THE Englishmen who invested their money in the Virginia Company’s high purpose were naturally disappointed in the colony’s failure to live up to expectations. But they were not sure what, if anything, to do about it. By 1618 they were divided into factions. One group, led by Sir Thomas Smith, was composed of big merchants, for whom Virginia was only one of many ongoing enterprises. These men, who had dominated the company’s counsels hitherto, could afford to regard Virginia as a long-term investment in which one need not look for immediate success. They were disappointed with the results thus far achieved and with the settlers’ new addiction to tobacco, but they were willing to wait for Smith, who had been highly successful in other ventures, to bring this one to fruition.1
Another group of members, led by Lord Robert Rich and his son, the future Earl of Warwick, were also willing to wait for returns on their investment. Their immediate interest in the colony lay less in direct profits from the settlers there than in the protection the colony could afford their ships. In spite of James I’s policy of peace with Spain, Rich and his associates were continuing the lucrative war of attrition begun by Hawkins and Drake. By obtaining privateering commissions from petty principalities like Savoy, they gave a color of legality to piratical cruises against Spanish shipping. But it was difficult to conduct such voyages from England without running into trouble with the king. Rich saw in Virginia a convenient base from which to strike the Caribbean. Bermuda, where the Virginia Company had planted another small settlement (on the grounds that Bermuda fell within the boundaries of the company’s charter), could serve the same purpose. As long as Virginia and Bermuda furnished a haven for their ships, Rich and his friends were not overly troubled by the failure to produce iron or silk or glass or any other commodity.
A third group of company members consisted of smaller men for whom the investment probably represented a larger share of their working capital than was the case with the Smith or Warwick factions. After ten years of waiting they were dissatisfied with the management of the big men. They wanted to see some action, and the production of a disreputable weed was not what they had in mind. Their leader, Sir Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, had become famous for his opposition to the policies of James I in the House of Commons. In the minds of other Englishmen, and doubtless in his own mind, he was one of the country’s outstanding defenders of freedom, a fact that probably helped to win him his following in the company.
It may also have won him, at least initially, the good will of the other factions. Neither merchants like Smith nor noblemen like Rich were notably fond of their king’s pretensions to divine right or less devoted than Sandys to the liberties that flowed from the power of Parliament. Nor were they any more content than Sandys to see their colony devote itself to the mere production of smoke. In 1618 all parties in the company agreed on a reorganization of the colony’s government and a rededication of its purposes. Most of the directives aimed at carrying out these objectives were adopted while Sir Thomas Smith was still treasurer of the company. But the man who carried them out or tried to carry them out, and who has been associated with them ever since, was Sir Edwin Sandys, whose following had grown large enough by 1619 to place him in the treasurer’s seat.
The new program involved a variety of measures, many of which were to have lasting effects on the colony’s history and on the pattern of human relations in it. Most of them derived from a recognition that the company must furnish greater incentives to individuals, both investors and settlers. Military organization and martial law had enabled the colony to survive, but they had not done much more than that. Men needed a larger stake in the country if they were to make it flourish. Governor Dale had recognized the need when he began assigning land to individuals as early as 1614, but he did it only in small amounts and without passing permanent title to the property. The first step in the new program was to grant some of Virginia’s land to the people who had chosen to live there. “Old Planters,” defined as those who had arrived before the spring of 1616, were to get a hundred acres apiece whenever their terms of service were up, or at once if they had come on their own. If they were also shareholders in the company by purchase, they got an additional hundred acres for every share. Settlers who had come after 1616 would get fifty acres. Henceforth anyone who came on his own or who paid for the transportation of someone else would be entitled to a “headright” of fifty acres.2
The company reserved a “quitrent” of a shilling a year on every fifty acres granted. The amount was small—a shilling was roughly the value of an ordinary day’s labor in England at the time and less than half that generally given in Virginia—but land was abundant. Though conveyed to individuals, it would yield a small annual income in quitrents to the company, increasing with the arrival of every new settler. Sandys was eager to use whatever funds he could raise for getting more people to the colony. In order to make settlement more attractive to England’s impoverished laborers, he offered an alternative to servitude: persons sent at company expense would be assigned land to work as sharecropping tenants under the direction of a company agent. They would turn over half of their earnings to the company for seven years, and then each would get fifty acres of his own.3
Sandys managed to send several hundred such tenants to work lands set aside for the company. And in order to speed up settlement, he induced various members of the company to join in sub-corporations or associations to found “particular plantations” peopled by tenants on the same terms. Investors in these associations obtained a hundred acres for every share of stock in the company plus fifty acres for every tenant they sent to occupy their lands. The lands of each association would form a separate little community within the colony.
Company members thus acquired a special interest in the colony, beyond the mere holding of stock. In other ways, too, the company encouraged the formation of special-interest groups within itself. It had already given up in 1616 the attempt to serve as the source of supplies for the colony and had turned this function over to a sub-corporation known as the “magazine,” in charge of an agent in the colony known as the “cape merchant.” The magazine, which was given exclusive rights for four years, expected to make a profit by selling English goods to the settlers, taking their produce in exchange. When the four years were up, in January, 1620, and the magazine showed no profit, the trade was thrown open to other associations, usually formed to support a single voyage at a time. Sandys was somehow able to persuade investors, for patriotism or profit, to keep risking their money on such magazines, on particular plantations, and on a variety of other projects to benefit the colony, such as the shipment of a hundred willing maids, to be sold to planters who could afford to buy a wife.
Sandys gave particular encouragement to the production of commodities, other than tobacco, for export to England. He proposed to set up three separate iron foundries and sent 150 men with experience in the business to man them, even though the colonists had not yet located an adequate source of ore.4 He made the sponsors of particular plantations agree to direct their tenants to “staple and solide Commodities … and not onely or chiefly to Tobacco.”5 And he gave specific instructions to the men in charge of the company tenants to see to it that they were employed in producing cordage (from silk grass), pitch, tar, potash, lumber (he sent materials for setting up sawmills and German millwrights to supervise the job), silk (King James, a silk enthusiast, furnished the cocoons), wine, salt, and fish. These, together with glass (the next year he sent some Italian glassmakers), were the commodities he wanted the colony to concentrate on, adding parenthetically, “Corne and Cattell we passe over, being only for sustenance of the People.”6 Sandys took for granted that the settlers by this time could provide themselves with plenty of corn and cattle while devoting their major attention to the commodities named. Tobacco was not one of them, and Sandys had made it plain that he wanted the company tenants to plant none of it. The following year, 1621, the company ordered that the colony grow no more than 100 pounds per person annually, a restriction that applied to everyone in the colony, including tenants on particular plantations.7
It was easier to make these orders than to enforce them, and a principal reason for the difficulty grew out of another element in the company’s new program. In its effort to make the colony attractive to settlers, the company had decided not only to give out land to settlers but also to furnish them with a more liberal, more English frame of government than the semi-military dictatorship that had prevailed for the preceding eight or ten years. The governor and council of the colony, appointed by the company, remained as before the principal governing officers, charged to carry out the instructions of the company. But their powers were henceforth to be limited in a way that would give the settlers on the spot a much greater degree of control over their lives. The Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall were junked, and the company prepared to draft a new code based on English common law.8 In addition, the first governor under the new regime, Sir George Yeardley, was instructed to call annually an assembly, consisting of his council and of two “burgesses” from every settlement in the colony, including the particular plantations and the four centers of settlement where the company was placing its own tenants: Jamestown, Charles City, Henrico, and Kecoughtan (later Elizabeth City). The burgesses were to be elected by the “inhabitants,” but the instructions said nothing about who was to be included under this term, nor does any surviving record tell us who actually was included. The assembly had the power to make laws, which became valid when approved by the company; and the company declared its intention ultimately to make its own regulations depend on approval by the assembly.9 Although its authority was thus limited, at least on paper, this was the first representative legislative assembly in English America and it would eventually expand its authority in the manner that other representative assemblies, including Parliament, have done.
In the eyes of the company at the time, however, the assembly was probably not the most important element in the plans to make Virginia politically attractive. The most conspicuous burden that every government imposes on its subjects is the cost of supporting it. At some point it occurred to the leaders of the company that they had a way of giving their settlers a unique freedom from this age-old burden of taxation. The lands that the king had granted the company in Virginia were abundant beyond measure, and England was filled with men who needed land and would work as sharecropping tenants for seven years in order to get it. The company would therefore assign to every office of government a portion of land and would undertake to furnish the initial tenants for it on the same seven-year fifty-fifty basis prescribed for the tenants sent to occupy the company lands. The purpose was plainly stated: “because our intent is to Ease all the Inhabitants of Virginia forever of all taxes and public burthens as much as may be and to take away all occasion of oppression and corruption.”10
The amounts were generous. The governor got 3,000 acres and 100 tenants.11 The treasurer (of the colony as distinct from the treasurer of the company), charged with over-all supervision of the production of new commodities, got 1,500 acres and 50 tenants.12 The marshal, an officer created in anticipation of the need to defend the colony against invaders, also got 1,500 acres and 50 tenants.13 The vice admiral, who had no ship, got 300 acres and 12 tenants.14 Ministers got 100 acres and 6 tenants.15 When the secretary of the colony was found to be taking high fees for issuing land grants, he was forbidden to do so and given land and tenants instead.16 It seemed an ideal arrangement. A government whose officers “should not need to prey upon the people”17 should be a gentle government indeed. When the settlers heard of it, one of them observed that if it were carried out, “then we may truly say in Virginia, we are the most happy people in the world.”18
In the effort to recover its original purpose and direction, the company did not forget the Indians. The new program coincided with the death of Powhatan and the succession of his brother Opechancanough, who at first showed as much coolness to the English as Powhatan ever had. Sandys secured £550 from an anonymous donor to pay for bringing up Indian children in English houses and teaching them English skills, but the Indians were fond of their children and unwilling to part with them. Governor Yeardley accordingly proposed, and Opechancanough agreed, to take whole families of Indians to live in the English settlements and provide them with houses of their own.19 By supporting Opechancanough in a quarrel with an interior tribe, Yeardley won a seeming support from the new monarch of Indian Virginia.20 The company also revived an earlier project for which funds had been donated, the establishment of a college where Indian youth would become acquainted with the more sophisticated aspects of Christianity and civility. Ten thousand acres had been set aside at Henrico for its endowment, and Sandys sent a hundred tenants to begin producing for it.21 To take charge of them in 1621 went George Thorpe, a former member of Parliament, now a member of the governor’s council and an ardent advocate of the biracial settlement that had thus far eluded realization. Thorpe, acting for a new governor, Sir Francis Wyatt, proved a more congenial negotiator than Yeardley, who had demonstrated his opinion of Indians too often in the past with gunfire. On a visit to the Indians Thorpe found that Opechancanough “had more motiones of religione in him then Coulde be ymmagined,” and the two of them projected an exchange whereby some Indian families would live among the English and some English families among the Indians.22
Meanwhile Sandys was rounding up settlers at a great rate. He pressed every English parish to ship off its poor.23 He got the City of London to send a hundred destitute boys to serve as apprentices.24 He got forty-four individuals and groups to take out patents for particular plantations.25 One way or another he managed within three years of becoming treasurer to get more than 3,500 persons to the colony, probably twice as many as had come in the preceding ten years.26 If all had gone as planned, Virginia should have presented an idyllic scene: tenants producing new commodities for the English market, enriching their sponsors while they laid up a nest egg for themselves, Indians learning English technology and religion in the bosom of the English settlement, the two races blending in a new community of good will. Instead, once again, good intentions paved the way to race war, famine, disease, death, and tobacco.
The most dramatic catastrophe came on March 22, 1622, when the Indians demonstrated that they did not share the hopes of men like Thorpe and Sandys for an integrated community. Thorpe had already observed that most of the English settlers did not share them either. “There is scarce any man amongest us,” he reported, “that doth soe much as afforde them [the Indians] a good thought in his hart and most men with their mouthes give them nothinge but maledictions and bitter execrations.”27 The Indians seemed to swallow the insults and moved freely among the settlers. And the settlers, relieved of the terrors of guerrilla warfare, spread out along the river, taking up lands wherever the location looked promising, with little heed for Indian ownership. But Indians were notoriously proud, their empty lands were not “unused,” and their seeming subservience might have signaled a warning. Opechancanough, spurred not only by the arrogance of the English but by their alarming growth in numbers, apparently decided on a concerted effort to wipe them out in a surprise attack. One of his subjects who had been converted to Christianity and to working for an English master revealed the plan in the nick of time. Even so, warnings could not be spread fast enough through the straggling settlements to prevent the massacre of 347 men, women, and children, including George Thorpe.28
The massacre released all restraints that the company had hitherto imposed on those who thirsted for the destruction or enslavement of the Indians. There was some disagreement as to whether they should be exterminated or put to work in some way. Captain John Martin, the leader of a particular plantation notorious for harboring debtors and dubious characters, argued against extirpation, not only because it seemed to him unchristian, but because the Indians kept down the woods (by firing), reduced the number of wolves and bear by their hunting, and because they were actually “apter for worke then yet our English are,” being able “to worke in the heate of the day.” They would be “fitt to rowe in Gallies and friggetts and many other pregnant uses too tedious to sett downe.”29 The secretary of the company, who reported the details of the massacre in a lengthy pamphlet, dwelt upon the Spanish example, dear to John Smith, and rejoiced that Virginia would now be free to follow it. He suggested that the Indians might “now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply the roome of men that labour, whereby even the meanest of the Plantation may imploy themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are more generous whilest Savages performe their inferiour workes of digging in mynes, and the like, ….”30
But Virginia had neither mines nor galleys, and though the settlers yearned for men who would be “apter for worke” than those they were getting from England, they bent their efforts more to exterminating than to enslaving the Indians. Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down, the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their corn wherever they chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the corn.31 When the company advised the governor and council to observe rules of justice in their campaign, they replied that “wee hold nothinge injuste, that may tend to their ruine, (except breach of faith).”32 But the exception in this case proved to be the rule. The English made treaties with the avowed intention of lulling the Indians into security, the better to surprise them.33 One negotiator carried a butt of poisoned sack to a peace parley on the Potomac and, after concluding a treaty, persuaded his hosts to drink to it. He could not be sure afterwards of the exact number he netted this way, but he estimated two hundred, besides fifty that he and his men killed with more solid weapons afterwards.34
Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day many times over. They had also put an end to Sandys’ plans for an integrated community of which the Indians would be a part. Though a few remained among them as servants or slaves (there is no way to be sure of their status), there was no longer any pretense of carrying on with the pious intentions that were still expressed from time to time in England.
The massacre was a setback to the company’s plans. Glassworking was halted. The ironworks, located far up the river, and still without a worthwhile source of ore, had to be abandoned, along with many of the particular plantations, as the settlers pulled together around Jamestown for safety.35 But the Indians, however frightening, were less effective at killing Englishmen than other causes that came to light after the massacre. By the time the massacre occurred, Sandys had succeeded in alienating the other factions in the company beyond recall. He insulted Sir Thomas Smith by demanding a more detailed accounting of his treasurership (hinting at embezzlement of company funds), and he made enemies of the Rich faction by ordering Governor Yeardley to clamp down on piracy. After the massacre, when his enemies began to close in on him, they discovered that the company was virtually bankrupt and that its colony, long before the Indians raised their hands, had become a charnel house. The story is succinctly told in some notes made by Samuel Wrote, a disgruntled and disillusioned investor. After finding that the company records showed 3,570 persons sent to the colony in three years under the Sandys program and that 700 had been already there, for a total of 4,270, he discovered that only 1, 240 were alive at the time of the massacre. “It Consequentlie followes,” he noted, “that wee had then lost 3000 persons within those 3 yeares.” The Indians had killed 347, but something else had killed 3,000, the great majority of the persons sent.36
The figures seem incredible, but if they erred it was only in perhaps underestimating the number of people present at the time Sandys took over. The death rate may have been even worse than Wrote supposed, and it continued at least as high after the massacre as before. The only question is how it could have happened. The Smith and Rich factions in the company knew that whoever else might be to blame, Sir Edwin Sandys was. Unable to challenge him successfully in the company itself, they turned to the king and called for an official investigation. To the commission the king appointed they presented the shocking facts, together with letters from the colony describing the arrival of masses of immigrants without adequate supplies. Handicapped by an empty treasury, Sandys had been able to find men but not supplies. And ship captains, interested only in the fee received for transporting them, overloaded their ships with passengers and dumped the survivors ashore in Virginia half dead with scurvy. When the king’s commission found out what was happening, they had little choice but to call for an end to the Virginia Company. In 1624 the king dissolved the company and placed Virginia under his own control.
Because the Stuart kings became symbols of arbitrary government and because Sir Edwin Sandys was a champion of Parliamentary power and was even accused at the time of being a republican, historians for long interpreted the dissolution of the Virginia Company as a blow dealt to democracy by tyranny. Modern scholarship has altered the verdict and shown that any responsible monarch would have been obliged to stop the reckless shipment of his subjects to their deaths.37 There can be no doubt that Sandys and the members of the company who backed him must bear the blame for sending so many ill-equipped settlers to a colony that was unprepared to receive them. But when we pause to consider the dimensions of his responsibility, we are faced by the same enigma with which we started. In 1619, when Sandys started to pour in settlers, the colony had been in existence for twelve years. Giving all due consideration to the conditioned laziness of English labor and to the disastrous alienation of the Indians, we may still ask how it could be that a colony which had lasted for a dozen years in a country where a minimum of labor would sustain life was nevertheless unable to provide for so many helping hands. Since question and answer center on the lack of food supplies, it will be appropriate to examine what people in Virginia during the Sandys administration said about the scarcity of provisions, considering their statements from the harvest of one year to the harvest of the next.
1619–20. When George Yeardley arrived as governor in April, 1619, to inaugurate the company’s new program, he took over a colony in which the supplies of cattle and corn were, as usual, low. Yeardley reported that he would devote himself in the coming year to getting a good crop of corn.38 On June 25 the arrival of the Trial, loaded with corn and cattle, “tooke from us cleerely all feare of famine.” In spite of an epidemic that weakened and killed large numbers, the colony reaped unprecedented harvests that summer, and by the end of September the settlers enjoyed, according to John Pory (no friend of Yeardley) “a marvelous plenty, suche as hath not bene seen since our first coming into the lande.”39 In January, 1620, John Rolfe too reported the abundance of corn, and of fish brought from Newfoundland and sturgeon caught in Virginia.40 According to these leaders of the settlement, Virginians were apparently well fed in the winter of 1619–20.
1620–21. There are no surviving reports about the amount of corn grown in the summer of 1620, but in November Sir Edwin Sandys informed the company that the settlers no longer wanted English meal sent them. Instead, they preferred beads for trade with the Indians.41 It is evident from other sources too that the colonists were getting corn from the Indians. In December, long after harvest time, George Thorpe observed that “this countrey meandes [i.e., mends, improves] in plentie of victuall everie daie,” and he probably meant in supplies obtained from the Indians.42 By May, 1621, Captain Thomas Nuce, a newcomer, observed that the men sent under his charge lived “very barely for the most part: havinge no other foode but bread and water and such manner of meate as they make of the Mayze: which I would to God I Could say they had in any reasonable plenty.” They would have been distressed, he said, if one of their ships had not brought in corn from Chesapeake Bay, where the colony now had “good and free trade” (with the Indians).43 The winter of 1620–21 was apparently not a plentiful one, but there was no talk of starvation. In June George Thorpe reported that people were blessed with good health and good hope of a plentiful harvest of all kinds.44
1621–22. Again there is no specific report of the harvest. On December 15, 1621, Peter Arondelle, another newcomer, complained of his family’s lean diet of one and a half pints of musty meal a day per man.45 But the governor and council reported in January that in the nine ships which had arrived during the autumn, none of the passengers died on the way and all continued in health.46 A ship from Ireland in November came “soe well furnished with all sortes of provisione, aswell as with Cattle, as wee could wishe all men would follow theire example.”47 If Arondelle’s complaint represents a general scarcity in the colony, it was not serious enough to lower his enthusiasm for Virginia, because just two weeks later he was writing home about the abundance of cattle and hogs both wild and domestic and observing that “any laborious honest man may in a shorte time become ritche in this Country.”48 The winter of 1621–22 produced no other surviving complaints of scarcity. There was even some boasting that new immigrants no longer need fear danger from “wars, or famine, or want of convenient lodging and looking to.”49
Then, on March 22, the Indians struck, killing not only settlers but also much needed cattle. Planting operations had to be curtailed, for corn furnished shelter to lurking Indians.50 There was no choice but to seek relief from the Indians themselves, not those who had participated in the massacre, but those to the north or south. Various captains were commissioned to get corn from them, by trade if they could, by force if they could not. There was not even a remote possibility that the harvest might be sufficient.
1622–23. The corn obtained from the Indians and from the settlers’ meager crops fell far short of the need, and most Virginians went hungry, as prices skyrocketed for whatever provisions there were.51 On July 2, 1623, Delphebus Canne, recently arrived from England, regretted not having brought more meal, oatmeal, and peas for sale to the settlers, because “now the land is destitute of food.” But he noted that the weather had been good and that people expected a large harvest of both corn and tobacco. Canne also remarked on another source of food. Long before Virginia was thought of, fishermen of all nations had discovered the Grand Banks and swarmed there every summer. By this time the ships that carried settlers to the colony sometimes made a shuttle voyage to the Banks after they arrived or traded there on the way. According to Canne, ships were expected daily from Canada and Newfoundland with enough fish for the whole ensuing year.52
1623–24. Whether the corn crop and the awaited cargoes from the north fulfilled expectations is not clear. In January the governor and council reported that “the scarsitie this foreruninge yeere hath been greate, and who could expect less, after such a massacre, yett none to our knowledg hath Perished through wante, many seasoned men goinge through theire labours, beside hard marches, which endured the same Comone scarsitie.”53 By April enough provisions had been obtained from the Indians to end the crisis.54
The reports all reflect some scarcity of food between 1618 and 1624. But only during the year following the massacre was the scarcity acute, and in the winter and spring after the bumper harvest of 1619 there seems to have been no scarcity at all. Yet it is precisely from this winter and spring that we have the most explicit complaints from Virginia about people arriving without adequate provisions. On November 4, 1619, when a hundred company tenants arrived “lusty and well” on the Bona Nova, the governor and council calculated that the 544 bushels of meal sent with them would last only five and a half months at two pounds a man per day. Fifty men were therefore parceled out for a year to private planters.55 Yet two or three months earlier, when a Dutch ship put in at the colony, the governor and cape merchant bartered Virginia provisions for twenty-odd Negroes (the first known Negroes to enter the colony), who certainly came ashore unsupplied with anything.56 It is not recorded that the Negroes were put to work for the company. The following June, after some four hundred more settlers arrived, Governor Yeardley wrote plaintively to the company, urging them to send subsequent ships with more provisions, adding that “yf such nombers of people come upon me unexpected, and that at an unhealthfull season and to late to sett Corne I cannott then be able to feed them owt of others labors.” In the future, he begged them, they should send men before Christmas (by November 4 perhaps?) with six months’ provisions (instead of five and a half?).57
Yeardley’s complaints, his purchase of the Negroes, and his disposal of the company tenants from the Bona Nova, at a time when the colony was reporting an unprecedented abundance, suggest that the problem was not altogether one of whether supplies existed. It was a question of who had them and of who could pay for them. In a year of plenty the governor and council were unable or unwilling to make use of fifty men with allegedly inadequate supplies when other Virginians were able and willing to do so. The great shortage of supplies, to which we attribute the failure of the Sandys program, was not an absolute shortage in which all Virginians shared and suffered alike. It was a shortage that severely afflicted the company and its dependents, but it furnished large opportunities for private entrepreneurs, and larger ones for company officials who knew how to turn public distress to private profit.
Thoughout the period when too many men were arriving with too few supplies, the established settlers were so eager for more workers that they paid premium wages for them, even when they had to feed as well as pay them. In 1621 the governor and council set maximum wage rates at three shillings a day for ordinary laborers and four shillings for most skilled craftsmen (joiners got five). If the workman was furnished with food for the day, the rate was only a shilling a day less.”58 These figures amount to three or four times the maximum wages of day labor established by county justices in England, where a man who was fed by his employer generally received about half the wage of one who furnished his own food.59 Food was comparatively less valuable in Virginia than in England.
Daily-wage earners were only a small part of Virginia’s labor force. Most workers were either tenants or servants bound for a period of years. Servants were what the planters most wanted. It had been common in England for farmers to hire servants by the year; and as we have seen, employers in many trades were required by law to hire their labor by the year.60 But servants who wanted to go to Virginia were willing to pledge several years’ work, usually four to seven years, in return for transportation and maintenance. If a Virginia planter could import a man from England, the cost of his passage to the colony was about six pounds sterling; his provisions and clothes for the voyage and to start him out in the New World might run another four to six pounds.61 At this rate the cost per year for a servant in Virginia was not much more, and might be less, than in England; for in England, too, masters had to provide food and shelter and sometimes clothing for their bound servants, and a year’s pay for an agricultural worker ran from thirty to fifty shillings (there were 20 shillings to the pound) in the first decades of the seventeenth century.62
Although the planter or entrepreneur who brought a servant to the New World ran the risk of losing his investment through death, Virginia planters evidently shared Edwin Sandys’ belief that the rewards outweighed the risks. Despite the fact that bound servants had to be fed, clothed, and housed, Virginians could not get enough of them. Everybody wanted servants. Even tenants who had been unable to pay their own passage to the colony wanted servants. Richard Berkeley and John Smyth (of Nibley) received from the tenants at their particular plantation a request for two servants apiece “for their owne pryvate benefit and imploymentes.”63 Indeed as John Pory put it, “our principall wealth … consisteth in servants.”64 And after the Virginia Company had been dissolved, former Governor Yeardley, now representing the interests of the colonists, urged the royal commission in charge of the colony “to advance the Plantation for the future by sending great numbers of people.”65
It would seem, then, that the failure of the Virginia Company should not be blamed entirely on its transportation of too many unequipped settlers. The demise of the company came at a time when the men on the spot were crying for more settlers. If the Virginia Company was a failure, some at least of its colonists were succeeding. And the way they succeeded will bear looking into.
1 My account of the divisions in the company rests heavily on W. F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company.
2 RVC, III, 100–101, 107.
3 RVC, III, 90–100. Though the records do not say how the tenants were to be supported until they were able to raise a crop for themselves, the company evidently expected to furnish them with provisions for the first months.
4 RVC, III, 309.
5 RVC, III, 360,628.
6 RVC, III, 275–80, 489.
7 RVC, III, 473; Smith, Travels and Works, II, 565.
8 RVC, I, 333, 394–95.
9 RVC, III, 483–84.
10 RVC, III, 99.
11 RVC, 1, 256, 268; III, 99.
12 RVC, 1, 454.
13 RVC, 1, 454.
14 RVC, 1, 549.
15 RVC, III, 277.
16 RVC, 1, 332–33; II, 94–95, 109.
17 RVC, IV, 523.
18 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 543.
19 RVC, 1,307–8, 585–89; III, 128–29.
20 RVC, III, 228.
21 RVC, III, 102,115.
22 RVC, III, 446, 584.
23 RVC, 1, 411–12,479–80, 489.
24 RVC, 1,304–7.
25 Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 59.
26 A tally of the number sent from the beginning to May, 1616, comes to 1,650. Brown, Genesis, II, 782.
27 RVC, III, 446.
28 RVC, III, 541–79.
29 RVC, III, 706.
30 RVC, III, 558–59.
31 RVC, IV, 9–10, 507–8, 569.
32 RVC, IV, 451.
33 RVC, IV, 98–99,102.
34 RVC, IV, 220–22.
35 RVC, III, 612–13; IV, 11–12, 23.
36 RVC, III, 536–37; IV, 158–59.
37 Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, esp. 1–23.
38 RVC, III, 118–22.
39 Smith, Travels and Works, II, 541; RVC, III, 220; I, 310.
40 RVC, III, 241–48.
41 RVC, I, 423.
42 RVC, III, 417.
43 RVC, III, 455–56.
44 RVC, III, 462.
45 RVC, III, 534–35.
46 RVC, III, 582.
47 RVC, III, 587.
48 RVC, III, 589.
49 Brown, First Republic in America, 465.
50 Edward D. Neill, Virginia Carolorum (Albany, N.Y., 1886), 53; RVC, III, 613–14; IV, 186, 234.
51 RVC, IV, 41–42, 58–62, 89, 231–35. Cf. P. A. Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., New York, 1895), II, 6–8.
52 VMHB, VI (1898–99), 373–74. On voyages to Canada see RVC, IV, 96, 221, 253, 272, 461, 477, 513. Lawrence Leigh wrote to Nicholas Ferrar from London, September 18, 1623, that someone who left Virginia the last of May in that year had reported that “the people stood well at helth” and were “in great hope of a verye good Croppe of Corne.” Ferrar Papers, Box VII, No. 726, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
53 RVC, IV, 452.
54 RVC, IV, 475. The harvest in the summer of 1624 was plentiful. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: America and West Indies, I, 70–71 (C.O. 1/3, f. 102).
55 RVC, III, 226, 246; Smith, Travels and Works, II, 542.
56 RVC, III, 243. It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1625 Yeardley (governor in 1619) and Abraham Peirsey (cape merchant in 1619) held 15 of the 23 Negroes then in the colony.
57 RVC, III, 299.
58 WMQ, 2nd ser., VII (1927), 246; RVC, III, 590. Cf. the similar rates set in tobacco in Bermuda in 1623 and 1617. J. H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1515–1685 (2 vols., London, 1877–79), I, 305.
59 J. E. T. Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (6 vols., Oxford, 1866–1900), VI, 632–33, 692–9s5; S. A. H. Burne, ed., The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, V (Collections for a History of Staffordshire edited by the Staffordshire Record Society, Kendal, 1940), 259–61, 324–26.
60 25 Edward III, c. 2; 3 Edward VI, c. 22; 5 Elizabeth I, c. 4.
61 RVC, III, 499–500; Neill, Virginia Carolorum, 109–11; VMHB, XIII (1905–6), 387; Bruce, Economic History, I, 629; Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, 49.
62 See references in note 59 and Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, XVII, 116.
63 RVC, III, 399. At least two company tenants, Francis Fowler and Thomas Dunthorne, held servants in 1626. See H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, 1924), 96, 108, 136, 137.
64 RVC, III 221. It follows that the rising demand ran up the price of servants in Virginia to an amount well above the mere cost of transportation and maintenance.
65 C.O. 1/3, ff 227–28;. WMQ, 2nd ser., VIII (1928), 162.