Cape Henry
headland in Virginia, United States
Cape Henry is a cape on the Atlantic shore of Virginia located in the northeast corner of Virginia Beach. It is the southern boundary of the entrance to the long estuary of the Chesapeake Bay.
Across the mouth of the bay to the north is Cape Charles the opposite point of the Bay's gateway. Named for two sons of King James I of England in 1607, together Cape Henry and Cape Charles form the Virginia Capes.
History
Cape Henry was named on April 26, 1607, in honor of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, the elder of two sons of King James I of England to survive to the age of 18 and heir-apparent to the throne of the Kingdom of England (later united in 1707 with neighboring Scotland as the Kingdom of Great Britain), by an expedition of the London Company branch of the proprietary Virginia Company headed by Captain Christopher Newport. After an unusually long voyage of 144 days from England, it was their first landfall, an event which has come to be called "The First Landing". Soon after this landing the English colonists erected a wooden cross and gave thanks for a successful crossing to a new land. In the First Charter of Virginia, King James I devoted parcels of land for the purpose of spreading the Christian religion. The Charter reads in part: "We greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Desires for the Furtherance of so noble a Work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance..."
Captain Newport, with his three ships, Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and the group of 104 men and boys, subsequently explored inland and established Jamestown on an island for protection offshore from the north shore further upstream on the James River which became the first permanent English settlement in North America.
The following year of 1608, Captain John Smith took a crew with a small boat outfitted with a sail and proceeded north up the Chesapeake Bay exploring and mapping its coasts and rivers, creeks and bays up to the later named Susquehanna River which fed the Bay.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cape Henry” is headland in Virginia, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cape, Henry and headland, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1640805. The Library of Congress control number is sh91001842. Authority coordinates are 36.925, -76.020. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1607, 1707 and 1608.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cape Henry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.