1571 – d. 1607) was an English barrister, explorer and privateer who was instrumental in founding the Virginia Company in London and Jamestown in colonial America.

More importantly for Gosnold's story, Sir Andrew Judd was also grandfather to Thomas Smith, one of the founders of the Virginia Company.

[17] English plans to colonize New England began to take concrete form in the early to mid-1590s when Edward Hayes wrote a treatise to Lord Burghley setting forth the rationale and procedure for settlement.

Captain Gosnold obtained backing to attempt to found an English colony in the New World and in 1602 he sailed from Falmouth, Cornwall, in a small Dartmouth bark, the Concord, with thirty-two on board.

These included a friend of his John Brereton whom he possibly knew from his days at University of Cambridge as well as Bartholomew Gilbert, and Gabriel Archer.

Gosnold pioneered a direct sailing route due west from the Azores to what later became New England, arriving in May 1602 at Cape Elizabeth in Maine (Lat.

[23][24] The captain explored the land and found a young Native boy, wearing copper ear decorations and an apparent willingness to help the Englishman.

[32] Gosnold's men were interested, however, with the trade that would enrich them and their commercial underwriters in Europe so spent more time tending to the harvesting of sassafras root and cedar wood than daily encounters with the Natives.

[33] It is unclear how the situation developed but by 11 June the relations had become so strained that a party of two Englishmen out hunting for shellfish for food were set upon by four Natives who shot one in the side with an arrow.

[34] Shortly thereafter, a dispute arose between those settlers who were supposed to remain and those who were returning to England, which resulted in the decision to end the settlement project.

To form the core of what would become the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, he recruited his brother Anthony, a cousin, his cousin-by-marriage Edward Maria Wingfield, as well as John Smith, in addition to members of his 1602 expedition.

Scrivener became Acting Governor of the new Colony, but drowned in an accident in 1609 along with Anthony Gosnold, Bartholomew's brother, while trying to cross to Hog Island in a storm.

Preservation Virginia began genetic fingerprinting, hoping to verify Gosnold's identity in time for the Jamestown quadricentennial.

By June 2005 researchers and The Discovery Channel sought permission to take DNA samples from the remains of his sister, Elizabeth Tilney, buried in the Church of All Saints, Shelley, Suffolk, and they were granted the first faculty for such a purpose by the English Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

In November 2005 Preservation Virginia announced that it had no reason to doubt that Tilney's remains were somewhere under the church floor, but its DNA testing had not confirmed a relationship.