Christopher Newport - Legacy

Legacy

• Newport News Point, where the mouth of the James River joins the harbor of Hampton Roads, later part of the independent city of Newport News, Virginia, is widely believed to have been named for him, although the exact history of the subject remains in some dispute. Some scholars believe that it is more likely that it was named for settlers from Ireland with the surname of Neuce. There is also a town in Flanders named Nieu Poort, the site of a contemporary battle between the Dutch and Spaniards, which had been won by the Dutch with the assistance of English soldiers.

• Christopher Newport University, in Newport News is named in honor of him.

• Captain Newport was portrayed by actors David Hemblen in Pocahontas: The Legend in 1999 and Christopher Plummer in Terrence Malick's 2005 film The New World, but did not appear in the 1995 Disney animated film or its 1998 direct-to-video sequel. In the Disney movies, his role is replaced by the villainous Governor Ratcliffe.

• In 2005-2006 playwright Steven Breese wrote Actus Fidei (An Act of Faith), based on the life and times of Captain Christopher Newport, as part of the Jamestown 2007 Festival. This play received its world premiere in the Spring of 2007 at Christopher Newport University.

• A biography on Captain Newport, by A. Bryant Nichols Jr., was published in 2007.

• A statue commemorating Captain Newport was recently unveiled at his namesake University, CNU. The statue has been the subject of some controversy, as it depicts Newport with both hands, while it is historically documented that Newport lost one of his hands at sea. The creator of the statue says, in an interview, that we should "not remember our heroes as mutilated."