers. “When the white man came here, you should have left him to die.”

Some in the group carried placards with Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara and wore black military-style uniforms. The tourists paid them little mind. At the end of the rally, the protesters threatened to enter the visitors center; a police SWAT team moved in to help discourage them.

Meanwhile, in a quieter demonstration at Jamestown’s First Amendment Expression Area outside Jamestown Settlement’s visitors center, Steven C. Smith of Florence, S.C., proclaimed that Jamestown was founded mainly to spread Christianity to the New World.

But the day finally belonged to the musicians. As the sun set, thousands of people gathered to hear Hornsby’s genre-spanning music, Khan’s funk, Skaggs’ bluegrass and, at the end, an impromptu jam with Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

Children danced in the grass.

Contact staff writer Bill Geroux at or (757) 625-1358.
Staff writers Katherine Calos, Juan Antonio Lizama and Jeffrey Kelley contributed to this report.