When Stormie Winds do Blow
Even a maid such as Ann Richards seeking new horizons will have felt more than a touch apprehensive as she stepped onto the ship that would carry her across the Atlantic. Fear of the sea burned deep in the national consciousness, stoked by dramatists and balladeers and the tempest narratives which the Virginia Company sought to suppress with only varying degrees of success. ‘Upon the Seas are dangers cruel,’ sang the valiant soldier to his sweetheart Betty in the popular ballad ‘A Voyage to Virginia’, ‘and many storms do there arise:/ To stay at home then be contented,/ whilst I do fight against my foe.’1 But now the women were set on leaving, entrusting themselves to wooden troughs of ships that were ‘but Tennis Balles for the windes to play withall… Tost from one wave to another; Nowe under-line; Nowe over the house; Sometimes Brickewal’d against a Rocke, so that the guttes flye out again; Sometimes strooke under the wide Hazzard, and farewell Mast(er) Marchant.’ 2
In the face of such dangers, real or imagined, it was customary for passengers and crew to pray for God’s blessing and a safe delivery before embarking on their journey.3 The Warwick women and all who sailed from Gravesend will have called at the parish church of St George, where Pocahontas lay buried in the chancel, and continued from there the short distance to the port, cutting their way as best they could through the frenzied coming and going of goods and people on the quayside.
You catch a sense of the operation’s complexity from William Webb’s jumbled accounts to the Virginia Company of monies disbursed on goods to be shipped to Virginia in the George, the Charles, the Marmaduke, the Warwick and the Tiger.4 In June 1621 he was organizing porters and lightermen to convey casks of oatmeal, pease, cider and nails, as well as loads of coal, ironware, mounted guns, wooden planks and masts, bed cords, rabbits and straw for the oven. Onto the George went goods belonging to the colony’s new governor Sir Francis Wyatt and its new treasurer George Sandys, Sir Edwin’s youngest brother, both sailing on her to Jamestown. Webb’s expenses for July and August extended to loading ship’s biscuit onto the Charles; purchasing a selection of baking pans, pudding pans, porridge pans, chamber pots, pipkins and pots for rabbits and pigeons; salt; a book and ink; a chest for Mr Bowlton the preacher; a bed and rug for Dr Pott’s servants; building cabins in the Warwick; an assortment of grindstones, woad seed and clothes for planter Myles Prickett; plus ‘wharfidge & cranidge’ fees for the George, Charles, Marmaduke and Warwick. That left just the Tiger, which departed a little later in September.
Throughout the summer months a certain James Hooper crops up repeatedly by name, presumably a trusted overseer of these many activities; his daily rate was 1s. 6d., plus the expense of dispatching him to Gravesend in July. Porters scurried about London, picking up loads from the Ferrars in St Sithes Lane, from Newgate Market, Houndsditch and Tower Street, while boats came and went to Blackwall, Galley Quay and out to the various ships; ‘ferridg by water divers tymes’ appears like a refrain. Here too, recorded on 21 July 1621, are expenses incurred transporting the Marmaduke’s passengers and goods to Portsmouth and over to the Isle of Wight.
By the time the ships were ready to receive their passengers, most of the cargo will have been hoisted aboard and stowed away, much of it tightly packed in the inky-black hold at the bottom of the ship. Seasoned Virginia hand Captain John Smith explains how cargo is best stored: the heaviest casks loaded first, next to the ballast of gravel, stones or lead distributed around the sides of the ship, wedged in with short pieces of wood to prevent them rolling about in heavy seas.5 Anything stored in the hold could not normally be accessed during the voyage, which might last two, three, even four months travelling westwards across the Atlantic. Aside from the clothes they were wearing, the women will have had with them at best a small bag of personal effects, leaving them without a proper change of clothes for the long voyage.
The Virginia Company’s orders to the Marmaduke’s master, John Dennis, will have mirrored its covenant with William Ewens, master of the George, drawn up at the same time. Ewens promised that, before departing from the River Thames, the George would be ‘stronge and staunch and in all thinges well fitted and provided’, a promise that extended to furniture, mariners and seamen ‘fitt and sufficient for the safe and good performance of the voyage’. He further promised that at the first opportunity of wind and weather he would set sail for the port of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, ‘there to receauve and take into the said Shippe such Passengrs and goodes’ as the company would direct.6
The covenant for the Warwick was clearer still, agreed on 24 August 1621 between the company and the ship’s master, Nicholas Norburne, and its captain and co-owner, Arthur Guy. The ship was to arrive at Gravesend by 4 September and remain there for four days to receive passengers and goods; thereafter the company was committed to paying fifty shillings for each day’s delay in loading either passengers or freight. As soon as the ships were ready, their orders were ‘to sett sayle from England with the first oppertunity of Wynd and weather’ and head straight for Jamestown, taking ‘their direct course accordinge to their best skill and knowledge’.7 If pirates threatened – a genuine hazard, as the Tiger discovered – the master’s orders were to do everything possible ‘to hinder their proceedinges or doe them violence’. The Warwick finally departed around the middle of September on a journey that lasted a full three months, as we know that she arrived in Jamestown on 19 December 1621, a long and wearisome voyage, even by the standards of the day.8
The route taken by the original settlers who founded Jamestown in 1607 went to Virginia via the Caribbean. While taking advantage of prevailing winds and currents and allowing passengers and crew to refresh themselves in the West Indies, this route risked provoking the hostility of Spanish men-of-war guarding their possessions. As early as 1610, Captain Samuel Argall had pioneered a more direct crossing, steering south-south-west to latitude 30 degrees north and then, leaving the Canary Islands a hundred leagues to the east, ‘hee found the windes large, and so tooke his course direct West, & did never turne nearer the South’. Although becalmed for fourteen days around Bermuda, he completed the voyage in nine weeks and publicly vowed to achieve it in seven.9
Within two years Argall made good his promise, departing from the English coast on 23 July 1612 and arriving at Virginia’s Point Comfort on 17 September with his men in good health and stores in good condition. This time, instead of sailing down to the Canaries, he had turned west some fifty leagues north of the Azores.10 On both these shorter journeys Argall had sailed in summer, before storms engulfed the Atlantic and fog and ice created further hazards. As he knew only too well, after September the cold westerly and north-westerly Atlantic winds would make for a long passage, and after September the weather was ‘so unconstant that goods cant be landed or shipt without hazard or damage’.11
Argall recommended September as the best time for magazine ships to arrive in the colony, bringing much-needed clothes before the onset of winter and shipping out tobacco and corn produced by the harvest. The colony’s secretary John Pory urged new settlers to arrive in Virginia a little later, at ‘ye leafefall and ye winter’, having found both spring and summer ‘fatall and unproffitable to new Comers’. To support his advice, Pory pointed to the arrivals in spring 1620 of the London Marchant, the Jonathan and the Duty, whose passengers ‘Came in sickly, and too late eyther by plantinge, settinge, howinge, clearinge ground, or buyldinge, to doe any worke of ymportance’.12 Among those on the first two ships were many of the ninety-odd women who formed the earlier shipment of brides sent to the colony.
While the maids who sailed on the Marmaduke, the Warwick and the Tiger escaped the health hazards of arriving in Virginia’s sultry summer heat, they faced a tempestuous Atlantic crossing and the notoriously rough seas around Bermuda,13 putting their trust in sailors whose job it was ‘to save Ship, goods, and lives… especially in foule weather, the labour, hazard, wet and cold is so incredible I cannot expresse it…’14 The sea at its worst reduced even the voluble John Smith to silence.
All this lies ahead of them. Imagine the women as they thread their way through the teeming quayside, keeping their emotions in check as best they can as they step into the small boats hired to take them to their ship anchored in the roads, followed by an awkward scramble up the ladder and on to the deck, where fear gives way to dread as they contemplate the flimsy bark that will be their kingdom for the coming months.
They are entering an alien world, and a very masculine one, where they must live among sailors clad ‘in scanty rags of appalling filthiness’, where drunkenness is the norm, at least in the popular imagination, and discipline brutally enforced. Women were thought to bring bad luck at sea,15 although plenty had by now travelled to Virginia, and relations between sailors and all their passengers were notoriously poor.
As they climbed on deck and took account of their surroundings the maids must have baulked at the numbers of people crowding with them onto the ship, passengers and crewmen. Ships were measured according to the weight of cargo they could carry: the Marmaduke’s 100 tons compares with 160 tons for the Warwick, just 40 tons for the Tiger, and 120 tons for the Susan Constant, the largest of the three merchant ships that had carried the first group of permanent settlers to Jamestown.16 Larger than all of these was the Mayflower, at an estimated 180 tons, which had taken the Plymouth settlers to New England the previous year. The Jamestown brides aboard the Marmaduke were crammed with a total of some eighty passengers and a crew of between fourteen and eighteen officers and men17 into a ship that measured no more than 116 feet from prow to stern, and nearly 25 feet at its waist.18 The larger Warwick carried one hundred passengers and as many as twenty-two officers and crew, plus a good share of the general magazine of supplies sent out to the colony as one of the self-financing trades designed to attract investment from individual adventurers.19
You can board a replica of the Susan Constant moored at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia and pace the length of the open deck between the raised forecastle and quarterdeck at either end. It takes less than fifteen paces to walk from the door to the cook room in the forecastle to the accommodation for the ship’s executive officers in the stern, with a great cabin for the master and other cabins for the mates and the carpenter. Other senior crew members slept in boarded cabins in the gun room and in the forecastle, where space would also be found for high-ranking passengers. The remaining seamen slept on straw mattresses or hammocks in the spaces in between.20
While the Jamestown brides were surely quartered together during the long voyage, their status did not merit special treatment and there were anyway too many of them. Assuming they boarded when the ship was ready to sail, they will have been ushered with the other passengers to a grated hatch in the upper deck and directed down a short ladder to the gun deck or lower hold below, a space known as the ’tween deck, which was situated above the cargo hold and between the bulkhead shutting off the gun room at the stern and the forepeak at the bows. On the larger Mayflower this space measured an estimated 78 feet from the bow of the ship to the bulkhead, and 19 feet across its widest point.21 A woman of small to ordinary height could stand upright here, since the headroom was at least 5 feet 4 inches and more in the spaces between the beams, but only when the deck was unencumbered.22
Aside from any accommodated at either end of the lower hold, the women will have shared the central ’tween-deck space with the other passengers – and not just people, either. As well as the mounted guns along either side, which needed space around them in case of hostile encounters, lighter freight was stored here together with anything required during the voyage.23 Just the year before, the crew of the 160-ton ship carrying Dr Bohune was forced to resort to delaying tactics after encountering hostile Spaniards in the Caribbean, ‘being pestered with goods and fardels [bundles] betweene the deckes, and altogether unprovided for any fight’.24 Despite the known dangers of encumbering the deck around the guns, Virginia’s council nonetheless wrote to the company in London soon after the Warwick’s safe arrival in Jamestown, expressly requesting that perishable supplies such as silkworm seed and foodstuffs should ‘nott bee stowde in the holde butt betweene the Decks, for yt the heate of the Holde will spoyle whatt Corne or seede soe ever you shall sende’.25
Here among the guns, casks and trusses of ship’s stores and perishable cargo, and the jostle of humanity, the Marmaduke women slept two to a makeshift bed, lying on straw mattresses placed inside small wainscot boxes that could be stacked one on top of the other during the daytime, covered with rugs provided for their use by the Virginia Company. Those sailing on the Warwick enjoyed a little more privacy, as William Webb’s accounts tell us that £1 11s. was spent on constructing cabins for them.26 These were almost certainly hanging cabins made of canvas, either suspended from hooks or stretched over wooden frames that could be folded away to give the passengers more space during the day.
I can only speculate how the women chose their bedfellows. On the Marmaduke Yorkshire-born Margaret Bourdman was recommended by Catherine Finch’s brother Erasmus, so the pair were likely companions. Age, birthplace and station in life will also have determined friendships between the women as they settled down for the voyage. Sailing on the Warwick were three widows aged twenty-five or twenty-six (Ann Richards, Marie Daucks and Elizabeth Grinley), two young women of roughly similar ages from Lothbury in London (cutler’s daughter Frauncis Broadbottom and baker’s daughter Sara Crosse) and four gentry daughters whose ages ranged from sixteen (Elizabeth Markham), nineteen (Elizabeth Nevill) and twenty-two (Lucy Remnant) up to twenty-five (Cicely Bray).
At least some light and ventilation penetrated the ’tween deck from the gun ports and the grated wooden hatch to the upper deck, which was closed in bad weather to stop seawater pouring into the hold. Down here the women lived, slept, ate, shat, sickened and recovered, penned like chickens in the gloom and allowed on deck only when their presence would not disturb the routine business of running a ship under sail.
Once all the passengers and goods are safely aboard, and the last tubs of beef, pork and salted fish secured by plates of iron bolted onto the side of the ship, the master commands the company to set sail. Even if the passengers down below can see very little, they can hear the master’s shouted commands barked in the nautical language recorded by Captain John Smith in his dictionary for young seamen instructing them to:
get the sailes to the yards, and about your geare, or, Worke on all hands, stretch forward your maine Halliards, hoise your Sailes halfe mast high. Predy!, or, Make ready to set saile. Crosse your yards, bring your Cable to the Capsterne. Boatswaine, fetch an Anchor aboord. Breake ground, or, Weigh Anchor! Heave a head! Men into the Tops! Men upon the yards! Come, is the Anchor a’ pike?… What, is the Anchor away? Yea, yea! Let fall your fore-saile. Tally!… Who is at the Helme there? Coile your Cables in small fakes! Hale the Cat! A Bitter,… belay,… loose fast your Anchor with your shank-painter! Stow the Boat!27
Starting out from the Isle of Wight, the Marmaduke’s master could choose to sail east or west from Cowes depending on the winds and out into the English Channel, guided by a skilled pilot past the island’s dangerous coastline, which presented ‘a continuall ridge and range of craggy Cliffes, and Rockes, and Bankes very dangerous for Saylers, as the Needles, so called by reason of their sharpenes’.28 Negotiating the Thames estuary from Gravesend and on round the coasts of southern England was scarcely any easier. The water poet John Taylor made the journey in 1623, rowing in a wherry to Portsmouth with four crew. Battered by strong winds and high seas, they were driven ashore at Dungeness on the Kent coast and again near Hastings, looking for all the world ‘like five poore rats halfe drownd’, and stumbling onto the beach near Goring, only to be mistaken for pirates by a suspicious constable.29
Bad weather and similar emergencies forced many a vessel to seek shelter in ports along the south coast. One famously delayed departure was that of the Mayflower carrying the pilgrims to New England in 1620, forced to return to Dartmouth and again to Plymouth when her sister ship the Speedwell supposedly sprang a leak.30 Captain John Smith’s last planned voyage to New England failed even more spectacularly when his three good ships were wind-bound for three whole months at Plymouth until they sailed instead for Newfoundland, ‘which was to me and my friends no small losse’.31
But finally, all sight of England has vanished and the passengers settle into the monotonous rhythms of the sea. Although not as regimented as the sailors’ hours, which are parcelled into four-hour watches, their lives on board are reduced to a routine of days, nights, sleeping and meals, the monotony broken by occasional forays into the fresh air on deck. The women have plenty of time to get to know each other and the other passengers, and to form friendships that will hold fast on the other side of the Atlantic.
On the Marmaduke Ann Jackson was a point of contact with the ‘twelve lustie youths’ bound for her brother’s settlement of Martin’s Hundred, although nothing suggests that romantic bonds were formed between the young men and any of her companions. The Virginia Company would anyway have disapproved, as it hoped to marry the women off to richer planters. Ursula Lawson was another link between the passengers, since she was travelling out with her kinsman, seasoned planter Richard Pace and his wife, Isabella. Sailing on the Warwick, nineteen-year-old Mary Ellyott accompanied her ‘father-in-law’ (more likely her stepfather) Maximillian Russell, who was also bound for Martin’s Hundred; and the orphaned Alse Dollinges from Dorset clearly knew Goodwife Bennet ‘that now coms along in the Warwicke’, who had vouched for her ‘honest Conversation’. Among their many fellow passengers on the Warwick, Tristram Conyam recorded the names of Christopher Stokes, his wife and children, and of Goodwife Unwon and her two children, identifying her as the wife of a tenant of Southampton Hundred who had previously travelled out with Captain Bluett, the probable father of Jamestown bride Elizabeth.32
Conditions for the passengers, barely tolerable at the start of the voyage, can only have worsened as the ships battled their way across the Atlantic against contrary winds and currents. Seasickness was their first hazard. If the maids were anything like the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, a prosperous wind brought some encouragement ‘yet, according to the usual manner, many were afflicted with seasickness’.33 To the smell of vomit must be added the stink of primitive sanitary arrangements. The main toilet for the crew was in the ship’s head, the area immediately behind the figurehead constructed of slatted or solid timber with holes cut through to allow human waste to drop straight into the sea.34 The women are more likely to have used buckets attached to ropes and doused with seawater.
Coping with their monthly ‘flowers’ was an added trial. Most women used folded rags or clouts to absorb their menstrual flow, preferably old cloths made from linen, which was thought to draw moisture from the body;35 this may have been the purpose of the linen contained in Jane Dier’s small box loaded into the hold.36 The clouts could be pinned or tucked into a girdle, since women did not yet wear briefs. But the cloths needed frequent washing and drying, a difficult operation on board ship, so you may have simply allowed your menstrual blood to seep into your shifts, worn next to the skin under a petticoat and an outer dress. Your soiled undergarments still needed washing since menstrual blood was considered physically and spiritually abhorrent, especially to men. ‘For I am uncleane and filthie: and all my righteousnesse is like a foule bloudie clout,’ wrote Thomas Bentley in a psalm he included in The Monument of Matrones, a compilation of prayers and meditations written largely by and for women.37
Keeping clean and free from lice, bed bugs and all the other infestations common on a crowded ship also required determined attention. Washing with water was not yet generally associated with personal cleanliness, and while higher-status women might resort to sweet waters, flower compounds and pomanders to mask the stink of daily life (a compound of roses was a French remedy for curing ‘the goat-like stench of armpits’),38 the Jamestown brides were more likely to have kept as clean as they could by rubbing their skin with linen cloths and brushing their hair with switches of pig’s hair to dislodge the lice.39 Although habits clearly differed between families, most people did not think it necessary to bathe or wash all over, preferring to keep just the visible parts clean, and the usual practice was condensed into the popular proverb: ‘Wash thy hands often, thy feete seldome, but thy head never.’40
The thoughts of sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Markham, a passenger on the Warwick, might have turned to her father’s handbook The English House-wife for ways of keeping clean. Among his many remedies are cures for stinking breath (distilled young oak buds), vermin-infested ears (ear drops of lovage), stinking nostrils (a powder of burned red nettles and pepper stuffed up the nose) and washes for tired eyes. In easier circumstances Elizabeth might have followed her father’s advice to wash her face morning and night with distilled rosemary water to achieve ‘a faire and cleere countenance’, and – unusually for the times – to wash her head with the same to prevent hair loss and encourage more hair to grow. She may also have thought longingly of his detailed instructions for perfuming gloves and jerkins, distilling perfumes and damask water, and making washing balls, musk balls, sweet bags and pomanders. But while her father happily pontificated on the inward and outward virtues he thought desirable in an English housewife, he offered little practical advice on the daily business of keeping clean, reserving his endorsement of good hygiene habits for a housewife’s duties in the dairy.41
Poor food was another complaint of those bound for Virginia. The cook was an important member of the crew, allotted his own cabin next to the cook room in the forecastle, reached by a door from the upper deck. His cooking apparatus was necessarily limited: a large round kettle hung from a metal beam suspended over a brick furnace, a grill and a spit for turning meat, copper fish kettles and assorted cans, platters, spoons and lanterns; forks and individual knives were not yet in general use. Tables for the passengers could be set up on the lower deck and stacked in odd corners at night.42
The Virginia Company’s calculation of the rations needed to feed its mariners included a daily allowance of three quarters of a pound of hard ship’s biscuit and three quarts of beer per man, plus additional meal and cider daily, and a varied diet throughout the week: salt pork and pease for dinner on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, and salt beef at supper; dried fish, oil and vinegar on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; and dried fish, butter and cheese on Fridays and Saturdays.43 Dramatists poked fun at shipboard meat ‘so salt, that one woulde thinke after dinner his tongue had been powdred [salted] ten daies’, and dried ship’s biscuit so hard ‘that one must carrie a whetstone in his mouth to grinde his teeth’.44 Poor John was the name given to salted and dried hake. Shakespeare throws it into The Tempest when the jester Trinculo stumbles across the monstrous Caliban. ‘What have we here,’ he declares, ‘a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of – not of the newest – poor-John.’45
No one perceived the limitations of shipboard food more clearly than Captain John Smith, who urged sea commanders to disregard the notion that ‘any thing is good enough to serve men at sea’ and castigated the usual diet served to naval seamen:
a little poore John, or salt fish, with oyle and mustard, or bisket, butter, cheese or oatemeal pottage on fish dayes, salt beefe, pork and pease and sixe shillings beere, this is your ordinary ships allowance… and after a storme, when poore men are all wet, and some not so much a cloth to shift him, shaking with cold, few of those but will tell you, a little Sacke or Aquavitae, is much better to keepe them in health, [than] a little small beere or cold water…46
Smith’s preferred diet, recommended especially for mariners who were sick or dying, included ‘a dish of buttered Rice, with a little Cinamon and Sugar, a little minced meate, or roast beefe, a few stewed Prunes, a race of greene ginger, a flap-Jacke, a Can of fresh water brued with a little Cinamon, Ginger and Sugar’ – hardly the rations fed to the Jamestown brides on board ship, although the Warwick maids and the settlers bound for Martin’s Hundred were each provided with three casks of prunes to supplement their diet at sea.47 But however unpleasant their journey, all the passengers who travelled with the maids on the Warwick and the Marmaduke survived the experience, unlike many of those who endured the horrific shipboard conditions aboard the Margaret & John in 1623 and died from lack of food or infected beer.48
On such a lengthy crossing the women will have experienced the gamut of conditions, to which Captain John Smith devoted a chapter in A Sea Grammar, explaining to young seamen the names by which different seas were known: ‘We say a calme sea or Becalmed, when it is so smooth the ship moves very little, and the men leap over boord to swim. A Rough Sea is when the waves grow high. An over-growne Sea when the surges and billowes goe highest. The Rut of the Sea, where it doth dash against any thing. And the Roaring of the Sea is most commonly observed a shore, a little before a storme, or after a storme.’49
Smith’s crescendo of terms for different winds makes the same progression, from ‘A calme, a brese, a fresh gaile; a pleasant gail, a stiffe gayle, it overblowes, a gust, a storme, a spoute, a loume gaile, an eddy winde, a flake of winde, a Turnado, a mounthsoune [monsoon], a Herycano [hurricane]’,50 explaining that a ‘faire Loome Gale’ was best for sailing ‘because the Sea goeth not high and we beare out all our sailes’, while the winds in a West Indian hurricane blew so violently that ‘the Sea flies like raine, and the waves so high, they over flow the low grounds by the Sea’. He knew of ships driven many leagues inland over the tops of high trees, like the Phoenix commanded by Englishman Captain Francis Nelson, which finally arrived in Jamestown in April 1608 after being blown to the West Indies by a hurricane.51
Storms were the stock ingredient of any good traveller’s tale, and given their late departure from England all the ships carrying the Jamestown brides will have encountered North Atlantic storms of the kind experienced by the soon-to-be-shipwrecked passengers in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ordered to keep to their cabins by the boatswain, whose shouted orders might have come straight from Smith’s nautical dictionary: ‘Heigh, my hearts! Yare! Yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master’s whistle! Blow, till thou burst they wind, if room enough.’52
Shakespeare may have drawn his inspiration for The Tempest from the Atlantic voyage of the Third Supply in 1609, when the flagship Sea Venture carrying Virginian governor Sir Thomas Gates, Admiral Sir George Somers, John Rolfe and his pregnant first wife and more than a hundred settlers was driven off course near the Bermudas. William Strachey’s eyewitness account of the voyage drops you inside the ‘hideous’ storm, which had blown up from the north-east, swelling and roaring by fits and starts until it ‘at length did beate all light from heaven; which like an helle of darkenesse turned blacke upon us, so much the more fuller of horror’. The storm raged for twenty-four hours, ever more constant, ‘fury added to fury’, one storm urging on another even more outrageous than the first, spreading fear ‘amongst women, and passengers, not used to such hurly and discomforts’, making them look ‘one upon the other with troubled hearts, and panting bosomes: our clamours dround in the windes and the windes in thunder’.53 The heavens remained black until the Thursday night, when Sir George Somers on watch duty ‘had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkeling blaze’, a description of the weather phenomenon known as St Elmo’s fire, which finds its echo in Shakespeare’s Ariel.54 If all else failed, the practice was to furl the sails, secure the helm to leeward and abandon the ship to the elements, a manoeuvre known as hulling.55
Huddled in the ’tween deck as storms raged, the women will have feared for their lives, wretched with seasickness and railing at their collective fate. Storms experienced at night were the worst, according to Dr James Barton, who sailed across the Atlantic in 1985 in the replica ship Godspeed, retracing the historic voyage that had brought the first permanent English settlers to Jamestown. As they were tossed around in total darkness, Barton recalls how sounds would appear terrifyingly loud: barked orders, cursing, thuds, waves crashing against the wooden hull, the cabin shuddering, wind roaring in the rigging, footsteps clomping on deck above their heads. ‘At those times,’ he told me, ‘I actually preferred being on deck, where I could at least observe how the ship was faring. However, I must admit I was returning to family and friends at home in Virginia. Your future brides were leaving home, family and friends behind, and heading for a land that was totally new to them, hostile and foreign.’56
Sailing across the Atlantic in their small wooden ships, the Jamestown brides could expect terrifyingly stormy seas.
Of course not everybody who crossed the Atlantic experienced the dark hell of a Bermuda hurricane, and some travellers even relished the crossing, seeing in their deliverance a sure sign of God’s mercy. One such account was written by a New England settler, Master Wells, to his people back home in Essex, who reported himself to be as cheerful as ever ‘in spite of Divells and Stormes… my wife all the voyage on ye sea better then at land, and sea sicke but one day in xi weekes, att sea my children never better in their lives. They went ill into ye ship but well there and came forth well as ever.’ The ship’s eighty passengers included women big with child, and a sixty-year-old consumptive woman with a strong cough of many years’ standing, who not only survived but ‘came forth of the shipe fully cured of the cough as fresh as [an] Egele that hath cast her bill and renewed her strength’.57 In quieter times the maids on the Marmaduke may even have enjoyed readings from the two psalters and twelve copies of the catechism thoughtfully supplied by the company to Mr Andrews, the master’s mate, for their use.58
Unusually, no passenger complaints were levied against conditions on board either the Marmaduke or the Warwick. The year after taking the maids to Virginia, the Marmaduke’s master, John Dennis, petitioned to be granted the freedom of the company ‘by his carefull transporting of Passengers to and from Virginia’,59 having already been granted his freedom by the council in Virginia. Somewhat grudgingly the London company granted his request, noting that Dennis had overcharged three passengers by a total of forty shillings for their homeward journey, and cautioning the Virginian governor to be more careful in future and bestow such freedom ‘upon none in this kinde but such as shall deserve extraordinary well by their care and good usage of Passengers’.
But if the maids who travelled by the Marmaduke and the Warwick emerged relatively unscathed from their long crossing, those who sailed on the Tiger were not so fortunate. Commanded by Master Nicholas Ilford, the 40-ton Tiger was too small to merit a ’tween deck, so space for the passengers would have been found in the forecastle and aft cabins: twenty-six paid for by the Virginia Company and as many as forty in total.60 Among the passengers went four Jamestown brides, only three of whom were of marriageable age: sixteen-year-old Londoner Elizabeth Browne, twenty-one-year-old Anne Gibbson and twenty-eight-year-old gentlewoman Allice Goughe, whose higher status is reflected in the title of Mistress accorded to her by Nicholas Ferrar in contrast to plain ‘Ghibson & Browne’ for the other two.61 The fourth maid on the Tiger was Priscilla Palmer, who was only seven or eight years old and travelling with her parents.
The Tiger left England soon after the Warwick in mid-September and headed straight into storms and contrary winds. Blown hundreds of miles off course, she fell into the path of Turks, the usual name for pirates operating out of the Barbary ports of North Africa, ‘who commonly lurke neere Ilands, and head-lands, and not in the maine Ocean’. While the Mediterranean was their primary hunting ground, from mid-August they could sometimes be found off the coast of Spain, lying in wait for ships coming in from the Indies.62 Mistaking the pirates for ‘Flemmings’ bound for Holland or England, the Tiger’s master approached their boat to speak with them, only to fall prey to ‘mercilesse Turkes’, who robbed them of most of their victuals, all their serviceable sails, tackle and anchors, leaving them without so much as an hourglass or a compass to steer their course, ‘thereby utterly disabling them from going from them, and proceeding on their voyage’.
For the women on board the Tiger this must have been a terrifying encounter. Captain John Smith portrayed pirates as ‘riotous, quarrellous, treacherous, blasphemous, and villanous’, presumably from personal experience, having been captured by French privateers on a journey to New England in 1615.63 Yet against all the odds, the women came to no harm. They could so easily have been sold into slavery ‘like beasts in a market-place’, as Smith claimed happened to him after he was captured by Tartars and taken as a slave to Constantinople.64 I can only assume that the pirates who attacked the Tiger were not returning to port immediately and lacked the resources to bring the women safely to market, since pirate ships rarely carried sufficient provisions to undertake long journeys.65
The full story of what happened to the Tiger – or at least the story the company wanted broadcast – appeared in a sermon preached before members of the Honourable Virginia Company assembled at Bow church in Cheapside, London, on 18 April 1622. The preacher was Patrick Copland, rector-elect of a college for native American children which the company wished to found at Henricus in Virginia, who took as his title ‘Virginia’s God be thanked, or A Sermon of Thanksgiving for the happie successe of the affayres in Virginia this last yeare’.66 But while Copland used the Tiger’s safe delivery to demonstrate God’s ‘loving kindnesse’ towards the colony, events in Virginia had moved on, and kindness was the last word anyone could use, as we shall see.
In the course of his sermon Copland asked his audience to consider the hazards involved in the Virginian adventure: the dangers of the Atlantic crossing and of life in the colony, and also the perils experienced by those at home, by which he meant principally the economic risks born by members of his audience. But Virginia had at last begun to prosper, he said, quoting the words of John Martin, an Armenian colonist who intended to live out the rest of his days in Virginia: ‘I have travailed (said he) by Land over eighteene severall kingdomes; and yet all of them in my minde, come farre short of Virginia, both for temperature of ayre, and fertilitie of the soyle.’
The fate of the Tiger fitted neatly into Copland’s narrative of God’s providence. After the Turks had left the ship rudderless and drifting, the Tiger was spied by another ship, which escorted it safely to Virginia with all passengers and crew except two English boys, young seamen most likely, whom the pirates had exchanged for two other youths, one French and one Irish. Aside from cloth dispatched to make clothes for some Frenchmen and other Europeans then living in the colony, the Tiger’s cargo also came safely to Jamestown.67 ‘Was not there the presence of God printed as it were, in Folio on Royall Crowne Paper and Capitall Letters?’ asked Copland of his audience. By this strange act of providence Elizabeth Browne, Anne Gibbson, gentlewoman Allice Gough, the young Priscilla Palmer, her parents and the rest of the passengers were spared, and the Tiger maids were free to join those from the Marmaduke and the Warwick in their search for husbands on the other side of the ocean.
