Point Comfort

A detail from John Smith's map published in his The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) shows "Poynt comfort" at the southern end of the Virginia peninsula where the James River empties into the Chesapeake Bay. The locations of a number of nearby Virginia Indian groups, including the Kecoughtan, the Chesapeake, and the Nansemond, are also visible on Smith's map.

English colonists built fortifications at Point Comfort, where, in 1619, the first Africans entered Virginia. Ironically, nearly 250 years later runaway slaves found freedom at the same location, at the then Union-occupied military installation known as Fort Monroe.