The Henry Bagwell Story

IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist (Regional Nonfiction - Mid Atlantic), 2022

The Henry Bagwell Story is a remarkable tale of survival and achievement against great odds. It is the first biography of an influential early English settler of the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the early 17th century.

Henry Bagwell was an enterprising young man from a prosperous merchant family in Exeter, Devon, England. A passenger on the ill-fated "Third Supply" mission that shipwrecked on the reefs of Bermuda en route to Jamestown in 1609, Bagwell earned the unofficial title of "adventurer" and the official designation of "Ancient Planter."

Bagwell was in the early wave of seventeenth-century English pioneers who dared to cross a dangerous ocean (in his case, more than once); to serve his time in the development and defense of a new land; and then to take possession of the acreage for which he had worked.

He was an important personality in the emerging society of the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the progenitor of a substantial family.

This is the first biography that has been written about him.