The National Bank of Poland just issued a unique 2008 silver 10 zlotych coin with a glass core commemorating the 400 years of Polish settlement in North America. The glass core shows a stylized image of a man blowing glassware. The ring shows fragments of a stylized map of Virginia, ships, settlers, Natives, and men smelting glass.
In 1606, king James I Stuart chartered the Virginia Company of London with the right to colonize and exploit the resources of the southern part of North America. On this basis, the English started the establishment of their own colonies in the New World. In December 1606, a hundred British settlers ventured across the Atlantic. Jamestown, the first permanent outpost, was established about 40 miles from the mouth of the James river entering the Chesapeake Bay, on the land inhabited then by the Powhatan confederation of the Algonquian tribes. The next party landed in Jamestown in 1608, with eight people from Prussia and Poland, most probably coopers, making barrels to store food, glass-makers, and tar makers, who could produce charcoal, coal and wood tar a well as potash used for the construction and operation of sailing ships. Those first anonymous Polish settlers pioneered the emigration from the territory of Poland to North America, particularly large in the second half of the 19th century.
