Witness
In the late summer and early autumn of 1621, a succession of ships set sail from England bound for Jamestown, Virginia. On board were fifty-six young women of certified good character and proven skills, hand-picked by the Virginia Company of London to make wives for the planters of its fledgling colony.1 The oldest was twenty-eight (or so she claimed) and the youngest barely sixteen. All were reputedly young, handsome and honestly brought up, unlike the prostitutes and vagrant children swept off the streets of London in previous years and transported to the colony as cheap labour.
The Virginia Company’s aim in shipping the women to Virginia was that of money men everywhere: to generate a profit by bringing merchantable goods to market. Since King James had abruptly suspended the Virginia lotteries on which the colony depended for funds, the company’s coffers were bare. Importing would-be brides was one of four moneymaking schemes designed to keep the company afloat, and its leaders in London hoped to ensure the colony’s long-term viability by rooting the unruly settlers to the land with ties of family and children. While the women travelled of their own free will, the company had set a bride price of 150lbs of tobacco for each woman sold into marriage, which represented a healthy return for individual investors. These were businessmen, after all, doing what they did best: making money.
But the women – what did they want from the enterprise? Why did they agree to venture across the seas to a wild and heathen land where life was hard and mortality rates were catastrophic? Had anyone whispered a word to them about the dangers they faced, or warned them how slim their chances of survival really were?
The Jamestown Brides sets out to tell the women’s story: who they were, what sort of lives they led before falling into the Virginia Company’s net, the hopes and fears that propelled them across the Atlantic, and what happened to them when they reached their journey’s end. I have stuck as doggedly as I am able to what the ‘evidence’ tells us, but the record is worn as thin as a vagrant’s coat, requiring a bold leap of the imagination to appreciate from the inside the shock of transitioning from one life to another, made all the harder by the four centuries that separate then from now.
Considered a mere footnote to Virginia’s colonial history, the story of the ‘maids for Virginia’ first came to me in Colonial Williamsburg’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, where I was researching Strange Blooms, a dual biography of John Tradescant and his son (also called John), gardeners to the Stuart kings and early collectors of plants and curiosities. Distracted by guides in eighteenth-century costume who were visiting the library to check their facts or simply to escape the tourists, I chanced across David Ransome’s scholarly article, ‘Wives for Virginia, 1621’.2 The story of these women shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic to procure husbands has stayed with me ever since for reasons that are only partly personal. Then soon to be divorced myself, I could also be said to be looking for a husband, but how far would I travel to find one? (Answer: not far enough to find one.) Beyond that, I wondered what combination of faith, hope, courage, curiosity or just plain desperation might encourage me or anyone else – at any time – to journey into the unknown.
The starting point for my researches was a series of remarkable lists that survive at Magdalene College, Cambridge, among the papers of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant closely involved with the Virginia Company who would later retreat with his extended family to found an informal Anglican community at Little Gidding in the historic county of Huntingdonshire. Intended as a kind of sales catalogue for prospective husbands, the lists record the women’s personal histories: name, age, marital status, birthplace, parentage, father’s occupation, domestic skills, guarantors and testimonials from their elders and betters. Dry as they are, lists such as these quickly come alive as you make connections, chase after hares, interrogate possibilities, scramble into and out of dead ends like the ‘Kremlinologists’ identified by the Virginian historian Cary Carson – ‘decoders of elusive clues’ from the few surviving scraps of evidence, much of it buried underground.3
The Virginia Company’s council had every right to take pride in the human cargo they had assembled at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight and later at Gravesend. Some one in six were the daughters of gentry or claimed gentry relatives, while the rest presented a microcosm of ‘middling’ England, with fathers, brothers, uncles working in respectable trades. They came recommended by the great and good of the City of London or by company investors and employees, from the lowliest porter to Sir Edwin Sandys himself, the effective leader of the Virginia Company and chief architect of the scheme to bring brides to the colony.
One of the maids jumped ship on the Isle of Wight, but miraculously the rest survived the Atlantic crossing and arrived in good health. A few were married before the ships left Jamestown, so we are told, but a little over three months later an Indian attack wiped out between a quarter and a third of the English colony. For the word purists among us, descendants of Virginia’s indigenous people continue to call themselves Indians – and so I shall use the term throughout this book – but you must be careful how you refer to the events of that cataclysmic day. At the time it was invariably labelled a ‘massacre’, later an ‘uprising’ and now simply an ‘attack’ or the ‘Great Assault’, as a way of sharing responsibility for what happened, after fifteen years of concerted land grabs by English settlers and barbaric acts committed by both sides.
Some of the Jamestown brides died in the slaughter, others clung tenaciously to life. Lists of the living and the dead compiled soon after the attack and two later censuses allow us to track what happened to around one third of the Jamestown brides, who also appear fleetingly in court records and the minutes of Virginia’s general assemblies, held from 1619. However brief and apparently inconsequential, such records throw up snippets of everyday life: malicious gossip, misdemeanours, fraudulent land registrations and squabbles over property, the stuff of life that illuminates what became of the women and the kind of men they chose to marry.
In retelling the women’s stories, I am trying to experience life as they found it and to participate in the choices and decisions they made. Inevitably this means slipping myself into the narrative, as unobtrusively as possible, especially when I go looking for the women on the streets of London, in the backwaters of rural England and the Virginian swamps and settlements to which they scattered. The histories I enjoy take me back into the past but also bring the past into the present, however dislocating the effect. And so I found myself sifting through the detritus of material culture, the post holes and broken pottery shards of Carson’s Kremlinologists, looking for sites which the women may have seen and objects they may have held in their hands. I found them too, always with a heady rush of recognition: bodkins of silver and brass excavated at Jordan’s Point on the Upper James where one of the brides settled, fragments of clay milk pans made by a potter known to another of the women, although she never found herself an English husband; hers is one of the most unsettling of all the women’s stories.
No letter or journal survives from any of these women, nor should we expect any to surface. While girls from the middling classes might be taught to read along with sewing and knitting, writing was a skill generally reserved for boys and for the children (boys and girls) of the upper gentry or families exposed to humanist education. The task I have therefore set myself is to bear witness to the lives and stories of these women, whose voices have left no trace in the historical record. ‘i will be her witness’ is how the narrator of Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer begins her story of the decline and fall of one Charlotte Douglas, who dreamed her life and died, hopeful, in the fictional Central American republic of Boca Grande. The story I am telling is fact not fiction, but like Didion’s narrator I struggle to make sense of what happened.
Much of the book’s textual detail comes from listening to the ‘chatter’ of the times: the sardonic musings of social commentator John Chamberlain; the nostalgic antiquarian John Stow writing about a London that was changing before his eyes; Virginia Company records, which you must read between the lines in order to disentangle factional truths and falsehoods; the bombastic but always lively writings of Captain John Smith on Virginia and seafaring topics; accounts and letters home from a variety of early settlers, whose viewpoints veer from the disaffected to the wildly propagandist; and one of the richest sources of all, the babble of voices from the street contained in contemporary ballads, once derided as a historical source but now valued as social texts.
My book falls naturally into two halves, divided partly by geography and partly by chronology. Part One, ‘England and its Virginian Colony’, tells the women’s stories up to the moment they boarded their ships at Cowes and Gravesend. Early chapters delve into their social, economic and geographical backgrounds, grouping them according to the ships by which they sailed to Virginia. Crucially, this part looks also at how it felt to be a woman in early modern England. We need to know where the women came from, literally and metaphorically, to judge how far they travelled. The focus of Part One then switches to the Virginia Company’s colonization of North America, refracting Virginia’s early history through the experience of largely female settlers, although Chapter 6, ‘La Belle Sauvage’, examines the parallel narrative of Pocahontas’s marriage to English settler John Rolfe, and the perplexing fate of the Virginia Indian women who accompanied the Rolfes to England in 1616.
A short ‘Intermezzo’ carries the women across the Atlantic and tacks with them slowly up the James River to Jamestown, where they arrive in the winter of 1621.
Part Two, ‘Virginia’, takes the story forward, setting out as forensically as I am able how the colony will have appeared to these young women fresh from England, and how they settled into their new lives. Here lies the heart of the book, which also provides a fresh perspective on the Indian attack and its aftermath. Where did the women stay? How did they choose their husbands? Where did they go and how did they adapt to their new lives? Who lived and who died? What happened to those who never married? Did investors in the scheme ever reap the rewards they were promised? These are some of the questions I try to answer as honestly as I can, looking also at the Virginia Company’s inevitable decline and fall. Chapters 15 to 18 pick up the lives of four women who survived through the 1620s, three who married and one who was captured by the Indians. Tracking these four women through the records and on the ground has been a joy, linking the very English landscapes of their childhoods to the creeks and inlets of tidewater Virginia where they made their homes. Place matters in this book, as you will see.
In my acknowledgements I pay tribute to the enormous help I have received from many people and institutions in the UK and in Virginia. Here I would like to thank three women in particular who have generously shared with me their unique insights and helped to guide my researches in Virginia: historian Martha McCartney, anthropologist and cultural historian Helen Rountree, and curator Beverly (Bly) Straube. This is a book written by a woman about women’s experiences, aided by women. Men have helped too, of course. I think of archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti giving up a bright but bitter Sunday morning to walk me over the ground of Martin’s Hundred, and riverkeeper Jamie Brunkow taking me from Jamestown down to Burwell’s Bay and back again, to experience the river as the women will have done, from the water. Thank you all: without your help this would be a far slimmer book.
Historians are taught not to judge the past by the standards of today, fair enough, but the fundamental question I am asking demands the exercise of judgement. I leave this task with you in the hope that you may find your own answers in the pages that follow. Were these women the victims of a patriarchal society, shipped overseas to serve the interests of others: investors who stood to gain from their ‘sale’, company officials who wished to tame male colonists with the carrot of female company, planters looking for female skills to aid their colonizing endeavours, English families wishing to dispose of unmarried daughters on the cheap? Or were they adventurers in the truest sense, women prepared to invest their persons rather than their purses in the New World?