Arrival at Jamestown
Once their ship had safely anchored, the women’s first ordeal was to face any welcome party assembled to greet them, under the watchful stares of curious onlookers, some of whom may have hoped to pick themselves a wife or at least to judge the kind of women on offer. Governor Dale’s wharf had long since decayed, but Yeardley had ordered the building of a ‘bridge’, possibly a new wharf, where the women might have landed, or they may have transferred onto small boats to be rowed the short distance to shore. Given the importance the Virginia Company had placed on the maids’ magazine, it is likely that they were met by the new governor, Sir Francis Wyatt, and as many of his officials as he could muster. A decade or more later, David Peterson de Vries arrived to find Governor John Harvey waiting for him on the beach attended by halberdiers and musketeers. While the Jamestown brides scarcely merited such a display, their arrival in the winter of 1621 was recorded among the benefits conferred on the colony that year.1
Just as their arrival in this most masculine of environments turned the women into objects of curiosity, so they will have picked out any ‘strangers’ among the people gathered to greet them: native Indians visiting the settlement or the tiny few who worked for the settlers, some of whom were beginning to ‘affect English ffassions’. They may also have spotted one or other of the thirty-two Africans – fifteen men and seventeen women – recorded as living in the colony in early 1620; they included the ‘20 and odd Negroes’ which John Rolfe revealed had come from a Dutch man-of-war that had arrived in late August 1619 at Virginia’s Point Comfort, where they were exchanged for supplies.2
A good many Virginians and some Africans had already passed through London of course, among them the Virginia Indian maids Mary and Elizabeth and the occasional ‘blacke a moore servant’, who left sad reminders of their passing in burial records.3 Some of the older Jamestown brides may even have glimpsed Mistress Rebecca Rolfe when she passed through London in the winter of 1616 with her entourage, or heard tell of the antics of her brother-in-law Tomocomo, who remained ‘blatantly and proudly Indian’4 to judge from his hairstyle (one side of his head close shaven, the other sporting a ‘Devill-lock’ several feet long) and the ‘diabolicall’ dances he performed for curious onlookers. From now on, such strangeness would be part of their daily lives, surely a sobering thought for the new arrivals, who will have looked to each other for support and to whatever welcome the colony’s governor had provided to ease them into their new home.
Governor Wyatt had only recently taken over from Sir George Yeardley, having arrived a few weeks earlier on the George accompanied by a clutch of new officials for the colony: Sir Edwin Sandys’ younger brother George in the new post of treasurer; Christopher Davison, who replaced John Pory as secretary; William Claiborne, charged with surveying all public tracts of land and private plantations such as Martin’s Hundred; and the colony’s new doctor, John Pott.5 Wyatt’s wife Margaret, a niece of Sir Edwin Sandys, came out later, but her place in any welcome party would usefully have gone to Yeardley’s wife, the former Temperance Flowerdew, whose example showed that women who married well could thrive in the colony, although she undoubtedly had the advantage of birth and breeding over most of the Jamestown brides. By the winter of 1621 the Yeardleys already had a daughter, Elizabeth, aged between one and two, and Lady Yeardley was either carrying Argall, the first of her two sons, or caring for him as an infant.6
One man who was obliged to greet the maids was the Virginia Company’s agent, John Pountis, a relatively recent recruit to the colony whose initial interest centred on fishing for sturgeon. Pountis had brought forty company tenants to Virginia in late 1619 or early 1620, and was rewarded with the title of vice admiral to the colony, supported by a stipend of 300 acres and twelve tenants.7 His instructions about the maids came in a letter from the Virginia Company to Governor Wyatt and his council in Virginia, brought by the captain of the Marmaduke. The governor and council were to take the women into their care and Pountis was to see that they were housed, lodged and fed until they could be married. Those who could not be married immediately were to stay with householders who had wives living with them. How this should be accomplished was left to the governor’s discretion, but the company hoped that an endeavour begun in London out of piety ‘and tending so much to the benefitt of the Plantation shall not miscarry for any want of good will or care on yor partes’.8
The arrival of brides for Virginia’s early settlers has long captured the public imagination; this ‘Shipload of Wives’ dates from the early twentieth century.
The company’s instructions also named the officials responsible for collecting the bride price from husbands, which had been calculated in best-leaf tobacco, then the colony’s standard currency. John Pountis was charged with collecting the tobacco owed for the Marmaduke maids,9 while Edward Blaney, who returned to Virginia aboard the Warwick as the colony’s new cape merchant, was to collect tobacco from the husbands of maids who travelled on the Warwick and later ships, and to keep a separate account;10 these responsibilities he would later deny, saying that he had nothing to do with any of the maids. Pountis was also to collect the ‘little quantitie’ of tobacco owed to Marmaduke passenger Richard Pace, an ancient planter who had paid for the passage and other charges of his kinswoman Ursula Lawson and was therefore personally benefiting from her marriage.11
For most travellers to Virginia, their first call was to repair to Jamestown’s wooden church to offer up thanks for their safe delivery. When Governor Sir Thomas Gates arrived in Jamestown on 23 May 1610 after a winter shipwrecked on Bermuda, he headed straight to church, causing the bell to be rung to summon all who were able to attend a service, ‘where our Minister Master Bucke made a zealous and sorrowfull Prayer, finding all things so contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and misgovernment’.12 Eleven years on, the same Reverend Richard Buck was on hand to offer up thanks and also no doubt to proffer solemn words on the virtues of wifely subordination.
Like any newcomer walking the short distance from the waterfront to the church, the maids cannot fail to have noticed Jamestown’s air of dilapidation. In contrast to the city they had left behind, here was no stone or brick. Everything was fashioned out of timber or muddy earth slapped on skimpy wooden frames and crudely patched in a make-do-and-mend spirit as each new governor sought to restore order and direction to an enterprise that endured cyclical decline, renewal and subsequent attrition.13 It was also a place stripped of the amenities that English town and city dwellers took for granted: a bustling market place, shops, taverns, places of entertainment;14 only the church, the whipping post and a guardhouse bore witness to the order the colonists had imposed on this unruly frontier. And the settlement was pitifully small: barely two dozen houses in all, less than half the ‘fiftie or sixtie houses’ plus ‘five or sixe other severall Forts and Plantations’ counted in 1609 by that confirmed fabulist Captain John Smith.15
The earliest settlers had built their fort in the shape of a triangle on low-lying ground fronting directly onto the water, its southern edge extending some 140 yards along the river with two shorter sides of a hundred yards each to east and west. To keep out wild beasts and marauding Indians they had constructed a palisade fence fourteen or fifteen feet high from oak and walnut planks and posts sunk four feet deep into the ground, with bastions at each of the three corners.16 Inside the fort three streets of houses ran parallel to the palisade, enclosing a market place, store house, guardhouse and ‘likewise a pretty Chappell’, which in 1610 was ‘ruined and unfrequented’ but undergoing extensive repairs.17
The renovations to Jamestown’s urban fabric did not last long, however. When deputy governor Samuel Argall arrived in May 1617 – the voyage that should have brought Pocahontas back to Virginia – he found just five or six houses left standing, the church down, the palisade unable even to keep out hogs, Sir Thomas Dale’s landing stage in pieces, the freshwater well spoiled, the storehouse used as a church, ‘the market-place, and streets, and all other spare places planted with Tobacco, the Salvages as frequent in their houses as themselves’.18 Argall attempted to restore order, building a new timber church ‘wholly at the charge of the inhabitants’ in the extended eastern area of the fort and claiming credit for improving conditions in the colony.19 But like other leaders who came before and after him, he soon diverted his attention from public to private matters, placing the settlers bound for Martin’s Hundred on land set aside for the governor’s use, where he tried to establish a particular plantation of his own.20
Two years had passed since Argall’s hasty departure to avert public disgrace, and two more men had presided over the colony: acting governor Nathaniel Powell, in post for just ten days, and Captain – now Sir – George Yeardley, an old Virginia hand who had sailed on the Sea Venture with Sir Thomas Gates and spent the winter shipwrecked on Bermuda. Commenting on Yeardley’s appointment as governor, John Chamberlain called him a ‘meane fellow by way of provision… and to grace him the more the King knighted him this weeke at Newmarket; which hath set him up so high that he flaunts yt up and downe the streets in extraordinarie braverie, with fowrteen or fifteen fayre liveries after him’. Yeardley took with him to Virginia as secretary his wife’s first cousin John Pory, a man known for his drinking habits. In Virginia, said Chamberlain slyly, Pory would without question become ‘a sufficient sober man seeing there is no wine in all that climat’.21
Aside from the newly built church, Yeardley – like his predecessors – found Jamestown in disrepair and virtually unfortified, its only houses the dozen or so built by Gates including the governor’s house, which Argall had enlarged, while its ‘fort’ was reduced to just four demi-culverin guns mounted on rotten carriages.22 Also like his predecessors, Yeardley set about repairing the damage, not always with the settlers’ approval. Pory recounts the discontent over Yeardley’s insistence that the men at Jamestown should contribute their labour to building or repairing a bridge and to constructing gun platforms for the town’s better defence; indeed, the men ‘repyned as much as yf all their goods had bene taken from them’.23 Following instructions from London, Yeardley was also much preoccupied with land distribution, and he acted as midwife to North America’s first representative assembly, which met in July and early August 1619 in Jamestown’s church.
Now that Sir Francis Wyatt had taken charge, he will have moved straight into the governor’s house inside the fort, which Yeardley vacated for a house he had built some way behind the fort across the Pitch and Tar Swamp on land abutting Back River, which he patented in 1624 ‘for his better conveniency and the more Comoditye of his houses & dwellings’.24 Yeardley had other properties around the James River and beyond, including extensive landholdings at Weyanoke, a private plantation on the north side of the James River; at Flowerdew Hundred south of the James River; and a fine ‘Mansion house’ at Southampton Hundred a few miles west of Jamestown at Dancing Point, where the Chickahominy River meets the James; as well as land on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. But Jamestown remained his principal residence for the rest of his life.
After giving thanks to God for the maids’ safe deliverance into his hands, Pountis faced the unenviable task of finding chaperoned accommodation for them, a task made even more difficult by their lack of provisions to tide them over until they might be married. Yeardley had already warned the Virginia Company about the dangers of sending new settlers without proper stores, but London seemed neither to listen nor to care about their predicament.25 Some of the maids could remain on board until the colonists were able to receive them, since captains and masters bringing servants to Virginia could be ‘injoyed to keepe them aborde if need be a fortnight after there arrival att James Citty’, allowing the scattered planters time to receive notice and come to Jamestown to see them.26 But this was only a short-term solution as ships were expected to stay no more than thirteen days at Jamestown.27
The colony had long bemoaned the absence of a guesthouse to accommodate new arrivals, and although Jabez Whitaker had finally built one on company land in James City, it was promised to Captain Norton and his Italian glassworkers, who also arrived on the Marmaduke. Whitaker had even employed an old woman to wash their clothes and keep the place clean.28 The glassworkers and the brides could clearly not be accommodated together in a space measuring just forty by twenty feet, so where could they go?
It was usual for the governor to put up any visitor requiring special treatment. A few of the better-born brides may have been accommodated by Sir Francis Wyatt in the governor’s small house inside the fort, despite the absence of his wife, but first call on his hospitality doubtless went to the new officials who had arrived with him and his younger brother, the Reverend Haut (or Hawte) Wyatt, a ‘sufficient preacher’ sent to Virginia as minister for the governor’s tenants.29 The Yeardleys may have accommodated several of the women in their house near the Pitch and Tar Swamp, and others may have found temporary lodging with the Reverend Richard Buck, by all accounts ‘a verie good Preacher’.30 Buck lived with his family about a mile outside Jamestown on a twelve-acre plot close to Back River recently purchased from ancient planter William Fairfax, on which stood a house and another small dwelling. Although the minister had the benefit of glebe land and a further 750 acres which he had patented at Archer’s Hope, he and his wife preferred living on Jamestown Island, where they brought up four young children.31 Buck’s wife died some time in the early 1620s, possibly before the maids’ arrival, but as Jamestown’s respected preacher the Reverend Buck would surely have been considered a fit person to receive young women until their marriage.
Other married settlers from Jamestown’s elite may have given temporary lodging to the maids. Possible hosts included the influential and wealthy merchant, planter and military man William Pierce and his wife, and John Rolfe, who had taken the Pierces’ daughter Joan as his third wife. When the Jamestown brides arrived, the Rolfes were most likely living with their young daughter Elizabeth on one of two plots of land in urban Jamestown owned by Joan’s father.32 Both properties were in the area known as New Town, which surveyor William Claiborne was just starting to lay out to the east of the fort along both sides of Back Street down by the waterfront. Several of the colonists whose names are linked to the Jamestown brides would cluster here by the mid-1620s, among them Dr John Pott and his near-neighbour Edward Blaney, who both had maids living in their households in early 1624.
Jamestown’s fort and waterfront as it may have appeared in 1622, a few months after the maids’ arrival, enlarged from the engraving shown on page 213.
Some women may even have been billeted with the handful of ancient planters who had cleared land and established homesteads on twelve-acre plots on the eastern part of the island, following a precedent set by Sir Thomas Dale before he left the colony in 1616. One of the first planters to settle here was William Spence, described variously as a gentleman, a farmer and a labourer, who established himself on land extending east from Back River to the James.33 Dale himself had patented a narrow ridge of land at Goose Hill on the south-eastern edge of the island. Though swampy and cramped – the whole island covered just 1,700 acres, much of it marshland cut by rivers and creeks – the soil was extremely fertile, producing fine crops of corn and wheat, good foraging for hogs and ample space for tobacco.34
But to fulfil his duties, Pountis will have wanted the women to see and be seen by prospective husbands, and hiding them away in a corner of Jamestown Island was hardly likely to achieve that aim. The land there was anyway considered the ‘outback’ and unhealthily low-lying. Far better to summon husbands to Jamestown and disperse clutches of maids to plantations that were actively seeking to expand. The women had thankfully arrived in the one short break in the toilsome business of growing tobacco and its relentless cycle of ‘Sowing, plantinge, weedinge, wormminge, gatheringe, Cureinge, and making up’.35
For January and early February at least the marriage business would give the colony a welcome distraction from the hardships of settler life, but the lucky couples would have to hurry. Between the arrival of the ships in December and Easter the window to marry was relatively tight. Advent and Lent were traditionally forbidden for weddings in the Protestant Church of England, and while local clergy often ignored the Church’s calendar, even Puritan preachers such as William Gouge at Blackfriars generally avoided marrying couples during ‘unseasonable times’ and conducted few marriages in March.36 ‘Marry in Lent, you’ll surely repent’ was a warning still heeded by country folk. Lent that year began with Ash Wednesday on 13 February, so women wishing to observe the Lenten ban had just a few short weeks in which to choose a husband, complete the formalities of marriage and settle into their new homes.
