The Crossbow Maker’s Sister
For young Catherine Finch from a small rural parish close to the Welsh borders, her new life in Virginia had more in common with her childhood than with the teeming tenements of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where she had once lived in service with her brother. Yet Erasmus Finch holds the key to his sister’s departure, I feel certain, on account of his links to the gentry of this Westminster parish, which was home to a number of Virginia Company investors and adventurers. In the area’s many taverns he will surely have picked up gossip about the company’s plan to send brides to Virginia and perhaps even secured for his sister an introduction to George Thorpe Esquire, another Strand resident, who had gone to Virginia to take charge of the settlement of Berkeley Hundred.1
The man Catherine married was Robert Fisher, an ancient planter who had arrived in Virginia in 1611 aboard the Elizabeth with Sir Thomas Dale’s fleet of ships. Although we know little about him, he was clearly skilled with his hands and probably a trained carpenter, for it was Fisher whom George Thorpe chose to build a house for Opechancanough. The coincidence is striking: like his future brother-in-law, Fisher made goods for royalty, Indian royalty in his case, compared with Erasmus Finch’s crossbows for the English kings.2 Fisher did well, it seems, and quite delighted the Indian chief with his ‘faire house’ built ‘after the English fashion’, especially with its lock and key, ‘which he so admired, as locking and unlocking his doore a hundred times a day, he thought no device in the world comparable to it’.3 The work took five weeks, for which Fisher charged ninety pounds of tobacco, more than half the cost of his new bride, which may explain why he felt able to buy himself a wife.
Thorpe did not survive to settle the bill, however, dying at the hands of the Indians in the great attack of 1622. It was still unpaid more than two years later, when Fisher appears among a dozen creditors of George Thorpe, late of Berkeley Hundred, deceased. I wonder if he ever received his money; when the creditors reapply to the court less than two months later, Fisher’s name has disappeared from the list.4 That unpaid bill may nonetheless hold a clue as to where Fisher and perhaps his new bride were living at the time of the attack: at the new plantation of Berkeley Hundred on the northern bank of the James, next to the company land at Charles City. Thorpe would surely have commissioned a carpenter from among his own settlers, a man whose work he knew and trusted. The first group of settlers had arrived at the settlement on 4 December 1619 and celebrated North America’s first official thanksgiving, adhering to their instructions to keep the date of their arrival holy ‘yearly and perpetually… as a day of thanksgiving’,5 a full year before the Plymouth settlers arrived in New England.
If Catherine had come to Berkeley Hundred soon after she arrived at Jamestown, she will have experienced the full horror of the attack of March 1622. Altogether eleven settlers from the plantation were reported slain: Thorpe himself, described as ‘one of his Majesties Pentioners’, seven men listed individually, and a family consisting of Richard Rowles, his wife and child.6 Many of the survivors found refuge at Samuel Jordan’s fortified settlement across the James River, known as Jordan’s Journey or Beggar’s Bush, one of only a handful of settlements considered safe from Indian attack. ‘Master Samuel Jorden gathered together but a few of the straglers about him at Beggers-bush,’ wrote Captain John Smith in The Generall Historie of Virginia, ‘where he fortified and lived in despight of the enemy.’7
Berkeley Hundred survivors were still living at Jordan’s Journey in 1625, when the muster recorded the presence of Robert Fisher, his wife Katherine, who had arrived on the Marmaduke in October 1621, and their one-year-old daughter Sisly. I cannot be certain that the Fishers were living here before then, since the census of February 1624 records a Henry Fisher, his wife and infant, rather than a Robert Fisher, but mistakes were common and the Henry Fishers are otherwise absent from official records, so it is reasonable to assume that Catherine’s daughter Sisly Fisher was born here in late 1623 or early 1624.8
Founded by ancient planter Samuel Jordan, the settlement of Jordan’s Journey sits on a triangular spit of land jutting into the James River from its southern bank, several bends upriver from Jamestown and close to where the James and the Appomattox Rivers converge.9 A Virginia Company investor, Jordan had come to Virginia in 1610, the same year as his future wife Sisley, who arrived as a young girl aged nine or ten aboard the Swan. He lived for a time at Bermuda Hundred, where Audry Hoare would later settle, representing the plantation at Virginia’s first general assembly held in the sweltering summer of 1619, when his particular task was to review the four books of law sent out from England. Like others who rose to prominence in Virginia, Samuel Jordan began to acquire land, originally on the north side of the James, and by 1621 had established his 450-acre settlement at Jordan’s Point.10 Two hundred of these acres came to Samuel and Sisley Jordan through their entitlement as ancient planters. According to a notorious gossip, Joan Vincent from Neck of Land Charles City, the Jordan marriage was not especially happy because of the ‘greate love’ harboured by Samuel for a married woman, Alice Boyse, who attracted suitors like flies, as we shall see.11
When the first colonists ventured this far in 1607, the promontory was the site of a native village inhabited by Weyanoke Indians who had long cultivated the land, clearing the fields for corn and erecting dwellings on the promontory’s eastern side, orientated to deflect the gusty winds that sweep up the James in winter but able to take advantage of cooling summer breezes. The forested uplands made good foraging territory and the water margins supplied plentiful tuckahoe to supplement their diet.12 What made the site attractive for the Indians appealed equally to the land-hungry English, and so the Weyanokes gradually lost their villages and corn-growing lands to the settlers, who stripped them of all but their traditional foraging territory.13
Catherine Fisher’s home at Jordan’s Point is shown here in a detail from a mid-eighteenth-century map of Virginia and Maryland by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson.
Catherine’s world had shrunk dramatically since she had uprooted herself from her brother’s home in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which in 1621 contained an estimated 1,916 households.14 Compare this with Jordan’s Journey, which in January 1625 could muster a total population of fifty-six men, women and children living in just fifteen households.15 Most of the adults were still in their twenties and, remarkably for early Virginia, nine of the fifteen households were families with a husband and wife (or wife-to-be) and in many cases (five out of nine) one or more children. Here you would find precisely the sort of settlers the Virginia Company had hoped to encourage: men rooted to the land with ties of family and children. Thanks to many more girl children than boys, the gender ratio of all ages was a respectable two males to every female. More than one third were servants, ranging in age from a boy of eleven to John Pead at thirty-five, the settlement’s oldest resident. All were English or had English names; there were as yet neither Indians nor Africans.
Like any community in the Old or New Worlds, Jordan’s Journey had evolved a pecking order based on breeding, social status and wealth. The Fishers were ranked around number four, making Robert Fisher a respectable catch for a woman who had arrived in the colony with nothing. At the time of the 1625 muster the community’s leading household was headed jointly by Samuel Jordan’s widow Sisley and the man who would become her next husband, William Farrar, an unusual – even scandalous – living arrangement. When the couple eventually married, Sisley Jordan would slip back to being a subordinate member of the household.
In 1625 the Jordan-Farrar household owned five of the settlement’s twenty-two houses and employed almost half its servants (ten out of twenty-one). The extent of their other joint possessions bore witness to their wealth and status: two boats, twelve coats of mail, fourteen pounds of powder and 300 pounds of shot, eleven fixed guns, plus copious food stocks that included 200 bushels of corn, 200 dry fish, sixteen neat cattle ‘yong and old’, four swine and twenty hens. William Farrar had chosen the well trodden route to riches in Virginia by forging an alliance with a wealthy widow and securing his place as commander and premier resident of a settlement.
Next in the social hierarchy came the households of Nathaniel Causey, Thomas Palmer and Robert Fisher, who all owned two houses each and employed servants: five for the Causeys and one each for the Palmers and the Fishers. The Causeys also had a boat. A gentleman and clearly the settlement’s second-in-command, Nathaniel Causey and his wife Thomasine were both ancient planters who by 1620 had settled at their plantation of Causey’s Care on the north bank of the James, close to West and Shirley Hundred.16 They survived the Indian attack of 1622, when Nathaniel, ‘being cruelly wounded, and the Salvages about him, with an axe did cleave one of their heads, whereby the rest fled and he escaped’.17 The Palmers, the next family of note, had sailed on the Tiger along with a handful of Jamestown brides, and shared their lucky escape from pirates. Catherine will surely have encountered them at Jamestown, if not before: husband Thomas Palmer, his wife Joan and her daughter Priscilla, whom Nicholas Ferrar had wrongly included among the Jamestown brides. She was still only eleven in 1625, the same age as the Palmers’ servant Richard English.
Other offspring then living in the settlement included the Chapmans’ two small children, Thomas aged two and six-week-old Ann; and Margaret Fludd’s son William, just three weeks old, and her daughter from a previous marriage to William Finch, a tenant from Berkeley Hundred not known to be related to Catherine Finch. Extended families embracing children from several marriages were even more common in Virginia than in England.
As well as owning two houses, the Fisher household was moderately well provisioned, recording forty bushels of corn, fifty dry fish, a hog, sixteen chickens, three guns, one coat of chain mail, three pounds of powder and twenty pounds of lead. Their servant Idye Halliers, aged thirty, had arrived on the Jonathan, which had brought the earlier shipment of brides to Virginia. If Halliers had been one of the brides, this will have caused friction with her younger mistress, but she gave her arrival date as 1619 and is more likely to have come to Virginia as an indentured servant. Employing a servant will have relieved Catherine of the worst of the drudgery in the house and out in the fields, affording her time to devote to the couple’s young daughter Sisly, doubtless named in honour of Sisley Jordan, who may have stood as godmother to the child.
Assuming the Fishers arrived at Jordan’s Journey soon after the Indian attack, they will have witnessed the commotion that followed Samuel Jordan’s death some time before the summer of 1623. As a wealthy widow with lands and provisions aplenty, Sisley Jordan immediately attracted suitors. The first to pounce was the Reverend Grivil Pooley, who lived at Flowerdew Hundred but also ministered to Chaplin’s Choice, Jordan’s Journey and Shirley Hundred. Pooley waited just three or four days after Samuel’s death before declaring an interest in marrying his widow. Witnesses would later swear that the couple drank a toast to their engagement, but Sisley was also reported to have said that while ‘she would as willingly have him as any other’, she could not contemplate marrying anyone until she was delivered of the child she was carrying.18
Relations between Pooley and Sisley Jordan became increasingly strained by the presence of William Farrar, a kinsman of Nicholas Ferrar in London, who had taken refuge in Jordan’s Journey after his own plantation on the nearby Appomattox River suffered heavy casualties in the Indian attack. Appointed to administer Samuel Jordan’s estate, Farrar and Sisley openly lived together under the same roof with her two small daughters by Samuel – Mary and the infant Margaret, born posthumously – and young Temperance Bayley, who may have been a Jordan relative. Such an unorthodox arrangement prompted Pooley to complain to Virginia’s general court in the hope of enforcing his prior claim to Sisley Jordan’s hand. Called as a witness, Nathanial Causey said he had never observed any ‘unfitting or Suspicyous familiarite’ between the couple, although he had seen ‘Mr ferrer kisse her’. Unconvinced, Pooley maintained that it was ‘Skandelous for Mr ferrer to breake the order in Courte, wch he hath done by beinge in ordynary dyett in Mrs Jurdens howse and to frequent her Company alone wthowt some body else to be in place accordinge to the order of the Court’.
Joan Palmer appeared fleetingly in the case, affording a glimpse into the highly charged atmosphere of this tight-knit community. According to Nathaniel Causey’s sworn testimony, Mistress Palmer came into his house in some consternation, saying that she had witnessed a ‘farefuyll thing’ that had happened to Sisley Jordan. ‘Shee saide yt Mrs Jrden being uppon her bed, she saw two hands, the one hande uppon her head the other hand uppon her Childs head and harde a voyce wch Cried, Judgment, Judgment.’ When Causey suggested to Mrs Palmer that Sisley Jordan was simply dreaming, ‘noe sayeth Mrs Palmer she was as broad Awake as I am now’.
Uncertain how to proceed in the delicate breach-of-promise suit between Pooley and Mistress Jordan, the court interrogated the witnesses then threw up its hands and sought advice from England, in the meantime insisting that Mr Farrar should behave himself ‘wthowt Skandall’. But faced with Sisley Jordan’s continued opposition, Pooley withdrew his suit, declaring,
I Grevell Pooly Preacher of the woorde doe for my P[ar]te ffreely and absolutely acquitt and discharge Mrs Cycelie Jurden from all former Contracts p[ro]mises or Conditiones made by her to me in the waye of maryage and doe binde my selfe in five hundred pownde ster[ling] never to have any Claime Right or title to her that way In witnes wherof I have heerunto sett my hand & seal the thurde dye of January. Grevell Pooly Cler.19
Sisley Jordan and William Farrar were married soon afterwards, and as far as I can tell the Reverend Pooley failed to secure for himself a wealthy bride. He sounds an unpleasant fellow. One year on he was again hauled before the court after falling out with a Mr Paulett, who accused Pooley of being a ‘blockheded parson’, speaking false Latin and teaching false doctrines, and committing simony and bribery. Pooley responded by calling Paulett a ‘base baudie ffellow’ who went up and down the country singing bawdy songs. After lengthy discussions and some disagreement regarding penalties, the court ordered both parties to confess their faults to the congregation, and for the graver offence of charging Pooley with false doctrine, simony and perjury, Paulett was further ordered to pay him 300 pounds in tobacco.20
The Reverend Pooley’s quarrelsome behaviour brings to mind Catherine’s brother Erasmus Finch. Perhaps her life was not so very different from the one she had left behind.
Today Jordan’s Journey lies directly south across the Benjamin Harrison Memorial Bridge, its footings marked by the Jordan Point Yacht Haven and a waterfront development of executive-style houses known as Jordan on the James, where meandering roads with names like Jordan Parkway and Farrar Landing carry echoes of Virginia’s colonial past. I came here in 2016 while staying at a large house on the north side of the James, its fair lawns sloping down to the river, still wide at this point and very still, with views across the water to the belching smokestacks of Hopewell’s paper mill on the far bank. Aside from the street names and Virginia Historical Markers to Samuel Jordan and Jordan’s Point, I found little to remind me of Catherine Fisher née Finch.
But back in the 1980s, rumoured development of the Hopewell Airport site at Jordan’s Point had prompted a series of archaeological and historical studies which brought to light the landscape and artefacts that the married Catherine Fisher, fresh from England, will have known.21 At the community’s social and geographical heart lay the compound of the Jordan-Farrar household, covering about an acre and a half on the western side of the promontory and affording its occupants a clear view up the James River, from where any attacking Indians might be expected to arrive.22 Within the compound archaeologists uncovered eleven early colonial buildings, including a three-bay longhouse almost certainly occupied by the Jordan-Farrar household, another longhouse for their servants, further houses, a stable or barn, sheds and agricultural storehouses. Enclosing the compound was a wooden palisade of posts, pales and rails, culminating at the northern tip in a raised bastion for their many fixed guns.
Outside the fortified compound was a burial ground running parallel to the palisade’s western and northern boundaries. Only a few of the dead had been buried in coffins and most showed signs of hasty interment. A surprising number were women. More than half the dead had perished between the ages of ten and nineteen, and almost another third were in their twenties. Two of the women were buried in coffins, one aged between twenty and twenty-four and the other between twenty-five and thirty-five. This last woman had a groove in her teeth, suggesting that she often gripped sewing pins in her mouth. The most elaborate burial was of a white male aged between thirty-five and thirty-nine, presumably either Samuel Jordan, the settlement’s founder, or his successor William Farrar, who had been placed in a flat-lidded coffin almost six and a half feet long, which was then lowered into a deep and carefully dug grave.
Archaeologists explored three further housing complexes at Jordan’s Journey. The first, which curators tentatively attributed to Nathaniel Causey, had two large houses and several outhouses, all encompassed by a simple palisade. Lying on the promontory’s north-eastern side, it would have given Causey a clear view of his property across the James. Although both this and the Jordan-Farrar property produced household and personal items of a refined character, the people who lived in this second complex had lesser means. Sisley Jordan had tucked a beautifully chiselled silver bodkin into her hair, for instance, while Thomasine Causey (if indeed she lived in the smaller property) had made do with a bodkin of brass.
Women settlers at Jordan’s Journey left behind bodkins they had tucked into their hair like this young woman etched by Wenceslaus Hollar, a small thread dangling from her bodkin’s eye.
Of the other two buildings revealed during excavations, the archaeologists concluded that one had probably been occupied by a single man, and the other by a relatively large group of people living communally, probably refugees from Berkeley Hundred to judge from the high-status items recovered, such as Roemer glass, porcelain and a silver ear scoop that could be attached to a chatelaine worn at the waist.
Domestic waste from trash pits yielded more clues about the daily lives of Catherine and her fellow colonists, and what they ate. The higher your status, the more domestic livestock you consumed. Nearly half the meat eaten by the Jordan-Farrar household came from their many cattle and less than 10 per cent from locally caught deer. They also ate substantial amounts of Atlantic cod and imported haddock, undoubtedly salted or pickled in brine and brought to Virginia in barrels. The so-called Causey household, by contrast, ate four times as much venison as the Jordan-Farrars, suggesting that they either traded with the Indians or hired them to hunt deer on their behalf. Wild fowl, local mammals and fish were on everyone’s menu, although perhaps less than you might expect. Among the stranger foods Catherine may have tasted were opossum, muskrat, bear, raccoon, pelican, horned grebe, loon and egret, while imported stores such as oatmeal, cheese, butter, prunes, vinegar and brandy will have stirred memories of home, growing fainter all the time. As we saw in Chapter 14, the governor’s wife, Lady Margaret Wyatt, had implored her sister to send butter and cheese soon after arrival, ‘for since th’ Indyans & we fell out we dare not send a hunting’. 23 But Lady Wyatt did not stay long in the colony, and Catherine was here for good, slowly adapting as all immigrants must to the realities of her new life.
The archaeologists have long since departed from Jordan’s Point, their excavations back-filled or buried under the executive homes and shared lawns of Jordan on the James. But you can still sift through the detritus of the people who lived here four hundred years ago, all suitably bagged and labelled in boxes and drawers at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in nearby Richmond, which I visited in spring 2017.
Fed on tales of colonial privation, I am overwhelmed by the sheer colour and variety of household goods enjoyed by Virginia’s better-off settlers, especially the ceramics, which came to Jordan’s Journey from England, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Portugal, Spain and far-flung China: south-Somerset slipware, fragments of Dutch and English delftware, Westerwald and Frechen stoneware jugs, a caudle cup of Portuguese majolica, a porcelain wine cup that must have come from China, slipware and earthenware costrels from Italy. From closer to home I am shown a coarseware porringer made in the Jamestown area in the 1630s by the potter Thomas Ward, who lived with John Jackson, the brother of Jamestown bride Ann Jackson.24
I am struck too by the incongruity of European arms and armour worn in the Virginian wilderness to ward off nimble and near-naked attackers: a peascod breastplate, sword hilts and backplates, remnants of a protective brigandine. But what I am seeking most of all is evidence of women’s lives, like the bodkins they tucked into their hair and the tiny black earring dangle decorated with even tinier projections of white glass which came to light in the Jordan-Farrar household. Since their servants were all men, did Sisley Jordan and young Temperance Bayley once use the mass of sewing pins, needles and brass thimbles found here? And did Sisley own the finely decorated gold ring, which survives as a fragment, and the remnant of gold braid that may once have graced an elegant pair of gloves? The smaller Causey household similarly yielded a length of silver embroidery, which Thomasine Causey could lawfully have worn as the wife of a plantation owner with an estate across the water.
As for their moments of leisure, compare the whistle or flute made of bone and the brass book clasps found at the Jordan-Farrar household with the heavy lead gaming dice unearthed in the communal house, probably made from melted-down lead shot. Virginia may have lacked the playhouses and taverns of London, but people found their own ways of keeping themselves amused.
I find nothing that I can link absolutely to Erasmus Finch’s sister but feel I am getting closer. Catherine Fisher née Finch had done well for herself. Against all the odds she had secured a capable husband, survived the Indian attack, given birth to a daughter and settled into a small but relatively stable community of like-minded ancient planters and more recent arrivals on the healthier freshwater reaches of the James River. Here were other young wives and mothers for company, busy growing their families, and she had a servant to carry out the heavier tasks around the home and perhaps in the fields, unless her husband sold his skills as a carpenter instead of trying to get rich by growing tobacco. Like all uprooted people, she will have experienced the steps along the route to assimilation, from shattered expectations, through coping as best she could with unimagined hardships, then mimicking the actions of the more successful settlers around her, anticipating the day when she could fully accept and adapt to the challenges thrown at her by her newly adopted home.25
And then the Fishers simply disappear from the record. No land patent survives to document the hundred acres which Robert Fisher could have claimed by right as an ancient planter, nor is there any record of land passed on to Catherine or the young Sisly. They may have moved elsewhere, but they have left no trace on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, which attracted many settlers who survived the Indian attack, and travel further afield was unlikely. Migration to Maryland had not yet started and New England had only recently been colonized. You anyway needed the governor’s permission to travel more than twenty miles from your home plantation or to embark on a voyage lasting more than a week.26
The most probable explanation is that the family succumbed to one of Virginia’s deadly diseases and that all three lie buried at Jordan’s Journey, perhaps in the burial ground beside the Jordan-Farrar compound, which became for them the end of the road.
