Maids to the Rescue
The precarious state of the Virginia Company’s finances, clearly seen in its dealings with the Indian maids, exacerbated tensions between the different factions on its governing council, which erupted into open warfare a couple of years before the maids left for Jamestown. Of the two principal camps, one-time Treasurer Sir Thomas Smythe headed the ‘old guard’ of rich City merchants whose many commercial interests enabled them to ride out the colony’s lean early years. Bequeathed an enormous inheritance by his merchant father, Smythe belonged to two of the twelve great livery companies of London, the Skinners and the Haberdashers, and his fingers reached into virtually every overseas pie baked by the Merchant Adventurers, Muscovy and Levant Companies, the Somers Isles (Bermuda) Company and the East India Company, several of which he served as governor.1
Leading the other faction was Sir Edwin Sandys, a noted parliamentarian from the landed gentry and the man chiefly responsible for the plan to send marriageable women to Virginia. The Sandys faction included country gentlemen caught up in the adventure of the New World, lesser merchants and citizens infected with the ‘microbe of speculation’2 who needed a more immediate return on their investment, and a sprinkling of great lords who directed their patronage at Virginia much as they supported charities and the arts. Chief among these was the handsome, impetuous and much-lauded Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, who invested heavily in the company and in the scheme to bring brides to Jamestown. Like Smythe and his backers, making a profit mattered to both Sandys and Southampton, but ‘the well carrying of the publick is of more importance’.3 Holding the balance of power on the company’s increasingly splintered council was a third faction led by Robert Rich, the second Earl of Warwick, who was principally interested in using Virginia as a base for piracy and privateering against the Spanish further south. For the moment Warwick gave his support to Sandys, but he would later switch sides with disastrous consequences for all concerned.
By the time the maids left for Virginia, Sir Thomas Smythe’s reign as treasurer of the Virginian Company had come to an end.
Portraits of the two principal players throw into relief the differences between them. Like Pocahontas, Sir Thomas Smythe had his portrait engraved by Simon de Passe, dressed in a fashionable beaver hat that declared his status and his wealth. Clasping a navigational chart in his right hand, he wears the furred robe of a City alderman over a brocaded doublet, his neck and wrists encased in starched white ruffs. Icons of overseas trade complete the image of a man of global affairs: anchors, a ship, barrels and sacks of merchandise.4 For all the accusations of mismanagement and profiteering that his opponents would later sling at his head, his features are sympathetically drawn – firm, practical and energetic certainly, but kindly too; like his father and mother before him, he was celebrated for his charity.5
Altogether sparer in tone, the portrait of Sir Edwin Sandys hangs in the wood-panelled dining room of Graythwaite Hall, Cumbria, still in the hands of the Sandys family, next to portraits of his father, mother and youngest brother George, who sailed to Virginia shortly before the Jamestown brides. Hatless and soberly dressed, Sir Edwin holds himself aloof, a man of reason and undoubted intelligence, who calmly returns your gaze, his small pointy beard distinctly Jacobean in contrast to Smythe’s Elizabethan finery.6
The discontent that had long rumbled among members of the Virginia Company’s governing council came to a head at its quarter court of 28 April 1619. Having led the company as treasurer since its inception, Smythe stepped down from the post, claiming the pressure of other business, and Sir Edwin Sandys was elected in his stead with the aid of a ‘ballatinge box’ brought in for the occasion. Sandys won the election by a clear majority: fifty-nine balls cast in his favour, compared with twenty-three for his nearest rival, the merchant Sir John Wolstenholme, whose wife’s brother was married to Smythe’s sister, and eighteen for Smythe’s son-in-law Alderman Robert Johnson.7
Sir Edwin Sandys supplanted Sir Thomas Smythe as treasurer of the Virginia Company and masterminded its plan to send the Jamestown brides to Virginia.
In choosing Sir Edwin Sandys as its new leader, the company also needed a new venue for its meetings and day-to-day business, for reasons both practical and political. Throughout his long regime Sir Thomas Smythe had housed the offices of the Virginia Company and the other companies he directed on the ground floor of his spacious house on Philpot Lane, a narrow street close to Billingsgate in the commercial heart of the City running north from Little East Cheap up to Fenchurch Street. As befitted an active merchant, he had installed a strongroom to house documents and company assets, while upstairs he displayed a collection of curiosities brought home by his ships’ captains from voyages around the globe; his suitably multiracial household included two Virginian Indians and a homesick boy from the Cape.8
The London home of Sir Edwin Sandys was better suited to his life as a leading member of the gentry than as the director of a great trading enterprise. It lay on fashionable Aldersgate Street just outside the City gates, said to resemble an Italian street more than any other in London on account of its straightness and the spaciously uniform houses that lined both sides. Others who took up residence here included the Earls of Westmorland, Pembroke and Shaftesbury, and the poet John Milton.
Better equipped as a place of business was the home of Sandys’ deputy, the merchant John Ferrar, who lived with his extended family on St Sithes Lane (now the tiny Sise Lane) in the geographical heart of the City between Budge Row and St Pancras Lane. Heading the Ferrar household until his death in 1620 was John’s father Nicholas, another respected merchant adventurer, who ‘kept a good table’ at which he entertained many of the great Elizabethan adventurers, among them Sir John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.9 Nicholas had married Mary Woodnoth from Cheshire, who gave him seven children and survived well into her eighties: this is the Mrs Ferrar who commended the mother of the Jamestown bride Alse Dauson as ‘verrie honest’. She sounds a remarkable woman, the sort to fill the gut of Pinch Belly in the broadside ballad of 1620. ‘We are told that she was beautiful, bright-haired, and fair,’ wrote a Victorian divine, ‘upright even to her eightieth year; highly educated, of a strong judgment, a wise and even temper, so that her choleric husband declared that in their five-and-forty years of marriage she had never given him cause for anger.’10 Also living in the household was John Ferrar’s troublesome second wife Bathsheba, daughter of merchant Israel Owen; his young son Nicholas; his mother and his niece Mary Collet; and two unmarried brothers, Richard and Nicholas, as well as servants, apprentices and visitors.11
After Sandys took over as treasurer in the spring of 1619, the company met for the most part at St Sithes Lane and occasionally at Southampton House in Holborn, home of the Earl of Southampton, or at Sandys’ house on Aldersgate Street when the elder Nicholas Ferrar lay dying.12 Philpot Lane continued to be used occasionally, provoking several bad-tempered exchanges between the different factions. Soon after the transfer of power, Smythe’s son-in-law Robert Johnson requested that the adventurers in the separately funded general magazine should be allowed to meet there, arguing that Smythe was ‘one of the greatest and principall Adventurers and not able to goe to any other place’. The magazine was the monopoly supplier of essential provisions to the colony, and as its principal investors, Smythe and Johnson were suspected of milking the profits for their private gain. Sandys snapped back that if the adventurers paid back to the Virginia Company the £800 they had invested in the magazine, ‘they might meete in what place they pleased’.13
In September of that year (1619) Sandys wrote privately to Southampton about the ‘malignancie’ of Smythe and Johnson his deputy. ‘I had thought that no man, carrying the face of an honest man, could have been displeased with beeing called to an Account: beeing the onlie justification & discharge of a true man. But it hath fallen out otherwise.’14 To be fair, the company minutes document only Sandys’ version of events. No records survive from Smythe’s period of office, and those kept by the ever-faithful John Ferrar may be partial in their account. Determined to blame the colony’s current privations on Smythe’s stewardship, Sir Edwin Sandys reminded the council that in April 1618 – one year before he took office – the colony had numbered just 400 men, women and children, of whom at most 200 men were able ‘to sett hand to husbandry and butt one Plough was goinge in all the Country’. All this was the fruit of twelve years’ labour and ‘above one hundred thousand marks expences’ paid out of the public treasury, not counting the £8,000 to £9,000 of company debt and the investments made by adventurers in their own private plantations. Despite all the land, men, provisions and livestock delivered to Captain Argall at the start of his deputy governorship, by the time Sandys took over as treasurer of the London company in May 1619, everything was ‘gone and Consumed ther beinge not lefte att that time to the Company either the land aforesaid or any Tennant, Servant, Rent, or Trybute Corne Cowe, or Saltworke and butt six Goates’.15
Sandys’ plan to turn the company around was to send out more people and to diversify the colony’s economy, thereby making it more self-reliant and less dependent on tobacco. Reasoned and methodical as ever, he prepared a comprehensive plan to enlarge the plantation and to restore the company’s land in Virginia, ‘now lately decayed’. After preliminary discussions, it was approved unopposed at the company’s great court of 17 November 1619, at which neither Smythe nor his son-in-law was present.16 The proposal to transport one hundred potential brides – described in Chapter 5 – appeared as the third item of Sandys’ plan, after raising the number of men to be sent out as public tenants and dispatching one hundred young people to become their apprentices. Sandys even came to the meeting with the draft of a broadside seeking ‘Laborers and Husbandmen, Artificers and manuall Trades’ as public tenants, which was read to the meeting and approved by public vote.
On the surface Virginia looked set to prosper. The council was much preoccupied with implementing the Sandys’ plan and with various proposals to educate and bring up ‘the Infidells children to the true knowledge of God & understanding of righteousnes’ by establishing a college at Henricus (or Henrico) and taking children into settlers’ homes.17 Yet for all his energetic leadership, Sandys’ formal role as treasurer was unexpectedly short-lived. When he stood for re-election at the quarter court of 17 May 1620, after just one year in office, the king intervened, sending word to the meeting that he wanted the council to choose its next treasurer from just four names he put forward: Sir Thomas Smythe, Alderman Robert Johnson, the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe, the merchant Mr Maurice Abbott ‘and noe other’.18 The intention was clearly to exclude Sandys, whom the king had reviled ever since 1604, when Sandys’ speeches to parliament had disrupted his royal plan to unite the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, calling instead for a period of calm reflection.19
The king’s intervention put the council ‘att an exceedinge pinch’. While they did not wish to appear disloyal towards their sovereign, his message breached their privilege of free elections. In the end, they decided to delay their choice until the following quarter court. A committee would meet at Southampton House to draft a letter to King James, while Sandys was asked to remain as treasurer until the king’s pleasure was known.20
Although the king remained adamantly opposed to the re-election of Sandys as treasurer, he withdrew his insistence that they should choose one of his nominees, claiming merely that he wanted them to elect ‘such a one as might att all times and occasions have free accesse unto his royall personn’,21 which obviously excluded Sandys. ‘Choose the Devill if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys’ was his reputed reaction,22 and after much toing and froing a compromise was reached at the quarter court of 28 June 1620. Sandys’ close ally the Earl of Southampton was nominated for the post of treasurer ‘with much joy and applause’ and elected unopposed by the simple raising of hands, winning the dispensation that he would be allowed to involve himself in court business no more than ‘his owne more waightie buisinesses did permitt’. Despite the change in titular leadership, Sir Edwin Sandys remained in effective control of the company, with John Ferrar returned as deputy by a secret ballot.
Bad feeling between the different factions was not the company’s only flashpoint, however. Just as the ‘weed’ tobacco triggered dependency among smokers and Virginia’s fledgling economy, so the company found itself utterly dependent on the running lotteries for funds despite public disquiet over their effects and the company’s own efforts to find other sources of income. During Southampton’s term as treasurer, Sandys proposed to continue the lotteries until the end of 1620, ‘if there may be found places so many where to keepe them’, and to collect the subscriptions owed by lords, knights, gentlemen, merchants and other citizens.23 Just four months later, in November 1620, the council admitted that the lottery was ‘now of late very much disgraced’, and they sought ways of delivering it from the ‘many fowle aspersions unjustly cast uppon itt by malignnant tounges’, noting that it had already sent 800 people to Virginia to ‘the great advancement of that Plantacon’.24 But realistically the company had no other reliable source of income. Just under half the estimated £18,000 needed to finance the Sandys plan for the colony was scheduled to come from the lottery (£8,000), the rest from calling in debts and reckonings (£9,300) and a mere £700 from donations to the college at Henricus.25 So when the king abruptly ordered the lottery to be closed down, early in 1621, company finances were thrown into disarray.
The request to suspend the lottery had in fact originated with parliament, summoned by James to relieve his own financial difficulties. But the prime parliamentary mover against it was the king’s man Lord Cranfield, and debate was ‘spirited, even acrimonious’, with one member claiming that ‘these lotteries do beggar every country they come into. Let Virginia lose rather than England.’26 The king was only too happy to concede to parliament’s request, declaring that he had never liked the lottery, suspecting that it would prove ‘hurtfull and distastefull’, and that he had agreed to it only ‘upon information that the plantation could not subsist without it’. The speed with which the running lotteries were suspended was nonetheless dramatic. The king’s reply to parliament was delivered on 26 February. On 4 March the Privy Council drew up instructions to suspend the lotteries and a proclamation was issued four days later, commanding the Virginia Company to end all its lotteries ‘untill such time as Wee shall declare Our further pleasure therein’.27
The effect on poor John Ferrar’s accounts was instantaneous. Not only did the proclamation dramatically reduce the flow of money into the company’s coffers but it also left it with a stock of prize plate that could not be ‘turned into money, wthout to[o] great losse’. Public confidence in the Virginia Company was also declining fast. Shares nominally valued at £12 10s. were changing hands for as little as forty or fifty shillings, thereby depriving the company of fresh revenue and discouraging those who had paid the full share price.28 Debts were mounting and new proposals put on ice, including one from a gentleman ‘of good Account and sufficiency’ who claimed he could procure and transport to Virginia ‘at an easie rate’ a number of young men and maids as company employees. The court thought the proposition worthy of thanks but found itself ‘unhable in Cash to goe through with so great a charge’.29 Even small sums needed to be pinched where they could, such as the weekly maintenance charge to support the two Virginia Indian maids who had stayed on in the capital;30 and the company found itself unable to finance the deal it had struck with Captain Norton to set up a furnace making glass and beads for trading with the Indians. Norton’s bill for personnel and materials was £80 higher than the £150 originally envisaged, and ‘ther was nothinge left in Stocke to discharge so great a Sume’.31
The company’s coffers were completely bare. It needed a solution to its cash crisis, and it needed it fast if the colony was to survive.
The company’s response was commendably swift. The extraordinary court called for Thursday 12 July 1621 had discussed just two issues: where to obtain Europe’s best silkworm seed (Valencia in Spain, apparently) and how to avoid settling Captain Norton’s larger-than-expected bill to establish his glassworks in Jamestown. The company’s solution was to ‘release’ Norton from his contract with them, or more truthfully to release the company from its obligation to pay him, by allowing individual adventurers to trade with him directly.
Four days later, at its general court of Monday 16 July 1621, this proposal developed into a much more ambitious plan to restore the company’s finances by setting up four individual joint-stock ventures or ‘magazines’. Each would solicit subscriptions from individual adventurers who would share the risks of the enterprise and also, crucially, the profits. Captain Norton’s glassworks was one such enterprise, as was shipping marriageable women to the colony – a commodity that had its price like any other.
The glassworks trade set the blueprint for the others. As the senior official present, it will have fallen to deputy John Ferrar to remind those present that the expense of transporting Captain Norton’s Italian workmen together with servants, wives and children (eleven people in all) plus furnishing the necessary clothing, food, tools and material was far more than originally agreed, and that the company’s stock was ‘no way able to undergoe the burthen of this new charge’. So private adventurers would be allowed to finance the operation for profit and Captain Norton discharged of his contract with the company. Although the record maintains that the adventurers did not wish to exclude the company altogether, since glass beads were likely to prove ‘the Verie Coyne of that Country’, the company clearly wished to share in any potential gains. So the proposition put to the meeting was to raise a joint stock of at least £400, the company bearing one quarter of the charge and thereby entitled to one quarter of the profits.32
The court also discussed the conditions under which the glassworks would operate: the patent granted the venture a monopoly to manufacture glass and beads for seven years. For each person transported, the adventurers would receive from the company fifty acres of land, and Lieutenant Jabez Whitaker would make available his recently constructed Jamestown guesthouse for the ‘entertaynmt of their people some two monneths after their first landinge yt they may be able to build theire houses, and this may be specially recomended to the care of the Gouvernor to see itt done’. Nicholas Ferrar was appointed treasurer to the glassworks magazine, overseeing a committee made up of two company nominees and six adventurers. As the venture was already well advanced, investors were urged to pay their subscriptions by the following Thursday, ‘for the more speedie dispatch away of Captaine Norton and the said Glassmen’.
Four separate rolls were then read out to the meeting in order to solicit subscriptions. The first was for a ‘Magazine of Apparrell, and other necessary provisions such as the Colony stood in great need of ’, replacing the one wound up the previous year, its finances still under investigation. The second trade was for ‘sendinge of 100: mayds to be made wives’; the third for advancing the glass furnace; and the fourth for equipping ‘a Voyadge to trade with the Indians in Virginia for Furrs’, aping the great fur trade established by the French and the Dutch further north. While few practical details were discussed, enthusiasm ran high, and these ‘good undertakings were generally approved of and moved many then present to underwrite in the said Rolls’.
The court also discussed the appointment of a new doctor for the colony to replace Dr Lawrence Bohune, killed in a skirmish with the Spanish in the West Indies.33 The new man was Dr John Pott, who would play a shabby role in the story of the Jamestown brides. Described as a master of arts ‘well practised in Chirurgerie and Phisique, and expert allso in Distillinge of waters’, he claimed to possess ‘many other ingenious devices’ which would – in his own estimation – render his service ‘of great use unto the Colony’.
Already a master at advancing his own interests, Dr Pott asked to be released from the clause in Dr Bohune’s contract requiring him to replace at his own cost any of his tenants who should die after their first year in Virginia. Unable to grant Dr Pott’s request, since only quarter courts could confirm contractual changes, the court nonetheless awarded the doctor a ‘Chest of Phisique’ worth twenty pounds and ten pounds in physic books, both charged to the company and to remain in their possession. The company would pay his passage together with that of his wife, a man- and a maidservant, and any surgeons who accompanied him. Also discussed at the meeting was a plan to create monopolies of products such as sassafras, limiting their export in order to raise prices, bearing in mind ‘the p[re]sent State of the Companies Stocke’, which was ‘utterly exhausted’.34
The parchment rolls soliciting subscriptions for the various magazines were opened at once; those for the maids and furs would remain open for at least six months.35 Written by the clerk Tristram Conyam, the maids’ subscription appealed to potential investors’ Christian duty as well as to their commercial interests, framing the venture in compassionate – even biblical – terms: ‘Wheras by long experience wee have founde that the Mynds of our people in Virgenia are much dejected, and ther hartes enflamed w[i]th a desire to returne for England only through the wants of the Comforts of Marriage without w[h]ich God saw that Man could not live contentedlie noe not in Paradize.’36
But the lack of women in Virginia had unfortunate economic consequences as well. Without home comforts, the company’s planters looked on the colony as a place of short stay rather than a permanent residence, and so directed their labours towards short-term profits to the neglect not only of ‘Staple Com[m]odities, but even the verie necessities of Mans liffe’. Supplying maids ‘young, handsome, and honestlie educated’ would change all that, declared the roll, ‘judginge itt a Christian charitie to releive the disconsolate mindes of our people ther, and a speciall advancement to the Plantacon, to tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and Children’. Those who subscribed to the joint-stock venture were to pay their subscriptions to Mr Thomas Gibbs and his assistants, advancing a minimum £8. The cost of those who died en route (or ‘faile through Mortallytie’ as the roll delicately put it) was to be added to those who survived. The women were to be disposed in marriage ‘to the most honest and industrious Planters who shall defray and sattisfie us the Charges of their passages and provisions att such rates as they and our Agents shall agree’.
In the Virginia Company’s coat of arms, a maiden queen – her hair dishevelled and wearing an eastern crown – proclaims the colony’s status alongside the Crown’s other dominions of England and France (a heraldic fiction), Scotland, and Ireland.
The intention was that the stock raised from individual investors would pay for the brides’ clothing and transport to Virginia, estimated at £8 each in the original subscription but later increased to £12 per woman.37 Adventurers would reap their profits by ‘charging’ the men who married them in the colony’s prevailing currency of tobacco – initially 120 pounds in weight of tobacco for each bride but raised to 150 pounds by the time the Warwick departed for Jamestown because of ‘the great shrinkage and other losses uppon the tobacco from Virginia’.38 Not surprisingly, the company insisted that the price should be paid in ‘the best leafe Tobacco’, which was then valued at three shillings per pound.39 At a bride price of 150 pounds of tobacco, this represented a profit of ten guineas (£10 10s.) on an outlay of £12, a generous rate of return. The company had no wish to repeat the fiasco over the charges for boy apprentices, for whom the planters had paid just sixty-six pounds in weight of tobacco. This should have raised £10 per boy, but the planters had paid in tobacco of the ‘worst and basest’ kind, raising just £5 per boy at a tobacco price of 1s. 6d. per pound.
Cash was not the only incentive on offer to investors. Under the headrights system of land distribution, each person who paid another’s passage to the colony (ultimately the women’s future husbands) would expect to receive fifty acres of Virginian land. But as London explained to the governor and council in Virginia, ‘the Company for some weighty reason too long to relate, have ordered that no man marryinge these weomen expect the proportion of Land useually alotted for evry head: wch to avoid clamor or troble hereafter you shall do well to give them notice of ’.
The ‘weighty reason’ referred to was that the adventurers who invested in the maids wanted the land for themselves. For each woman transported, the collective magazine was to receive fifty acres of Virginia at the first division of land, and a further fifty acres per head at the second.40 Mr Gibbs, treasurer for the maids’ magazine, would later propose to the company’s council that the land owing for the maids (some 2,850 acres in the initial shareout) should be laid out together and called Maydes Towne, a proposal enthusiastically endorsed at the quarter court held on the afternoon of Wednesday 22 May 1622, a full two months after disaster had struck the company’s well laid plans but before the company caught wind of the changed landscape in Virginia.41
The lists of subscribers are incomplete but at least forty-four men put themselves forward, about two thirds (twenty-nine) for the lowest amount of £8. Nine investors subscribed £16, including Nicholas Ferrar, accountant William Webb and the venture’s treasurer Thomas Gibbs. Four men advanced £24, including deputy John Ferrar, and Gabriel Barbor, who had managed the Virginia lotteries. Among the most generous, Sir Edwin Sandys adventured £40, while the Earl of Southampton topped the list with £48.42 The total volunteered was £560, a little short of the £672 needed to finance the transport and clothing of fifty-six women, assuming a cost per head of £12. But the rolls remained open and by its quarter court of 21 November 1621, the company claimed that £800 had been raised and some sixty maids dispatched to the colony. Compared with the other magazines, women were a more popular commodity than glass (which raised just £500 in joint stock) but less popular than furs (£900 raised) and the general magazine of clothing and other necessities (£1,800 raised and expected to ‘returne good proffitt’).43 No women invested in the maids’ magazine, but only femes soles had rights in law over their own property, and only a handful of women invested in the Virginia Company as a whole.
The company’s ruling body would not concern itself with the maids for the rest of the summer. A final court held in late July heard from deputy John Ferrar that the Earl of Southampton and Sir Edwin Sandys had each subscribed £200 to the four magazines and a fifth one added for sending out to the colony shipwrights and other essential workers.44 But attendance was dwindling, and court meetings were suspended until the end of September, ‘as divers gentlemen were gone into the Country (accordinge to their usuall manner att this time of the yeare)’.
Behind the scenes, however, finding, equipping and dispatching so many marriageable women to the colony required frenetic preparations. The speed with which this was achieved was truly astonishing: just four weeks elapsed between the court’s decision to send the women as a self-financing trade (16 July) and the letter written to accompany the Marmaduke women to Virginia, addressed to the governor and council in Virginia and dated 12 August, setting out how the women were to be entertained in the colony before they might be ‘provided of husbandes’. Even the company had to admit that one month was not enough time to do the job properly, ‘for such was the hast of sendinge them away, as that straightned wth time we had no meanes to putt provisions aboard’, promising to remedy the defect by sending supplies with the magazine ship that would follow shortly.45
It seems likely that preparations for these latest bride shipments to Virginia were at least nominally under way, since the idea of dispatching ‘100 young maydes to make wives as the former 90 lately sent’ had been an explicit part of Sir Edwin Sandys’ plan – discussed in July 1620 – for revitalizing the colony by sending and supporting more public tenants.46 The difference was that these new women were to be encouraged to marry husbands who could afford them, independent planters rather than company tenants, and the marriages were to take place as quickly as possible to give the adventurers a swift return on their investment.
Sandys’ earlier plan of 1620 had sought to reach potential recruits (tenants, wives and servants) in two ways: by printing details of the kind of people the company wanted and the conditions under which they would volunteer, and by word of mouth, or as the company put it, ‘partly by help of such noble frends and others in remoter parts as have formerlie given great assistance beinge desyred in the like kinde’. A broadside had been duly published on 18 July 1620 detailing the kind of tradesmen it wanted and the terms it was offering, but saying nothing of potential brides.47 Anyone wishing to respond to the company’s call to ‘good men’ and ‘such of those as shall be commended for their honest conversation’ was asked to repair to the ‘Citie of London, to Mr. Ferrar, Deputy to the Company, his house in St Sithes lane’, where they were to be entertained at the company’s expense ’til such time as they be shipped for Virginia’.
The women now being sought were part of a money-making venture, and Sandys hoped that the whole experiment would be so successful that more women would flock to the colony.48 His officials needed to hand-pick only the very best, sifting through names already known to the company and calling on contacts in London and elsewhere to draw in women who were handsome enough in their person or wifely accomplishments to attract planters able and willing to pay the premium placed on their heads. As we saw in earlier chapters, they were remarkably successful at drawing in the daughters of the lower and middle gentry, helped no doubt by Sir Edwin Sandys’ wide network of contacts throughout England, and at trawling for personable young women among London’s great and good and those with close company connections.
The Ferrar household will have been a hive of activity throughout the normally quiet summer months. Assembling suitable women was just one of John Ferrar’s organizational headaches. He also had to find ships ready and able to take the women on board, and to furnish them with the clothes and provisions they would need in their new life – the cause of ‘exceedinge troble and labor unto us, being but a very few on whom so great a burthen hath lien’.49 Simply keeping track of all the arrangements was a challenge. Christopher Martin, who adventured £8 in the enterprise and personally recommended Elizabeth Dag among the Warwick maids, submitted a bill of £8 for providing clothing for four named maids, only one of whom (Sandys’ relative, Mistress Cicely Bray) is known to have travelled. Was this a scam to recoup his investment, or were several Christopher Martins involved? This one anyway promised ‘that theese maydes shall proceede there voyadge or otherwyse he will repay the mony’.50
The task of recording the clothes provided for each of the Marmaduke maids fell to John Ferrar’s brother Nicholas.51 His list is modest but practical for a woman expecting to enter into a working partnership with her future husband: one petticoat, one waistcoat, two pairs of stockings, one pair of garters, two smocks, one apron, two pairs of shoes, one towel, two coifs and one cross cloth, as well as worsted wool for darning and yarn for knitting stockings. Made of linen or wool, the clothes seem scarcely adequate for Virginia’s violent extremes in temperature. But there were touches of luxury in the dozen ‘white Lambe gloves’ supplied to the Marmaduke maids by perfumer William Piddock at a total cost of 4s.,52 and twenty-eight hats with bands supplied by hatter Rowland Sadler at 3s. 6d. each, plus a further 1s. 6d. for nine pairs of strings.53 Poor Sadler had to wait four months for payment, as doubtless did many other suppliers.
Altogether the cost of clothing each woman amounted to some £2, less than half the amount spent on clothes for each of the two Virginian maids, while sheets, canvas beds, bolsters and rugs added several pounds more.54 Wearing clothes supplied by an employer would have seemed natural to anyone who had worked in service, although some of the gentry women might have found the uniformity unsettling. A few also took small chests or bundles with their own belongings, but either the records are incomplete or the number of women consigning their possessions to the hold was pitifully small. These included Mary Ghibbs’s ‘small pa[c]ke of cloaths’, mistakenly left behind, and a box each for two maids living in Blackfriars, Anne Gibbson and Elizabeth Browne, who both sailed on the Tiger.55 The Marmaduke’s bill of lading names items for just two individual maids: a trunk for the widowed Joan Fletcher, who travelled only as far as the Isle of Wight before turning back, and a ‘Small boxe of linnen’ for the young Jane Dier.56
The Marmaduke’s bill of lading is one of several documents I request to view one freezing December morning at the Pepys Library of Magdalene College Cambridge, intrigued that apparently so few of the maids should have taken anything of their own to Virginia. I remember how cold I felt as I glanced at the nondescript items taken on board.
Before consigning your trunks or boxes to a ship’s hold, the purser would ask you to acknowledge your belongings by signing the manifest, but in an age when writing was a skill determined by class and gender, most ordinary passengers simply made a mark of their initials. Among the twenty or so names on the Marmaduke’s bill of lading, male and female, only one passenger had actually produced a signature: the widowed Joan Fletcher, whose writing is confident, even bold, each rounded letter inscribed with care. Young Jane Dier – and all the men entrusting their goods to the hold – could only manage a mark, in Dier’s case a slightly shaky crossed ‘I’ and a capital ‘D’.
It takes a moment for the significance of their different hands to register. Joan Fletcher’s kin were upper gentry, the Egertons of Cheshire and Staffordshire, who had naturally taught their daughter to write. Jane Dier, on the other hand, was merely a waterman’s daughter from the liberty of St Katharine’s by the Thames, at best taught to read but not to write. Of all the Jamestown brides, the one woman who might definitely have recorded her experiences never travelled to Virginia.
For the others, I must rummage through what few records survive to piece together what happened to Catherine Finch, Audry Hoare, Ann Jackson and their fellows gathering on the quayside at East Cowes and the much larger cohort who sailed from Gravesend, among them Bridgett Crofte from Wiltshire, recommended by a lowly porter, and clothmaker’s daughter Barbara Burchens. Although some of the gentry maids who travelled with them will surely have learned to write – Gervase Markham’s daughter Elizabeth, for instance, and Sir Edwin Sandys’ kinswoman Cicely Bray – nothing has yet come to light and probably never will. And so I must patiently retrace their steps wherever I can, sifting through the detritus of lives lived nearly four hundred years ago, the cracked pots and lost earrings that belonged to women just like them, searching for clues that might tell us what became of them in their new lives.
