Of Hogs and Women
The Jamestown brides were by no means the first English women to set foot on North American soil. That honour belongs to the women and girls who accompanied John White, a gentleman artist from London, on a colonizing expedition of 1587 masterminded by Sir Walter Raleigh, after previous (all-male) attempts to establish colonies had failed. White had himself sailed with at least one of these earlier expeditions, recording native life in a series of watercolours that capture in exquisite detail how early Europeans viewed this strange new land and – to their eyes – its even stranger inhabitants.1 In 1587 he returned as governor with nearly 120 settlers who included some fourteen families and kinship groups, among them his own heavily pregnant daughter Elinor and her husband Ananias Dare, who had married at St Clement Danes church in Westminster on 24 June 1583, the same church that would later include Catherine Finch’s brother John among its parishioners.2 In all, seventeen of White’s settlers were women, perhaps a dozen wives and the rest single women who may have been servants.3 Also travelling with the group were nine boys and two male infants.
White’s intended destination was the Chesapeake Bay, but the Portuguese master of their flagship refused to take them any further than Roanoake Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, where they found the melancholy remains of an earlier abandoned English fort ‘overgrowen with Melons of divers sortes, and Deere within them, feeding on those Mellons’.4 White’s granddaughter was born soon after their arrival, on 18 August 1587, and christened the following Sunday. ‘And because this childe was the first Christian borne in Virginia, she was named Virginia,’ wrote White soberly in his journal.5 Another child was born to Dyonis and Margery Harvie shortly afterwards, gender and Christian name unknown.
What happened to Virginia Dare and the others would come to haunt later colonists. At the settlers’ behest, John White sailed reluctantly back to England towards the end of August to replenish the colony’s dwindling supplies, leaving behind his daughter, granddaughter and the rest of the colonists. A succession of calamities delayed his return – the Spanish Armada, bad weather, French pirates and renewed Anglo-Spanish hostilities – and when White finally reached Roanoke, on his granddaughter’s third birthday, the only trace of the settlers were the initials CRO chiselled on a tree and the word CROATOAN carved on a palisade, suggesting that the settlers had decamped to a nearby island. A storm was brewing and White’s sailors refused to continue the search, although they did find three of his buried chests, which had been disturbed, ‘my things spoyled and broken, and my bookes torne from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and Mappes rotten and spoyled with rayne, and my armour almost eaten through with rust’.6 White never saw his daughter or granddaughter again.
Virginia Dare has since become the stuff of folklore: comic-book heroine, postage stamp image, symbol of hope and new beginnings but also an icon of white supremacists; make of her what you will. The Virginia Company instructed sea captains and later colonists to search for Raleigh’s lost company, who were fleetingly sighted but never found. An early Jamestown settler (George Percy) recorded seeing ‘a Savage Boy about the age of ten yeeres, which had a head of haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne, which is a Miracle amongst all Savages’.7 Ben Jonson slipped the lost colonists into Eastward Hoe, his co-authored play of 1605, in which Captain Seagull solicits money for a voyage to Virginia: ‘they have married with the Indians,’ says Seagull, ‘and make ’hem bring forth as beautifull faces as any we have in England’.8 Another rumour surfaced in an early travel book about Virginia written by William Strachey, who served for a time as secretary there: that an Indian chieftain kept seven English settlers alive to labour in his copper mines, ‘fower men, twoo Boyes, and one young Maid, who escaped and fled up the River of Chaonoke’.9
Among the ‘lost colonists’ who disappeared from Roanoke Island were the first Englishwomen hoping to settle in North America, including Governor John White’s daughter and granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America.
England’s next attempt at colonizing North America was a strictly masculine affair, following the royal charter granted in 1606 to the Virginia Company of London, permitted to settle around the Chesapeake Bay area of modern-day Virginia, and to its sister Plymouth Company, granted rights further north.10 Guiding the London company as treasurer was the wealthy merchant and City dignitary Sir Thomas Smythe (or Smith).11 Like many of his fellow adventurers, private profit was his primary aim, fortified by the belief that his colonizing endeavours would prosper if he ‘zealously promoted the Lord’s work’.12 God and colonization evidently made powerful allies. Joining Smythe on the Virginia Company’s governing council were two men who would play a leading role in sending brides to Jamestown: Sir Edwin Sandys, lauded as ‘one of the ablest parliamentarians of seventeenth century England’,13 and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Shakespere’s Venus and Adonis and popularly identified as the ‘fair youth’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
No women accompanied the first group of settlers who arrived in the Chesapeake Bay in April 1607 and chose Jamestown as their primary settlement, a small swampy peninsula some two and a half miles in length and three quarters of a mile across, overgrown with pine, gum, hickory and oak and connected to the mainland on the north side of the James River by a narrow isthmus.14 Easy anchorage was its main advantage: ‘our shippes doe lie so neere the shoare that they are moored to the Trees in six fathom water’, wrote the aristocratic colonist George Percy.15 But however convenient for trading purposes, their chosen site would prove fateful for the colonists’ survival, especially in the deadly summer months, when the waters of the James River become heavily contaminated with salt and sediment, and at low tide ‘full of slime and filth’.16 Even company propagandists were forced to concede that Jamestown was a ‘marish seate’,17 an opinion shared by William Strachey, who perceptively identified its unsavoury water supply as the source of the many ‘Fluxes and Agues’ that afflicted the colonists,18 and the colonists’ initial delight at the Edenic nature of the Virginian landscape quickly turned to horror as the litany of dying began. By the time Captain Newport returned in early 1608 with supplies and a further seventy-three settlers, all male, nearly two thirds of the original group were dead.19
The first English women to arrive in the new colony – and then only two of them – came with Captain Newport’s ‘Second Supply’ in October 1608, eighteen months after the first contingent had made its way warily up the James River looking for a place to settle. Mistress Forest, who was accompanying her husband Thomas, a Virginia Company adventurer, disappears immediately from the historical record, a casualty perhaps of Jamestown’s lethal brew of typhoid, dysentery and salt-water poisoning. Her maidservant, Anne Burras, lived on and married within three months, which would have been unthinkable had her mistress still needed her services. By then the noisy and charismatic Captain John Smith had taken over as president of the council, and during a difficult winter he recorded ‘a marriage betwixt John Laydon and Anne Burras; which was the first marriage we had in Virginia’.20
How the union was arranged can only be imagined. As the English settlement’s sole marriageable woman Anne Burras will have sorely needed male protection, and most of the single settlers will surely have wanted a wife, or at least a pair of female hands to carry out the household tasks then considered women’s work. Her chosen husband had arrived with the original group of settlers and survived the first winter when so many of his companions had perished. Classed as a labourer rather than a gentleman, Laydon lacked the specialist skills of some of his fellows, who are variously identified as carpenter, surgeon, blacksmith, sailor, barber, bricklayer, mason, tailor and a drummer.21 But however they made their choice, the pair chose wisely. Remarkably for the times, both were still alive more than sixteen years later, living in ‘Elizabeth Cittie’ (present-day Hampton) along with four daughters all born in Virginia.22 They will resurface in the story of the Jamestown brides as close neighbours to one of several Elizabeths among the Warwick maids who had successfully found herself a husband.
Anne Laydon’s example proved that women could survive the harsh Virginian climate, adding weight to the Virginian proverb ‘That hogs and women thrive well amongst them.’23 Sir Francis Wyatt, the governor who would later welcome the brides to Jamestown, even suggested that ‘the weaker sexe’ were better constituted to survive Virginia’s unhealthy climate than men, ‘either that their worke lies chiefly within doores, or because they are of a colder temper’.24 And so from early 1609 the Virginia Company actively encouraged women as well as men to join its colonial adventure, adding them to its lists of people required for Virginia, their trades advertised on broadsides posted in places where people congregated such as church doors and street corners,25 and in pamphlets sold by the printers and booksellers around St Paul’s Churchyard in London. Smiths, carpenters, coopers, shipwrights, turners, planters, vine growers, fowlers, fishermen, metalworkers of all kinds, brickmakers, bricklayers, ploughmen, weavers, shoemakers, sawyers and spinners were in demand, ‘and all other labouring men and women that are willing to goe to the said Plantation to inhabite there’. New recruits were instructed to repair to Philpot Lane in the City to the house of Sir Thomas Smythe. In return, they were promised ‘houses to dwell in, with Gardens and Orchards’, food and clothing provided by the joint stockholders, a single share in the enterprise valued at £12 10s., their dividend in land and a share in the fruits of their labour.26
The broadsides had the desired effect, and more women followed in the next wave of migration, known as the ‘Third Supply’, which accompanied the colony’s new leaders, who left Plymouth in early summer 1609 in a fleet of nine ships under Captain Newport, bringing upwards of five hundred new settlers to the colony.27 Travelling with Newport in the fleet’s flagship, the Sea Venture, were the colony’s two deputy leaders, Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, and the admiral of the Virginia Company, Sir George Somers. The Spanish ambassador in London reported to King Philip III of Spain that as many as one hundred of the settlers would be women (almost certainly an overestimate) and that Virginia’s governor general, Lord Delaware, would follow with a further six or seven hundred men ‘and a few women’.28
The exact number of women who sailed with the Third Supply is not recorded, but they included a fourteen-year-old maidservant nicknamed Jane by archaeologists at Jamestown and the young Temperance Flowerdew, who would later claim to have sailed on the Falcon under Captain John Martin and who reappears in Virginia a decade or so later as the wife of the new governor, Sir George Yeardley. Born into a prominent Norfolk family, Temperance was the daughter of Anthony Flowerdew and his wife Martha Stanley, and distantly related to the Earls of Derby and Romney.29 Perhaps as many as ten women and children sailed with the colony’s new leaders on the Sea Venture, among them the pregnant first wife of settler John Rolfe, who would later take Pocahontas as his second wife; a Mistress Horton and her servant Elizabeth Persons; and Edward Eason’s wife.30 West of the Canaries, a terrible hurricane dispersed the fleet. One ship was lost and the Sea Venture was driven off course then scuttled in the Bermudas to avoid loss of life. The remaining ships of the leaderless fleet limped into Jamestown in August 1609, bringing sickness and mutiny into the colony. Survivors of the shipwrecked Sea Venture would not arrive for another ten months, including several husbands who had travelled separately from their wives.31
Captain John Smith returned to England early that October after accidentally blowing himself up with his own gunpowder. He left behind nearly five hundred settlers living in fifty to sixty houses within Jamestown’s palisaded fort plus a handful of forts and plantations elsewhere.32 Nominally in charge was the gentle if ineffectual George Percy, who had recorded the colonists’ first landing and whose brother languished in the Tower of London, suspected of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up England’s House of Lords and King James with it.33
Then began the toughest winter the colonists had yet experienced: the Starving Time they called it, when dwindling food stocks and a tight siege by Powhatan Indians reduced their numbers to sixty at most, surviving on a diet of roots, herbs, acorns, walnuts, berries, a little fish now and then, the skins of their horses and a gluey porridge made from boiling their starched ruffs. It was rumoured that the poorer settlers even resorted to cannibalism, digging up a dead Indian and boiling body parts with roots and herbs. Those who spent the winter marooned on Bermuda had a far easier time despite mutinies, murder, execution, births and deaths, including that of the Rolfes’ infant daughter, christened Bermuda, who lived for a few weeks only.34
When Sir Thomas Gates and the other shipwrecked survivors reached Jamestown in May 1610 on ships they had built themselves from salvaged timber and native cedar they found the colony close to collapse: the palisade fence torn down, the gates fallen from their hinges, the houses left empty by the death of their owners and many burned ‘rather th[a]n the dwellers would step into the Woods a stones cast off from them, to fetch other fire-wood’. After two wearisome weeks attempting to put the colony back on its feet, Gates gave the order to abandon Jamestown and evacuate the settlers to Newfoundland, commanding every man and woman ‘at the beating of the Drum’ to repair to their allotted ships.35 The evacuation was halted only when news of Lord Delaware’s arrival reached the colonists as they sailed down the James River past Hog and Mulberry Islands. Delaware had brought more new recruits for the colony, far fewer than intended, but news of the disasters had reached England and deflated the enthusiasm provoked by the previous spring’s propaganda campaigns.36
Although forced to acknowledge the truth of reported food shortages and disorder, the company could not allow reports of cannibalism to go unchallenged. In a version of events attributed to Sir Thomas Gates, one of the settlers had ‘mortally hated his Wife’, killed her and hidden her body parts about the house. When the husband was suspected of his wife’s disappearance, the house was searched and her body parts discovered. In his defence, the man claimed that his wife had died and that he had hidden her body ‘to satisfie his hunger’. ‘Now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d [grilled over coals], I know not,’ wrote John Smith slyly, ‘but of such a dish as powdered [salted] wife I never heard of.’37 The husband’s story was supposedly disproved when a subsequent search of his house uncovered good stores of ‘Meale, Oat-meale, Beanes and Pease. He thereupon was arraigned, confessed the Murder, and was burned for his horrible villany.’38
While the newly married Anne Laydon survived the Starving Time, and Temperance Flowerdew may have returned home to England before it even began, the young English woman later nicknamed Jane was not so fortunate. Working within the fort area in 2012, archaeologists first uncovered fragments of her teeth, buried not in an obvious grave but rather among the detritus of everyday life – broken pottery, discarded weapons, butchered animal bones and mollusc shells – in an L-shaped cellar that had functioned as a kitchen for one of Jamestown’s earliest buildings.39 Further excavations revealed half of a human skull apparently chopped in two, plus other cranial remains and a section of shin bone. The objects surrounding these human remains held a clue as to their date. Senior Curator Beverly Straube of the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project was able to match a ceramic medallion from the cellar to a German stoneware jug found in a nearby well that had been filled with trash in 1610, suggesting that the cellar was backfilled soon after Delaware ordered a clean-up of the colony in June 1610.
The bones tell the story of who Jane really was and what had happened to her. Close examination of the split skull revealed further chop marks to the forehead and back of the cranium. Experts from the Smithsonian Institution carried out extensive tests to determine the sex, age and probable origin of the remains. Skeletal examination, radiography of the jaw and isotopic testing of the bones all pointed to a middle- to upper-class young woman of about fourteen years old, born along the coastal plains of southern England and recently arrived at Jamestown. Like the Jamestown brides, she may have been the daughter of gentry or a maidservant eating the same food as the family she served.
Despite the company’s vigorous efforts to suppress reports of cannibalism, the chop marks on Jane’s skull and leg bone show where the truth lies. Although they cannot tell us precisely how she died or when, they do recount what happened to her body after death. Under magnification, her jaw revealed many cuts made with quick sawing motions using a sharp knife – altogether more tentative than the chops aimed at dog bones from the Starving Time – together with nearly imperceptible knife jabs to dislodge the flesh. Her skull and leg bone had also undergone sustained blows, reflecting a concerted effort to separate bone from the brain and other soft tissue, including cheek muscles and material from both the inside and outside of the lower jaw, and attempts to prise out the marrow from her right tibia, which was chopped halfway through.
Jane’s pensive face gazes back at you in Historic Jamestowne’s small museum, her features reconstructed in resin then remodelled in clay. She looks shockingly young, her hair swept into a modest coif handmade by a costume researcher specializing in early seventeenth-century dress. The coif is decorated with blackwork embroidery, one of the skills brought to the colony by shoemaker’s daughter Audry Hoare and Londoner Susan Binx.40
The Starving Time undoubtedly represented a low point in Jamestown’s early history for all the settlers, men and women. Accustomed to dealing with Ireland’s English colonists, who mostly came from the poorest elements of society and were deemed incapable of self-discipline, Jamestown’s new leaders imposed strict rules, set out in the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall introduced from 1610.41 All settlers were required to attend twice-daily church services; and punishments for transgressing any of the laws were severe, including whipping, public shaming, burning of hands, loss of ears and hard labour. Colonists were sentenced to death for many offences, from repeated non-attendance at church to killing cattle, hogs, goats, poultry or dogs.42
The laws gave some sexual protection to women, ordaining that ‘No man shall ravish or force any woman, maid or Indian, or other, upon pain of death.’ Other proven acts of fornication by men or women were punishable by escalating sentences of whipping, while ‘he or she that can be lawfully convict of Adultery shall be punished with death’. Several laws concerned public hygiene, forbidding anyone (‘man or woman, Launderer or Launderesse’) to wash dirty linen in the open street, within the fort’s palisade fence or forty feet outside of it, or to clean pots and pans within twenty feet of the old well or the new pump. Nor were colonists to perform the coyly phrased ‘necessities of nature’ within a quarter-mile radius of the fence, ‘since by these unmanly, slothfull, and loathsome immodesties, the whole Fort may bee choaked, and poisoned with ill aires’. Even privies, it seems, were lacking.
The colony’s longest-surviving female settler, Anne Laydon, reportedly suffered a severe whipping during the time of Sir Thomas Dale’s government, together with Jane Wright, the first Virginia colonist to be accused of witchcraft.43 The pair were among a group of women ordered to make shirts for the company’s servants and since neither had enough thread to finish the job properly, they unravelled the bottom of completed shirts, making all their shirts shorter than the other women’s, ‘for wch fact the said Ann leyden and Jane Wright were whipt, And Ann leyden beinge then wth childe (the same night therof miscarried).’44
However unpleasant for the settlers, Sir Thomas Dale’s rigorous execution of the Lawes helped to bring stability to the colony.45 Persuading potential investors to part with their money – and potential colonists with their lives – was another matter. A dual narrative developed in which company propagandists sought to counter the ‘vile and scandalous reports’ spread by disaffected settlers, painting Virginia as a promised land flowing with milk and honey and reserved exclusively for Englishmen, a tactic that made matters worse when the reality of Virginian life proved less than ideal for investors and colonists.
John Rolfe’s introduction of a sweeter strain of tobacco, using Spanish seeds from the Orinoco, at last gave the colonists a cash crop they could actually sell and put them on the road to profitability, but investors remained wary.46 As John Chamberlain remarked, many gentlemen rushed to invest in the adventure when Virginia fever was at its height, but when the time came for them to meet their obligations, especially the second or third time around, ‘theyre handes were not sot so redy to go to theyre purses as they were to the paper, and in the end flatly refused, wherupon they are sued by the companie in the Chauncerie’.47 A few years later, his prognosis of company fortunes was hardly more sanguine: ‘I heare not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some quantitie of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, and clap-board, things of no great value unless there were more plentie and neerer hand. All I can learne of yt is that the countrie is goode to live in, yf yt were stored with people, and might in time become commodious, but there is no present profit to be expected.’48
The company’s financial performance bore him out. When the dividend on its 1609 stock fell due in 1616 there were no funds to divide between its many stockholders and so the company declared instead a dividend of land, not the 500 acres per share confidently predicted in 1609, but a more modest 50 that might rise to an ultimate total of perhaps 200 acres per share as the company’s landholdings increased.49 But from 1612 the company had enjoyed a new source of funding that would develop into its mainstay: the Virginia Lottery, permitted under its third royal charter and considered newsworthy enough for John Chamberlain to communicate to Sir Dudley Carleton: ‘There is a lotterie in hand for the furthering of the Virginia viage, and an under-companie erecting for the trade of the Bermudes.’50
Just one copy survives of this Virginia Company’s broadside of 1616 promising silver cups and sacks of coin to winning ticket holders in its Virginia lottery.
The company’s first three lotteries held in London were not especially successful, despite the fanfare that accompanied the good fortune of tailor Thomas Sharplisse, who drew the chief prize of £4,000 ‘in fayre plate, which was sent to his house in a very stately manner’.51 Far more popular were the running lotteries held from 1616, which travelled from town to town throughout England. Norwich and Leicester certainly played host, as did Salisbury in Wiltshire, birthplace of Jamestown bride Ann Jackson and close to where Bridgett Crofte was born. Other probable host cities included Manchester, Reading and Exeter.52 Everyone was encouraged to take part, even women seeking a husband, according to the popular ballad ‘Londons Lotterie’:
You Maydes that have but portions small
to gaine your Mariage friend,
Cast in your Lottes with willing hand,
God may good fortune send.
You Widowes, and you wedded Wives,
one litle substaunce try:
You may advance both you and yours,
with wealth that comes thereby.53
Not everyone approved, however. The success of the running lotteries provoked complaints that they sucked money out of local economies at a time when trade and agriculture were depressed across the nation; and critics maintained that they appealed to a very English addiction to gambling.54 There were rumours, too, that they swindled people who could ill afford the price of a ticket. While at least two early lottery managers were taken to court for fraud and theft, the men responsible for managing the running lotteries emerged with their reputations intact: Lott Peere and Gabriel Barbor, who between them brought two young women to the company as Jamestown brides, Mary Ghibbs and Fortune Taylor.
The Virginia Lottery played a vital role in the plan to send shipments of brides to Jamestown. Since profits from the lottery were helping to plug the gap in the Virginia Company’s finances to the tune of some £7,000 to £8,000 a year,55 its leaders could turn their attention to developing a viable and thriving colony, which required a constant supply of new settlers to tame the wilderness and transform Virginia’s raw resources into profit. Now was the perfect time to heed the advice of one of the company’s founding members, the English statesman and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon: ‘When the plantation grows to strength, then it is time to plant with women as well as with men; that the plantation may spread into generations, and not be ever pieced from without.’56
To flourish, Jamestown needed two sorts of women: on the one hand honest wives, giving male settlers a reason to put down roots in the colony, and on the other hard-working women from the serving classes able to undertake the drudgery of housewifery and lend a helping hand in the tobacco fields.57 From 1608 both sorts of women had been coming to the colony, although not in numbers large enough to stabilize its economy, either as wives or servants, and the ratio of women to men remained stubbornly low in the colony’s early years, rarely exceeding one woman to every six men.
Since too few colonists – women or men – were willing to put themselves forward, the authorities had looked to coerce those who had little choice but to obey. The great Elizabethan explorer Richard Hakluyt provided the moral underpinning for this policy by drawing attention to ‘the multitude of idle and mutinous persons’ who stuffed England’s prisons, recommending that petty thieves might be employed to fell and saw timber and plant sugar cane on the country’s western plantations.58 Decanting felons to the colonies remained official policy throughout Virginia’s early days, despite Sir Francis Bacon’s warning against planting with ‘the scum of people and wicked and condemned men’. Equally popular as public policy was clearing England’s city streets of vagrants of both sexes and shipping them to Virginia, thereby solving the labour shortage of the one with the unwanted population of the other. Sir Thomas Smythe’s son-in-law Robert Johnson used a horticultural metaphor to describe the benefits that would flow from ridding England of its superfluous population: ‘as with plants and trees that bee too frolicke, which not able to sustaine and feede their multitude of branches, doe admit an engrafting of their buds and sciences into some other soile, accounting it a benefite for preservation of their kind, and a disburdening their stocke of those superfluous twigs that suck away their nourishment’.59
As early as 1609 the Privy Council had taken the view that ‘all the ills and plagues’ affecting the City of London were caused by the number of poor people cluttering its streets. The council therefore recommended to the lord mayor that the corporation should join forces with the City livery companies and City wards to raise sufficient funds to ship vagrants to Virginia. The Merchant Taylors’ Company offered £200 and its members a further £300, while the Ironmongers advanced £150. In total the City raised some £18,000 to help sweep the vagrant poor off London’s streets.60 King James took a personal interest in this endeavour, writing to Sir Thomas Smythe about ‘divers idle young people’ who continued to plague the court, despite being twice punished. ‘His Majesty, having no other course to clear the Court from them, had thought fit to send them to [Smythe], that at the next opportunity they might be sent to Virginia, and set to work there.’
But as Bacon predicted, the unruly adults enticed to the colony by these means were not the answer to its prayers, ‘for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief ’. And so from 1618 the company increasingly called for vagrant children to work as servants in the colony, girls as well as boys, considering them to be less confirmed in their delinquency and more pliable than adults.61 Smythe’s original plan was to round up a hundred children aged between eight and sixteen who had ‘no means of living or maintenance’ and to ship them over to Virginia, where they would be educated and taught a trade or profession. The calculated cost per child was five pounds, which was to be collected from parish ratepayers like Erasmus Finch in Westminster, who contributed to poor relief.
Catching the children was easy. On the orders of the lord mayor, aldermen instructed their constables to walk the streets and apprehend ‘all such vagrant children, both boys and girls, as they shall find in the streets and in the markets or wandering in the night’, and commit them to Bridewell to await shipment overseas. Another instruction to the deputies and churchwardens of London’s parishes quickly followed, requiring poor inhabitants ‘that are overcharged and burdened with poor children’ to agree to send any surplus children aged ten and upwards to Virginia, ‘thereby to ease them of their charge’. Parents were to be reassured that their children would be ‘well used’ and provision made for their education and maintenance.
The plan clearly worked. As John Chamberlain reported in October 1618, ‘The citie is now shipping [to Virginia] an hundred younge boyes and girles that lay starving in the streets, which is one of the best deeds that can be don with so litle charge not rising to above 500li.’62 A quarter of the children were ‘wenches’ (twenty-four out of ninety-nine),63 and the children left for Virginia in the late winter of 1618 and early spring of 1619, some travelling by the Jonathan,64 others in the George and the Neptune. The Virginia Company let out a collective sigh of relief, thanking the City of London for the children sent to the colony over that year, ‘wch by the goodnes of God ther saffly Arived, (save such as dyed in the waie) and are well pleased wee doubt not for their benefitt’.65 Those who died on the journey will not have been so sanguine.
The company asked the City to send out a further hundred children in the spring but this time wanted them to be a little older: twelve years and upwards. Those impoverished parents who refused to send their children to Virginia were to be threatened with the loss of poor relief. The City agreed to pay three pounds per child for transportation and a further forty shillings a head towards clothing, stipulating that each should receive twenty-five acres of land after they had served out the terms of their apprenticeship. ‘They shall be Apprentizes the boyes till they come to 21 years of Age the Girles till the like Age or till they be marryed and afterwardes they shalbe placed as Tennantes uppon the publique Land with best Condicons wher they shall have houses with Stocke of Corne & Cattle to begin wth, and afterwards the moytie of all encrease & pfitt what soever.’ The children had no say in the matter. Any who were ‘obstinate’ or disobeyed could be imprisoned, punished and disposed of, ‘and so to Shipp them out to Virginia with as much expedition as may stand with convenience’.66
The constables appear to have experienced increasing difficulties in apprehending girls. In the thirty days between 24 December 1619 and 22 January 1620 they brought to Bridewell just eight girls among more than one hundred young vagrants. These included Ann Momford, ‘an ould guest that will take no warning’, incarcerated on the orders of Mr Recorder for leading ‘an incontinent life’, and Mary Nicholls, apprehended as a ‘lewde va[grant]’.67 Whether the constables targeted boys or the girls had taken fright is not made clear. Outside London reports of maidens being ‘pressed’ or forced to travel to Virginia circulated wildly. In Somerset a justice of the peace ordered the arrest of one Owen Evans, accused of fraudulently raising money by claiming authority to entrap or press young maidens for Virginia and Bermuda. He had given one constable four shillings to press four maidens for Virginia, threatened to hang another constable unless he helped to press girls for him, given one shilling to Jacob Cryfe to press his own daughter, and had received ten shillings in protection money from another parish to stay away. Such was the terror he engendered in young women ‘that forty have fled from one parish to obscure places, and their parents do not know what has become of them’.68
Evans was not alone in his trickery. Shortly afterwards, a clerk in chancery by the name of William Robinson was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross for trying to extract money from alehouse keepers and country moneylenders by counterfeiting the sovereign’s Great Seal. One of his schemes involved sending young women to Virginia, claiming to have royal authority ‘to take up rich yeomens daughters (or drive them to compound) to serve his Majestie for breeders in Virginia’.69
The plight of entrapped or ‘trapanned’ girls sent to Virginia entered the public’s imagination as a fate to avoid at all costs. A popular ballad of the late seventeenth century tells the story of ‘The Trappan’d Maiden: Or, The Distressed Damsel’:
Give ear unto a Maid,
That lately was betray’d,
And sent into Virginny O:
In brief I shall declare,
What I have suffered there,
When that I was weary,
weary, weary, weary O.
When that first I came
To this land of Fame,
Which is called Virginny, O;
The Axe and the Hoe
Have wrought my Overthrow,
When that I was weary,
weary, weary, weary O.70
Another ballad recounts a cautionary tale of a weaver’s wife, ‘witty and fair’, who turned her wit against her husband once too often. When she fell for a ‘lusty Lad’, her husband exacted his revenge by selling her for ten pounds to a captain bound for Virginia, explaining,
The Times are very hard,
Ill sell my Wife for Mony
She is good Merchandize you know,
when you come to Virginny.
The captain agreed, and once the husband had tricked his wife into accompanying him on board ship, he abandoned her to her fate and rowed hastily back to shore. After they had crossed the Atlantic the captain sold her as a maiden ‘for fifty pounds in Money,/ And she another husband had/ when she came to Virginny’.71
Sending women and girls to the colony against their will was ultimately self-defeating, however. The poor quality of women transported to the colony during his leadership was one of many complaints later levelled at Sir Thomas Smythe by his enemies, and specifically that he had sent ‘but few women thither & those corrupt’.72 Another critic complained that the few dispatched from Bridewell were of ‘soe bad choyse as made the Colony afraide to desire any others’.73 Smythe’s ally Sir Nathaniel Rich came to his aid, suggesting that he sent out ‘a great many [women]… the best hee could get’, even claiming that one of the women he dispatched went on to marry a future knight and governor, surely an oblique reference to Temperance Flowerdew.74
But women settlers were needed for more than their labour alone. When Sir Edwin Sandys took over the reins of the company in the spring of 1619 he was determined to make the colony more attractive for colonists and investors alike, and to increase its population.This called for wives as well as workers, and so in early November that year the idea was mooted of sending shiploads of young marriageable women to the colony. As the company’s finances were in a reasonable shape thanks to the lottery, these women were to be offered free to the company’s own public tenants; any private planter taking one as his wife would simply be asked to reimburse the cost of her transportation.
Sandys was looking for ‘a fitt hundreth’ of women,
Maides young and uncorrupt to make wifes to the Inhabitanntes and by that meanes to make the men there more setled & lesse moveable who by defect thereof (as is credibly reported) stay there but to gett something and then to returne for England, wch will breed a dissolucon, and so an overthrow of the Plantacon… and it was never fitter time to send them then nowe. Corne being here at home soe cheape and plentifull, and great promises there for the Harvest ensuing.75
A much larger general court discussed the plan two weeks later, when Sandys reiterated his determination to remedy the ‘mischiefe’ of planters who stayed in Virginia for a few years only, ‘not setled in their mindes to make it their place of rest and continuance’. Ever prudent with company finances, Sandys did not intend to commission special ships to take the maids and the other new colonists to Virginia, but rather to put them on ships trading with Newfoundland, at six pounds a head, promising ‘not to leave the Company one penny in debt for any thing in his yeare to be performed: And moreover that he would discharge 3000 li of former debts and reckonings according to the Stock left in the Lottaries at his coming to this place.’76
Unlike the brides who travelled to Jamestown in 1621, no list of these women has survived. Perhaps there never was one. As London adventurers were not seeking to make a profit from these earlier shipments, the company had less need to advertise its wares, but in February and March 1620 it dispatched a total of ninety women by the Jonathan and the Merchant of London,77 perhaps by other ships as well, and shortly afterwards announced its intention to send one hundred more, although no more bridal shipments took place that year.
Sifting through the muster or census undertaken throughout the colony in 1625 throws up a small number of women who travelled by either the Jonathan or the Merchant of London in 1620, and who went on to marry men who had reached the colony at an earlier date or by different ships. These women may have travelled to Virginia in search of husbands, but they may equally have gone as indentured servants or as married women who subsequently lost their husbands and remarried.
Reviewing its achievements for 1620, the Virginia Company applauded itself for transporting ninety young maids ‘to make Wives for so many of the former Tenants’78 and for dispatching 1,200 ‘choise men borne and bred up to labor and industry’, stout men from Devonshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Sussex to join the ‘neere one thousand’ remaining from before. While freely admitting that ‘many disasters’ had struck Virginia in previous years, the company was determined to quell the ‘false and malicious’ rumours spread abroad about the state of the colony. Instead, it painted Virginia as a country ‘rich, spacious, and well watered; temperate as for the Climate; very healthfull after men are a little accustomed to it; abounding with all Gods naturall blessings… In Summe, a Countrey, too good for ill people.’ Here was a colony on the cusp of reaping great rewards. The future could only get brighter, or so the company thought.
