Dispersal
The maids who failed to find a husband immediately could not remain indefinitely in Jamestown; the place was simply too small to house so many single women. Since they had arrived without stores, company agent John Pountis needed to dispatch them to settlements that could feed them and where he could be sure of meeting the Virginia Company’s demand that unmarried maids should be ‘putt to severall househoulders that have wives till they can be provided of husbandes’.1 Pountis clearly took his responsibilities seriously, later receiving ‘very hartie thanks’ from the Virginia Company’s council for his abundant ‘care & charitie’ in providing for the maids and a special ‘remembrance of theire loves’ from the adventurers in the maids’ magazine, who doubtless hoped for a good return on their investment.2
It is nonetheless curious that Pountis picked two of the colony’s newest settlements to receive some of the maids, where they will have experienced frontier life at its rawest. Perhaps he had no choice. Provisions that winter were as scarce as ever, prompting Frenchman Peter Arondelle to complain personally to Sir Edwin Sandys about his family’s meagre rations, ‘but a pinte and a halfe of musty meale for a man a day’,3 a far cry from the plentiful pigs, turkeys, geese, cocks, hens, ducks and good fat capons promised in the Virginia Company’s promotional literature and in popular ballads such as ‘The Maydens of Londons brave adventures’.4
And so the women parted company. The ones who had quickly netted a husband slipped quietly into their new lives as wives to the planters. Of the remaining maids, some may have stayed on at Jamestown while others dispersed in small groups to settlements up and down the James River. If Jamestown’s shabby state had come as a shock, we may hope that their new homes opened their eyes to the glorious Eden promised to them by the Virginia Company, a land that was ‘rich, spacious and well watered; temperate as for the Climate; very healthfull after men are a little accustomed to it; abounding with all Gods naturall blessings: The Land replenished with the goodliest Woods in the world, and those full of Deere, and other Beasts for sustenance’.5
Despite all the colony’s earlier tribulations, the women had come to Virginia at a time of great optimism for the future. On first landing in the country, Governor Sir Francis Wyatt judged it ‘setled in a peace (as all men there thought) sure and unviolable’. Swords were rarely worn and guns brought out even more rarely, except for hunting deer and fowl. Able at last to reap the benefit of their long years of toil, the ancient planters and investors in particular plantations had chosen the richest grounds for their settlements, placing them ‘scatteringly and straglingly… and the further from neighbors held the better’, keeping their houses open to ‘the Savages, who were alwaies friendly entertained at the tables of the English, and commonly lodged in their bed-chambers’. Not only were planters ‘placed with wonderfull content upon their private dividents’, new settlements ‘pursued with an hopefull alacrity’ and all the colony’s projects set to thrive, but relations with the natives appeared to open ‘a faire gate’ for their conversion to Christianity, one of the stated aims of the whole Virginian adventure.6
All was not as it seemed, however. Edward Waterhouse, the Virginia Company’s secretary in London, would later use Wyatt’s letter to condemn with hindsight the colony’s fatal complacency in the months leading up to the catastrophic events of 22 March 1622, but at the time of the maids’ arrival Virginia’s future did indeed look bright. Their coming to the colony was just one of the many good things that happened that year. The Earl of Southampton also lauded the sixteen or so people sent to make glass beads for the Indian trade, the magazine of essential supplies valued at £2,000, the dispatch of the Discovery to trade in furs with the Indians, twenty-five people brought to Virginia to build boats, ships and pinnaces, and seven more to plant one thousand acres as financial backing for a projected ‘East Indie School’ to raise native children in the ways of Christianity.7
Virginia’s rivers, creeks and bays teemed with fish, which the Indians were far more skilled at catching than the early settlers.
Since Virginia possessed only primitive trails, and the swampy rivers and creeks impeded travel by land, it was surely by boat or canoe that Sir Edwin Sandys’ kinswoman Cicely Bray and Barbara Burchens – both still without husbands – travelled to Powle-Brooke, one of the smaller private plantations then springing up around the James River. Located at the western mouth of Powell Creek, a tributary on the south side of the river some twenty-five miles upriver from Jamestown, it had begun as a plantation of six hundred acres laid out from around 1619 for Captain Nathaniel Powell and John Smith, not the legendary captain but an ancient planter who had come to Virginia in 1611 aboard the Elizabeth at the same time as Catherine Finch’s husband, Robert Fisher.8 The women’s new home was less than ten miles by water from Flowerdew Hundred, Sir George Yeardley’s thousand-acre plantation at Tobacco Point.
Aside from having travelled together on the Warwick, Cicely Bray and Barbara Burchens had little in common. Eight years apart in age, they hailed from very different social ranks. Seventeen-year-old Burchens was a cloth maker’s daughter from Denby, either the Derbyshire village in the Peak District or the Welsh market town of Denbigh celebrated for glove making and weaving. She came to the Virginia Company highly commended as a ‘Mayde of honest and Cyvill Conversation’ by Mistress Brewer, the wife of John Brewer, a yeoman of His Majesty’s guard. Cloth working was an honourable trade, ranked twelfth in order of precedence among the twelve great City livery companies, and living in service with a member of the king’s personal bodyguard shows that young Barbara Burchens had good connections to London’s elite workers. But she came undeniably from artisan stock.
Cicely Bray, by contrast, was gentry to the core. A century or more before her birth a Sandys of the Vyne branch of the family had married the daughter of John Bray, half-brother to the celebrated courtier, architect and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Sir Reginald Bray. Two generations before that, a male Bray (Richard) had married a Sandys female (Margaret Sandys of Furness Fell), creating the first of the links that joined the two families and their several branches. Cicely belonged to the line of descent that had settled ultimately in Gloucestershire, where her relatives included ‘John Bray gent.’ of Donnington and Captain Edmund Bray of nearby Great Barrington – possibly her grandfather – who died in 1620 and was buried in the church of St Mary the Virgin there. You can find the captain’s stone effigy lying on a plinth in the south aisle squeezed between the organ and the wall. Although his face has quite worn away, his fine Jacobean ruff clings crisply to his neck and he wears his sword strapped to his right side, apparently in penance for having killed a man in the Low Countries. Captain Bray’s second son Sylvester had married Cicely or Cecily Mayne, bringing her Christian name into the Gloucestershire Brays and implying a connection between the Cicely Bray who travelled to Jamestown in 1621 and the captain commemorated in stone in a Cotswold village.9
The man in charge of Powle-Brooke, where the two women were bound, was precisely the sort of colonist the company had hoped would take unmarried maids into their care. A gentleman from the same class as Cicely Bray, Captain Nathaniel Powell was one of the few survivors from the very first group of settlers still in the colony. Captain John Smith praised him as a ‘valiant Souldier’ (they had explored the Chesapeake together, and Powell had gone in search of the lost colonists), and Powell obligingly completed some of the gaps in Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia, published long after Smith had left the colony. 10 No stranger to public office, Powell had served as acting governor for ten days after deputy governor Samuel Argall abruptly left the colony and was appointed to Virginia’s council of state in 1621.He was, in the words of the Virginia Company’s council, ‘a man of extraordinary merritt’.11
As an ancient planter and co-founder of his own plantation, Captain Powell would have made a splendid husband for Bray or any of the better-born maids, but sadly for them he was no longer free, having married Joyce Tracy just the year before. While of similar rank to Bray, Joyce Tracy had one advantage the other could not match: a stake in Virginian land through her father William Tracy, an active investor in the Virginia Company and in the new plantation of Berkeley Hundred on the north side of the James, settled in 1619 under the initial command of Captain John Woodlief. Joyce’s father had set out for the colony the following September, taking his family with him: wife Mary, son Thomas, daughter Joyce and a young kinswoman, Francis Grevill. They left Bristol in the Supply on 18 September 1620 with a group of fifty or so men, women and two children, bound for Berkeley Hundred where William Tracy and George Thorpe were to take over as joint commanders.12 Eight of the men were described as gentlemen, although two of these returned to England, one (Nicholas Came) by the ship that had carried him to Virginia.
By the time the group reached Berkeley Hundred on 29 January 1621, Captain Powell and Joyce Tracy were married; tradition has it that they wed at sea, or they may have married soon after the Supply arrived at Jamestown. Francis Grevill also quickly found a husband among Jamestown’s elite, marrying Nathaniel West, a younger brother of Virginia’s one-time governor Lord Delaware. But William Tracy did not survive long enough to reap his anticipated rewards. By April he was dead, seriously indebted,13 and Powell had taken his new bride to the plantation named after him. Accompanying the new Mistress Powell was her maidservant, Isabell Gifford, who had travelled out to Virginia with the Tracys and married Adam Reymer (or Raynor) at sea.14
Today the site of Powle-Brooke forms part of the James River National Wildlife Refuge, which I visited one hot, still morning in early spring, before the trees turned green. Aside from the highway’s distant drone and occasional hooting from a railroad, the silence was broken only by warbling birds and throatier bullfrogs, and the tramp of my feet through winter-crisp leaves.
The water is glassy still, reflecting upside-down trees that mingle with the saplings growing from the swamp. A bird darts in close, spots me sitting by the water’s edge then flies off to squawk from a nearby tree. More sounds of wildlife disturbed: wings flapping and the plop of a waterfowl ducking underwater. I marvel at the freshly aromatic smell of wax myrtle rubbed between my fingers, a clean, sweet smell, mildly antiseptic. The blue water of the creek ripples in the wind. Only the margins are brown, clogged and oily.
What did they think of their new home, Cicely Bray and young Barbara Burchens? Did they feel trapped by the trees, the water, the harsh drudgery of frontier life? Were they fretful at the dangers they faced, living far from Jamestown in the midst of so-called savages, the streets of London and the rolling Gloucestershire countryside a distant memory? Or were they glad to be making a new life for themselves away from fathers, brothers, family members, masters and mistresses who sought to control their every action?
They were not alone of course. The settlement where they lived was home to a dozen people at least, and they had Mistress Joyce Powell and her maidservant Isabell for female company. Just the year before, nearby Flowerdew Hundred counted five women and four children among its total population of seventy-seven people.15 Even closer to Powle-Brooke was a cluster of smallish settlements, all begun in 1618 or 1619: Captain John Ward’s plantation, Captain Bargrave’s plantation and Martin’s Brandon, but these were clearly unsuitable for unchaperoned maids. In March 1620 they counted just one woman among their settler population of eighty-four.
Still on the south side of the James but some way downriver on the lower reaches of Burwell’s Bay lay Edward Bennett’s plantation, also known as Bennett’s Welcome or Warraskoyack after the Indian tribe that lived in what is now Isle of Wight County. Fort Boykin marks the approximate spot today, close to the oyster beds and the dwindling ghost fleet of mothballed merchant ships held in reserve for national emergencies, fittingly painted a ghostly grey. At least three of the maids came here from Jamestown, all still unmarried: the widowed Marie Daucks, twenty-five years old and commended for her honesty and ‘good Carriage’ by her kinsman, Master Slocum of Mauden Lane in London; twenty-one-year-old Alse (Alice) Jones from Kidderminster in Worcestershire, lately come out of service with a Mr Binneons of Bishopsgate Street; and London-born Parnell Tenton, twenty years old, presented to the Virginia Company by her mother (her father was dead), and one of two maids recommended by Mr Hobson, an official of the Drapers’ Company. ‘ She cann worke all kinds of ordinary workes’ is all we know of her accomplishments.16
The Bennetts’ plantation was even rawer than Powle-Brooke, settled only from late January or early February 1622, suggesting that the three maids will have spent the months of December and January at Jamestown before travelling downriver to their new home. Edward Bennett, the plantation’s chief backer, was a London merchant, shipowner and member of the Virginia Company who obtained the patent to his land in the autumn of 1621 and immediately set about dispatching some two hundred settlers.17 One of his associates was Richard Wiseman, who had invested in Captain Lawne’s vacated property nearby, along with merchant Robert Newland from the Isle of Wight, who had organized the departure of the Marmaduke maids.18 The main group of 120 settlers arrived at Bennett’s Welcome in February 1622, led by seasoned settler Captain Ralph Hamor,19 an ancient planter who had first come to the colony in 1609. Among them were two more Bennetts: Edward’s brother Richard and the Reverend William Bennett, who became the plantation’s minister.20 It is possible that both were unmarried when the maids came to Bennett’s Welcome: Richard would die intestate five years later, and the Reverend Bennett’s wife did not come to Virginia until December 1622, on the Abigail, although they may have married before then in England and travelled to Virginia at different times.
A third plantation to which some of the maids dispersed was Martin’s Hundred, one of the largest of the new breed of particular plantations and located some seven miles east of Jamestown: in 1620, its population of seventy-two people included fourteen women and thirteen children and young people.21 Ann Jackson had come here to join her brother and sister-in-law, and since Martin’s Hundred was settled by several married couples, other maids will almost certainly have accompanied her, among them nineteen-year-old Mary Elliott, brought up by her ‘father-in-law’ Maximillian Russell, whose ‘good deserts’ drew praise from Nicholas Ferrar.22 Living with the Jacksons were two servants who had travelled out to Virginia with them: ‘pottmaker’ Thomas Ward, in his early to mid-forties, reputedly English North America’s first craftsman potter, 23 and John Stevans (or Steephen), aged a little over thirty. Had life turned out differently for the young gardener’s daughter from Wiltshire and Westminster, one or other might have made a bid for her hand, despite their lack of independent means and Ward’s somewhat advanced age.
After a difficult birth, the plantation to which she had come was at last seated in the right place and ‘do now againe go forward cherefully’.24 What happened here was clearly of great concern to the Virginia Company back home, which looked on Martin’s Hundred as a model for future plantations.25 Formed in 1618, the settlement took its name from Richard Martin, the company’s legal counsel who had defended the colony to parliament in 1614, when he declared in a witty if somewhat rambling speech that all Virginia required was ‘but a few honest laborers burdened with children’, by which he plainly meant hard-working family men with equally ‘honest’ wives.26 Martin died in 1618, soon after his appointment as Recorder of London, and Sir John Wolstenholme took over as the society’s chief investor, giving his name to Wolstenholme Town at the heart of the settlement. A patent of late January 1622 named several men connected with the maids’ magazine among the society’s many investors, including the Virginia Company’s husband William Webb, organizer of the Virginia lotteries Gabriel Barbor, Christopher Martin and Nicholas Ferrar. The same patent directed the adventurers, tenants and servants of Martin’s Hundred to diversify into products other than tobacco, among them corn, wine, iron, silk, silkgrass, hemp, flax and timber.27
Martin’s Hundred was not in quite such good shape as many hoped, however. Only recently its leaders had declined a Virginia Company proposal to foster native children in order to instruct them in the ‘true religion’, claiming that the plantation was ‘sorely weakened and as then in much confusion’. The arrival of maids without accompanying provisions would only add to their difficulties. The company worried that even the dozen lusty youths who arrived by the Marmaduke might need to be forcibly billeted among the existing settlers and was therefore heartily relieved to hear that the newcomers were received ‘willinglie and lovinglie’.28
Ann herself will surely have received the warmest of welcomes from her brother and sister-in-law, her spirits lifted, one hopes, by the plantation’s fine riverside location commanding views across a wide bend in the James River to Hog Island on the far side. Like all the maids who came with her, Jackson will have experienced the complex emotions of immigrants everywhere: relief at her safe arrival tempered by inevitable disappointment that her new life was not quite as she had imagined. And like all immigrants she will have struggled to cloak the wild and the strange with the mantle of old habits, her senses strained by the sights, sounds, smells of her new surroundings beside the majestic River James, where pinnaces and Indian canoes replaced the familiar wherries and lighters of the Thames, and where merchant ships like the Marmaduke and the Warwick – however incongruously framed by virgin forest – brought back memories of home.
Surveying her new domain, she cannot fail to have been struck by the precarious nature of her new existence, akin to England’s Irish plantations but unlike anything she had experienced herself in Wiltshire or Westminster. As well as arming themselves against Indian attacks, Virginia’s early settlers feared marauding Spanish ships and erected riverside forts, which Spanish spies dismissed as fashioned without craft by unskilled men and built of wooden boards ‘so weak that a kick would break them down’.29
Yet however flimsy its defences might appear to their enemies, Ann Jackson had undeniably entered a fortified environment. At the heart of Wolstenholme Town stood a palisaded fort a little way back from the bluff, roughly trapezoid in shape and guarded by a watchtower at one corner and a gun platform aimed towards the river across a stretch of open ground where troops could muster. Inside the fort was a house hastily erected for Governor William Harwood, a couple of storehouses, a pond and a well. South-east of the fort lay the company compound, fenced rather than fortified, containing a three-room farmhouse with an open enclosure for animals tacked on to one end and three smaller structures, where potter Thomas Ward may have begun to make his pots.30 Even closer to the river stood the homestead of warden John Boyse, John Jackson’s fellow burgess at the general assembly of 1619, his house tightly palisaded and flanked with gun emplacements, one facing downriver towards the ravine known as Grice’s Run, the other pointing squarely towards the river to cover any direct approach.31
Pushed right to the edge of the ‘civilized’ world, Ann Jackson, Cicely Bray and all the other maids who dispersed to distant settlements will have experienced the full shock of frontier life as they participated in the daily struggle to carve new homes from the wilderness. For anyone used to city life, the work involved was back-breaking. To clear space for growing crops, the English settlers had adopted native methods – ‘spoiling the woods’, as Captain John Smith called it, cutting broad notches in the bark of trees to kill them then burning or cutting the stumps, and planting their corn between the blackened remains.32
Once the land was properly cleared, most farmers turned to growing tobacco, the colony’s one successful cash crop and its economic foundation. Back in England, labouring outdoors was men’s work, while women took charge of the house and its surrounding yard, plus all the parallel tasks of ‘huswifery’. Although the same division of labour theoretically applied in Virginia, the reality for many settler women was very different. In a land where labour was scarce and tobacco a greedy master, even wives might be called from their domestic tasks to help hoe the fields or perform sickening tasks like killing the worms that destroyed the tobacco crop.33
The plight of indentured serving women and the small number of recently arrived African captives was infinitely worse, of course. ‘Give ear unto a Maid,/ That lately was betray’d,/ And sent into Virginny O’, sings the heroine of a late seventeenth-century ballad, ‘The Trapann’d Maiden: OR, The Distressed Damsel’, which paints a miserable picture of life in Virginia. Transported against her will and forced to serve a five-year term, the ‘damsel’ recounts her litany of woes: underfed, dressed in rags and sleeping on straw, she works at her mistress’s beck and call from daybreak, carrying water from the well on her head, pounding grain with her mortar, tending her mistress’s child and ‘a thousand Woes beside’.
I have play’d my part,
Both at Plow and at Cart,
In the Land of Virginny, O:
Billats from the Wood,
Upon my back they load,
When that I was weary,
weary, weary, weary, O.
Instead of drinking Beer,
I drink the Water clear,
In the Land of Virginny, O;
Which makes me pale and wan
Do all that e’r I can,
When that I was weary,
weary, weary, weary, O.34
Regardless of whether you worked alongside the men in the fields and whether or not you found a husband, all the Jamestown brides will have toiled long and hard at the essential domestic tasks that made life tolerable for everyone. Idleness was not an option; the company’s insistence that ‘no man be suffred to lyve Idlie, the example whereof might prove p[er]nitious unto the rest’ applied just as firmly to women, prompting Virginia’s first general assembly to insist that women should qualify for land shares as ancient planters alongside their menfolk, because ‘in a newe plantaton it is not knowen whether man or woman be the most necessary’.35
Women typically looked after the animals, tended gardens, fetched water from nearby creeks and wells, washed clothes, raised young children, kept the household decently and cleanly clothed prepared food for the table. It was women’s work to butcher, preserve and boil the homestead’s precious hogs and goats, and to tend the domestic cattle that had arrived in the colony as early as 1611.36 Although Virginia’s summers were too hot to make hard cheeses, the women’s industry can be linked to the milk pans that start appearing from about this time, patiently sifted from excavated sites in and around Jamestown. Used to separate milk from cream in the process of making butter and cheese, they helped to supply ‘white meat’ for the settlers’ diet.37
Maids who could spin or weave, such as Essex-born Martha Baker, will have found their skills redundant, since all cloth was imported, and those with rarefied needle skills would have been thwarted by the Virginia Company’s ban on wearing gold and silver thread by all but the colony’s elite.38 But ordinary sewing skills were much in demand for making and mending clothes for the entire plantation: ‘we m[u]st here all perishe for want of clothinge and other necessaries’ was a habitual complaint.39 As for tasks like laundry, Thomas Niccolls was not the only male settler who yearned for female help. Some plantation sponsors stipulated that the wives of new tenants should be paid for helping with ‘Cookinge washing mendinge of Clothes and other huswiferie’.40
For most aspects of daily life, the settlers relied on imports from home as the colony had as yet virtually no productive industries. The lack of pack thread for drying tobacco was a constant source of complaint; and ships’ holds were crammed with basic necessities for frontier life such as needles, thread, leather points, kettles, axes, fishing nets, frying pans and nails.41 You had to be nimble to adapt and survive. To overcome a shortage of sieves, settlers sifted their meal through pieces of leather ‘burned full of holes with a hote Iron w[hi]ch is soe wide that the bran and all of the males [meal] goes through w[hi]ch I am p[er]swaded makes theire bread verie unhoulsome and is a great cause of theire fluxes’.42
Houses were similarly crude, surely a source of further disillusionment for the better-born maids and those who had worked in service for London’s professional elite or master craftsmen. Virginian houses were put together quickly using light wooden frames and earthen walls, an ‘earthfast’ type of construction borrowed from Captain John Smith’s native Lincolnshire and commonly used in medieval peasant homes.43 They looked shoddy and deteriorated rapidly. ‘Ther Howses are generally the worst yt ever I sawe ye meanest Cottages in England beinge every way equall (if not superior) with ye moste of the beste,’ declared the visiting Colonel Butler in 1623, an opinion that the daintier maids may well have shared.44
Yet in Virginia building houses as quickly as you could made perfect sense, reserving what capital you had to buy land and labour to grow the tobacco on which your fortune depended. Timber was in any case plentiful, stone virtually absent and bricks not yet in regular manufacture. Defending themselves against Captain Butler’s politically motivated criticism, the planters argued that their homes were built ‘for use and not for ornament and are soe farr from beinge soe meane as they are reported yt throughout his Mats: Dominions here, all labouringe mens houses (w[hi]ch wee cheifly p[ro]fesse our selvs to be) are in no wise generally for goodnes to be compared unto them’.45
But as a woman fresh from England, your spirits will inevitably have sunk as you crossed the threshold of your new home. Most contained just one room, measuring perhaps twenty-five feet by sixteen, which served as ‘ther Kitchen, their Chamber, their all’.46 A wooden ladder led up to the loft space, where children and servants slept. Aside from an enormous fireplace, furnishings were typically sparse: a bedstead if you were lucky, a chest for storage, wooden platters, a cooking pot, a mortar and pestle for pounding corn, a few knives and spoons, a bench or storage barrels for seating. A single glance was all it took to survey your new surroundings, which naturally lacked any additional rooms set aside for those ‘home industries’ that were your particular domain: baking, brewing, dairying, salting and curing.
Less obviously but no less painfully, you were entering a society and a social order in flux. Back home in England, servants, apprentices and their masters or mistresses commonly lived together in a cohesive household. Had you lived in service yourself, it was probably with neighbours, kinsmen or family connections as you passed through the young adult stage of your life before marrying and forming a household of your own. Here in Virginia the ties of kinship and community were broken, creating a more restless, fractured society and households that little resembled the family-centred social groups of blood relations and seasonal help you will have known back home. Even discounting the rascals and ruffians swept off the streets to rid the mother country of undesirables, most indentured servants were young, male and rootless, ‘on the loose and on the make’, which required a different sort of domestic arrangement that separated masters from servants. So as well as transplanting yourself geographically, you were entering a new kind of social space where the rules were not yet written. Adapting to your new environment would prove especially difficult for the women among you that failed to find husbands, who were neither servants nor mistresses but caught somewhere in between.
House construction in a few settlements was beginning to reflect this new order. Sir Thomas Dale had attempted to lure colonists to his settlements on the Upper James with the promise of ‘a hansome howse of some foure roomes, or more if he have a family, to repose himselfe in rent free, and twelve English Acres of ground’,47 but he was doubtless bragging and by 1619 other places were taking the lead in matters of building. Within visiting distance of Cicely Bray and Barbara Burchens at Powle-Brooke, Sir George Yeardley’s plantation at Flowerdew Hundred boasted a four-bayed house in which a lobby entrance and an internal chimney stack separated a parlour on one side from a hall and kitchen plus one or more service rooms on the other. Householders could withdraw to the parlour, away from the domestic activities taking place on the other side of the wall.48 The planters were rightly proud of such developments, insisting that ‘the houses of men of better Ranke and quallety they are soe much better and convenyent yt noe man of quallety wthout blushinge can make excepcon against them’.49
Food and drink could also cause problems for new arrivals accustomed to bread made with English grains, which required well tilled soiled and a more forgiving climate. Corn or maize was now your staple diet, as it was for the Indians, fruity and slightly musty in taste. For the middle rank of settlers cattle and pigs provided the primary source of meat, supplemented by Virginia’s abundant wildlife, which included exotic birds like the great blue heron, the common loon and the trumpeter swan, as well as opossum, grey squirrel, sturgeon, Canada geese, ducks, turtles and passenger pigeons.50
Despite such apparent abundance, complaints about meagre rations and poor food recur throughout Virginia’s formative years. In May 1621 newcomer Captain Thomas Nuce observed that the men under his command lived ‘very barely for the most part: havinge no other foode but bread & water and such mann[er] of meate as they make of the Mayze: w[hi]ch I would to God I could say they had in any reasonable plenty’.51 Nuce’s wife had nonetheless just added a ‘jolly boy’ to the colony and remained in good health. Another recent settler, the perspicacious and generally sympathetic George Thorpe, blamed the Virginia Company’s propaganda for exciting false expectations, insisting that ‘more doe die here of the disease of theire minde then of theire body by havinge this countrey victualles over-praised unto them in England & by not knowinge they shall drinke water here’.52
Water was indeed a problem for early immigrants, who sickened and died in their hundreds from a lethal mix of contaminated wells and saltwater poisoning. Jamestown’s water was especially deadly in summer, as the discharge from freshwater rivers fell and saltwater penetrated further up the James estuary.53 Settlements upriver from Jamestown, such as Powle-Brook, escaped the brackish water, although Martin’s Hundred and Bennett’s Welcome lay in the saltwater zone. Europeans anyway preferred drinking beer to water. In England most adults drank at least one gallon of ale a day; men, women and even children drank alcohol at every meal, breakfast included.54 Virginia’s inability to produce ale or wine remained a source of vexation until well into the century, despite a beer made from Indian corn which George Thorpe claimed to prefer over ‘good stronge Englishe beare’. The ‘Dutchmen’ recruited for the sawmills were so disgusted by the colony’s lack of ale and entertainment that they threatened to return home, but noted tippler Secretary John Pory remained optimistic that Virginia could produce good wines, requesting slips of the large vine of ‘Corynth grapes’, which he had seen at the London house of merchant Nicholas Leate. In Virginia you could scarcely walk three steps ‘in any place unmanured’ without tangling your foot in some vine or other, he told Sir Edwin Sandys back in London, commenting, ‘I drinke water here w[i]th as much (yf not more) pleasure and contente as I dranke wine in those partes.’ ‘Bravely spoken’ added John Ferrar in the margin of Pory’s letter, but Governor Wyatt was less forgiving. ‘To plant a Colony by water drinkers was an inexcusable errour in those, who layd the first foundacion, and have made it a recieved custome, which until it be laide downe againe, there is small hope of health’.55
So what do you make of your new environment now that you have recovered from the shock of arrival and begun the slow process of acclimatization? February is habitually Virginia’s coldest month, but you have known extreme cold back home. The older maids among you might remember the bitter winter of 1608 when the Thames froze over completely, just as it will freeze again in the winter of the year you left.
Writing mid-century, George Gardyner of Peckham attributed Virginia’s unwholesome air to its changeable climate, ‘which is mighty extream in heat and cold’, and to Virginia’s many ‘Swamps, standing-waters and Marishes, and mighty store of Rivers’. Two other ‘pernicious companions’ haunting the English settlers he identified as ‘Country Duties’, his coy euphemism for venereal disease, and rattlesnakes, so called ‘for the rattle in her taile, whose bitings are present death’. Gardyner was presumably referring to the canebreak rattlesnake, which inhabits the forests and swampy glades of south-eastern Virginia, over-wintering in hollow trees and tree stumps.56 By arriving in winter, you are at least spared an encounter with such creatures until the onset of Virginia’s steaming-hot summers, when ‘this vermine… is so stirring that they are in the fields, woods, and commonly in their houses, to their great anoyance’.57
But there is one strange presence you cannot ignore: that of the Indians who lurk unseen in the encircling forests and come daily into your settlements, sitting at your tables and even sleeping in your beds, if Governor Wyatt is to be believed. A decade before you came to the colony William Strachey painted their different dispositions for a European audience, considering some Indians too fearful to trust the settlers, others bold and audacious enough to enter the English forts to ‘truck and trade with us and looke us in the face, crying all freindes, when they have but new done us a mishchief ’. For all his prejudices, William Strachey has left us one of the most closely observed accounts of how the native population appeared to European eyes. As a woman, you would surely have been more circumspect in your observations, less blatant in your curiosity and perhaps a little fearful of coming too close to the ‘other’.
For maids who survived into the summer, rattlesnakes will surely have become a fact of life, drawn here by Mark Catesby for The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas.
Skin colour was the first difference to which Strachey drew attention, describing Virginia’s indigenous people as ‘generally of a Coulour browne, or rather tawnye’, a sort of sodden quince colour, which he attributed to a paste made from red-tempered earth and the juices of certain roots with which mothers smeared their newborn infants, who remained ‘so smudged and besmeered’ throughout their lives, partly from custom and partly to protect against Virginia’s swarms of stinging mosquitoes ‘which heere breed aboundantly, amonst the marish whorts [plants], and fenburies’.58 Turning to hair, physiognomy and anatomy, Strachey noted that ‘Their hayre is black, grosse, longe and thick, the men have no beardes, their noses are broad flatt and full at the end, great bigge Lippes, and wyde mouthes, (yet nothing so unsightly as the Moores,) they are generally tall of stature, and streight, of comely proportion.’
To clothe themselves, Indian men wore animal skins in winter and the ‘better sort’ donned large mantles of several skins decorated with white beads, copper or painted, ‘but the Comon sort have scarse wherewithall to cover their nakednes, but stick long blades [of] grasse, the leaves of Trees or such like under broad Baudricks [belts] of Leather which covers them behind and before’. The better sort of women also wore mantles of animal skins, ‘fynely drest, shagged and frindged at the skirt, carved and coulored’ and prettily decorated with beasts, fowl, tortoises or more fanciful images. Young girls went naked until they were eleven or twelve, when they would don a leather apron ‘as doe our artificers or handicrafts men’.
English fear of the Indians was enshrined in the very first law laid down by Virginia’s general assembly of 1619, which implicitly recognized that the way the settlers behaved could affect their relations with the local population: ‘be it enacted that noe injury or oppression be wrought by the English ag[ain]st the Indians whereby the present peace might be disturbed, & antient quarrels might be revived.59
As for drawing closer to some of the ‘better disposed’ of the Indians, the general assembly counselled against either rejecting or accepting their advances, but where Indians came voluntarily to the larger settlements, the settlers should admit no more than five or six into any one place and keep them under a ‘good guard’. On no account should Indians be entertained by lone inhabitants, ‘for generally (though some amongst many may proove good) they are a most trecherous people, & quickly gone when they have done a villainy’.
By 1621, despite the uneasy peace that prevailed, most English settlers bestowed upon the Indians nothing but ‘maledictions and bitter execrations’.60 A notable exception was Captain George Thorpe, who had taken sole charge of the plantation of Berkeley Hundred after William Tracy’s death. John Pory likened his coming to that of ‘an Angell from heaven’, while Sir George Yardley called him ‘a most sufficient gentleman, virtuous and wise’.61
As Thorpe explained to Sir Edwin Sandys, his ‘poore understandinge’ led him to believe that ‘if there bee wronge on any side it is on o[u]rs who are not soe charitable to them as Christians ought to bee’. The Indians – especially the better sort – were of ‘a peaceable & vertuous disposition’, their only fault being that they were ‘a litle cravinge and that in a niggardly fassion for they will comonly p[ar]te w[i]th nothinge they have whatsoever is given them’. To cement relations between the two nations, he urged Sandys to send English clothes and other household stuff for trading purposes, and to make a public declaration of the company’s desire to convert the people to Christianity.62
So determined was Captain Thorpe to improve relations between the two peoples that he went to see Opechancanough, Powhatan’s brother and effective successor as paramount leader of the Indians. Their conversation went well, he reported, declaring that the Indian leader ‘had more motiones of religione in him, then Coulde be ymmagined in soe greate blindnes, for hee willinglye Acknolwedged that theirs was nott the right waye, desiringe to bee instructed in ours and confessed that god loved us better then them’.63 They talked also of the stars and of the constellations, and Thorpe learned to his delight that the Great Bear was called the same in both languages. The Indians were then in the midst of their hunting, said Opechancanough; Thorpe should visit him again when their hunting was done. Poor unsuspecting George Thorpe failed to realize that Opechancanough was playing him like a pawn in his bid to sweep away the English usurpers.
Others have documented the many atrocities committed on both sides of the conflict and viewed events through Indian eyes.64 The Jamestown Brides offers a different perspective: that of young women fresh from England caught up in a clash of cultures sparked by the Europeans’ rapacious hunger for land. Like the just and gentle George Thorpe, they had no idea what the Indians were planning next.
