Gov. Timothy M. Kaine this week will celebrate the start of America's 400th birthday - in England.

On Tuesday, the anniversary of the day in 1606 that three ships carrying Jamestown's settlers left London, Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, will join other dignitaries on the banks of the Thames River in London for a commemorative ceremony.

The event will take place at the Museum in Docklands, part of the Museum of London group, which will officially open a special exhibit titled "Journey to the New World: London 1606 to Virginia 1607."

In the original voyage, the three ships - the Godspeed, the Susan Constant and the Discovery - and the 105 Jamestown settlers took five months to reach Virginia. Their stopping place near today's Williamsburg became the first permanent English settlement in America.

A reproduction of the Discovery that formerly was a tourist attraction in Jamestown will be moored in front of the museum. Kaine will formally present the small ship as a gift to the United Kingdom from the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a Virginia state agency.

A new Discovery reproduction has been built in Maine and is undergoing sea trials.

The Jamestown British Committee, an organization working with Virginia groups to commemorate the Jamestown anniversary, provided a written preview of Tuesday's event. It includes quotations from Kaine and from Robert H. Tuttle, U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

"Today, we pay tribute to the founding of the Jamestown colony and the legacies of free enterprise, representative democracy and cultural diversity that began there," Kaine said in the written preview. "We also honor the sense of adventure and fortitude that led the British settlers to play such a key role in beginning one of the world's greatest nations."

Later on Tuesday, Kaine is scheduled to be one of two keynote speakers at a commemorative dinner for 300 guests at Middle Temple in London, a 17th-century building in which the Virginia Company was incorporated on April 10, 1606.

The Virginia Company was the commercial enterprise that created and controlled the Jamestown expedition.

A second keynote address is to be delivered by the Right Honorable Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, lord chief justice of England and Wales.

The London events are part of an ongoing Jamestown commemoration that will include a three-day America's Anniversary Weekend festival in Jamestown on May 11-13 to mark the anniversary of the settlers' arrival.

Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, have scheduled a state visit to the U.S., including a visit to Jamestown, in May. The date of the visit has not been set, but officials hope it will take place during the anniversary weekend.

Officials acknowledged last week that there is some disagreement among historians about whether the Jamestown settlers departed on Dec.19 or Dec. 20, 1606.

Whichever the date, the chairman of the federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission said marking the voyage's start helps make the anniversary an international partnership."We felt that while the major American activities focus on the arrival, from the standpoint of our British counterparts . . . the departure or launch from England was a very important anniversary," Frank Atkinson said.