The Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America was established on May 14, 1607.  The year before King James gave a charter to investors who formed the Virginia Company to establish a colony in the New World and of course search for gold and silver as well as a river to the Pacific Ocean.

Three ships containing about 100 colonists made their way along the Chesapeake Bay and landed on a narrow peninsula on a river that they named the James River. While some crew returned to England, the settlers led by John Smith, faced dysentery, starvation, and attack by the local Algonquian Indians tribes organized under Chief Powhatan. In 1607 John Smith was held captive by Chief Powhatan, and according to Smith, Pocahontas, a daughter of the Chief, had rescued him from death). 

Dr. Sara Schechner and her compatriots A.D. Morrison-Low and Paolo Brenni [How Scientific Instruments Have Changed Hands, 2017 Boston] bring the Smith-Powhatan exchange alive with a story of Smith's sundial:

"We begin with the most famous sundial: the one that brought Captain John Smith into contact with the Indian princess Pocahontas, in 1607.  It was a unusual, spherical, ivory compass sundial, and the dashing captain boasted that it had saved his life by fascinating his Indian captors in Virginia.  Smith's spherical sundial does not survive, but archaeological excavations of the James Fort site have yielded examples of rectangular, ivory diptych sundials made in Nuremberg.  This more common form was apparently preferred by the English gentlemen who accompanied Smith to Jamestown in 1607.  The gnomonic projections on their sundials appear to be for latitudes more the 10 deg north of Jamestown, but accuracy in time finding was not critical in a wilderness fort.  More important was the magnetic compass embedded in each diptych, which gave directions, and perhaps the fact that these ivory tools still had the capacity to impress other settlers of a lower status."