Return to Jamestown
I have returned twice to Virginia in the course of writing this book and expect to come back many times more. Jamestown Island counts as one of my favourite places on earth, in ways that are hard to explain.
Once you leave behind the razzmatazz of Jamestown Settlement on the far side of the isthmus, you find yourself enveloped in a kind of contemplative calm, despite milling school parties and family groups for whom Jamestown is one more stop on the tourist trail, interspersed with quaintly costumed eighteenth-century Williamsburg and the many battle sites of the Civil War. Reading over the diaries I kept of my many visits to the island, I see that the same calm descends each time, starting from the moment I drop down to the Colonial Parkway that loops round from Yorktown to Jamestown, tunnelling under Williamsburg and avoiding all the paraphernalia of modern roads. In some sections the speed limit drops to an unhurried 35 mph, encouraging you to stop and reflect on the many historical signboards marking the route and sometimes just to sit and stare, shaded by loblolly pines, looking across Back River to the narrow wooded peninsula that is Jamestown Island – flat and quite insignificant, really – where Europe first put down permanent roots in North America and changed the course of both continents.
The island has moved on since I came here for Strange Blooms in 2004, without losing its timeless spirit. Now a footbridge whisks you from the Visitor Center across the Pitch and Tar Swamp, where turtles teem in the oily water below, little cooters and long-necked snapping turtles, which daily fed the early colonists. Drawn at first to the Jamestown of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas, centred on the church and the palisaded fort area, I now mostly turn left after the footbridge and walk the grassy stretch of Back Street to the plots of Dr John Pott and Edward Blaney, where Fortune Taylor and Elizabeth Starkey pitched up as servants rather than wives. My Jamestown is increasingly peopled with history’s minor characters, who speak to me all the more loudly for having been silent so long.
Jamestown’s melancholic air – evident in this engraving from an earlier century – persists to this day.
The first time I came to Virginia expressly for this book, I concentrated on finding and walking the places where the women went. My friend the historian Martha McCartney jump-started my researches by marking the sites on a map, which I kept with me at all times, its paper folds now barely holding together. Some of these former settlements I visited on my own: Jordan’s Journey, Neck of Land Charles City, the College Land near Henricus, and Powle-Brook, now part of the James River National Wildlife Refuge, where Cicely Bray and Barbara Burchens met their grisly end. You need a permit to visit the refuge and if you are lucky, as I was, you may have it all to yourself. Helen Rountree kindly drove me to other sites further east: Edward Bennett’s plantation close to Fort Boykin; Elizabeth City on Hampton Roads, across from the US naval station in Norfolk; and over to the Eastern Shore by way of the dune forests and cypress swamps of First Landing State Park and the Great Dismal Swamp on the borders with North Carolina, which we had visited together many years previously. With Helen I walked again the sights on Jamestown Island and Jamestown Settlement’s re-created Indian village, where her keen anthropologist’s eye found fault with a cone-shaped device for catching fish, which might work in rapids, she said fiercely, but not in the tidal reaches of the James. I love the company of experts. They care that we get things right.
My visit to Martin’s Hundred with archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti was one of the high points of my next research trip, having failed to arrange access the first time, when I got no further than its stout perimeter fence liberally posted with private property notices warning that hunting, finishing, trapping or trespassing for any purpose are strictly forbidden. In the sharp sunshine of early April, Luccketti walked me through the site, reliving the different stages of their excavations and pointing out the underground museum, now closed, although the current owner Samuel M. Mencoff has poured more money into the site than Colonial Williamsburg ever did during the plantation’s four decades as a rural adjunct to its main attraction.
The wind is bitterly keen. Under the pines by Grice’s Run, the lime-green leaves of jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) are just poking through.
At the end of our visit Luccketti directs me to the flat-topped site on the far side of a ravine which was occupied some time after the Indian attack by the Jackson family and their two servants, including the potter Thomas Ward. Ann Jackson will have lodged here after she came back from the Indians but before a ship could be found to take her back to England. Leaving my guide for a few minutes, I scramble down the ravine and up the other side, wondering why Jackson should have situated his homestead here rather than more conveniently among the houses of Wolstenholme Town.
More pines and some spindly trees throw long shadows across the wide clearing of bare earth buried under a light covering of crisp brown leaves. Back on a level with the main site, you feel connected but nicely separate. I am acutely aware that I am treading the same ground as one of the brides, who (in my imagination, at least) came here in a distressed state after her long sojourn with the Indians. Having remembered to take with me a black-and-white photograph of the excavated site after the top layer of earth had been peeled back to reveal the post holes and hearth of the Jacksons’ home, I pace the ground carefully, looking for an infant’s grave which I believe to be that of Ann Jackson’s niece who died during Ann’s captivity. Forty years have elapsed since the site was excavated, so I cannot be certain that I have identified the precise spot.1
During this second visit to Virginia I spent much of my time tracking the bits and bodkins of material culture stored in various research collections at Richmond, Williamsburg, Jamestown and Charlottesville, guided throughout by the many contacts of Beverly ‘Bly’ Straube, senior curator at the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project when I first met her and now much in demand as an independent archaeological curator and material culture specialist. It was to Bly I would return with my questions, which she answered patiently and expertly in a way that explains why ‘things’ have increasingly come to elucidate our histories. My notebooks are full of references to random artefacts dug out of the ground. Inevitably those of higher status catch my eye first, like the silver ear scoop and nail scraper unearthed at the communal house at Jordan’s Journey and the diminutive Chinese porcelain wine cup decorated with a frieze of stylized flames that may once have belonged to Catherine Fisher’s neighbours Nathaniel and Thomasine Causey.2
At all the collections I ask to see objects that relate particularly to women and their domestic lives, marvelling at the wealth of sewing items that have survived the intervening centuries: scissors, thimbles (some large enough for male thumbs, admittedly), pins, needles, metal aiglets, buttons, hooks and eyes; also earrings, gold and copper-alloy finger rings, and hair ornaments. Chamber pots are puzzlingly rare, whether locally made or imported from England (they lacked privies too). Among many privileged moments, I feel the thrill of holding in my hand fragments of earthenware dishes and a milk pan, glazed on the inside, attributed to Thomas Ward, the Martin’s Hundred potter, who lived with Ann Jackson’s brother. His pots have a finer shape and texture than those made by other local potters, and he gave even functional items a decorative twist using wavy lines and pie-crust edges.
Also on display at several collections are the laddish items of European armour reminiscent of medieval warfare which protected the English invaders as they clanked around the Virginian swamps. No wonder the Indians of the Eastern Shore demanded to know ‘what we were, and what we would’ on first encountering such outlandish apparitions.3
Now I must try to answer the question I posed at the outset: were the Virginia Company’s ‘maids for Virginia’ the victims of a patriarchal society, or were they true adventurers, willing to risk their own ‘carkases’ (in John Pory’s memorable phrase) in so dangerous a business? Or were they both victims and adventurers, as I have come increasingly to believe, only some of whom triumphed in the end?
However carefully the Virginia Company picked its words to describe the transaction at the heart of the maids’ magazine, the company’s money troubles meant that it needed to satisfy its investors by making a profit on each marriage transacted. Was this so very different from the way the colony’s market economy profited from the labour of indentured servants, who had to purchase their freedom if they wanted to opt out of the contract before their time was done? Or the way that established planters bought and sold the first Africans to arrive in Virginia, without the dignity of proper names, allowing only a handful of blacks to establish independent lives?4 I suspect not, or rather that many indentured servants and imported Africans suffered a far worse fate.
The Virginia Company could claim that as far as the women were concerned it acted for the greater good – the continued survival and comfort of the entire colony – and it took pains to stress that in theory at least the women were free to choose a husband from the planters allowed to approach them. Modern sensibilities nonetheless baulk at the notion of a near-monopolistic trading company deriving profits from women imported as brides, an enterprise that may have pricked a few consciences even then. Supplying dowries that allowed indigent young women to marry was a respectable form of charitable giving, although in this case the intended beneficiaries were not the brides or their prospective husbands, required to put their tobacco on the table, but individual investors who hoped to reap their rewards in cash and in the promised settlement of Maydes Towne. For those of us who find this distasteful, the scheme’s financial failure excites a certain Schadenfreude, so it is worth remembering that it was fatally flawed from the outset. The company had failed to calculate how many planters might actually want to spend good money on brides, especially since gentlemen and wealthier planters had other ways of finding themselves a wife.
Determined to attract the best calibre of women through its wide network of contacts, the Virginia Company was undoubtedly cavalier with the truth, concealing from the women the true condition of the colony and its shocking mortality – a complaint levelled against the company throughout its seventeen-year history. At times London seemed wilfully ignorant of what conditions in Virginia were really like. Others have argued that the colony survived only because the company collapsed along with its pig-headed insistence on retaining disease-ridden Jamestown as its chief ‘city’, dispatching ever more shiploads of settlers without proper provisions.5 ‘I often wish little Mr Farrar here, that to his zeale he would add knowledge of this Countrey,’ wrote a weary Governor Sir Francis Wyatt to his father after the Indian attack of 1622, faced with London’s wildly optimistic instruction to raise an army of five hundred men.6
Whatever gloss you put on the company’s actions in setting up a trade in brides, I remain shocked that I found not a single expression of regret from the leaders of the Virginia Company – Sir Edwin Sandys, the Ferrar brothers, the Earl of Southampton or any of the others – about sending so many of these women to their deaths. They naturally had no prior warning of the Indian attack, but simply regarded the women as commercial commodities and tried to exact a financial return even after the attack, without stopping to enquire if the ‘merchandise’ was still alive. Profit came before Christian charity, clearly. More than three and a half years after the attack, the court in Jamestown cancelled a planter’s debt of 150 pounds of tobacco advanced to buy six acres of ground and two houses at Charles City, which the Indians had burned in the 1622 attack before the purchaser was able to occupy them. In its judgment the court did not ‘conceave in equitie yt ffrancis Michell should be compeld to paye the said Debt’.7 But while the Jamestown court could apparently forgive money owed for houses and land, the investors back in England expected payment for a dead wife. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer assume the risk in any transaction.
Whether the company had inveigled the women into travelling to Virginia under false pretences, or whether the fifty-six women travelled willingly and knowingly, once they arrived at Jamestown they did what women have always done: they got on with their lives as best they could, even if Bridgett Wilkins had to offer a shirt to persuade a man to lie with her and Adria Harris had to deal with a philandering husband. Without being privy to their inner thoughts, it is impossible to say whether they were happy in the lives they had chosen. A letter from a male settler in Jamestown suggests that after the Indian attack wives found the settler’s life especially hard. ‘As you know this land hath felt the afflication of Warr, sense of sicknes and death of a great nomber of men,’ wrote William Rowlsley to his brother in England, begging him to send a hogshead of beef and some neats’ tongues, ‘for here is not a bitt of flesh to be had at any Rate’. Rowlsley and his wife were as well as any people in the land, he wrote reassuringly, ‘but my wife doth nothing but talke of gooing home’.8 The maids who came to Virginia will undoubtedly have regretted their decision at times, but I like to think that some may have looked back with satisfaction at the lives they had made for themselves. All the settler women who endured Jamestown’s privations in those early years deserve a church memorial, not just the Dr Potts of this world.
On my last visit to Jamestown Island I slipped once more into Historic Jamestowne’s small museum, the Archaearium, where I came across a display of clipped money whose significance had previously eluded me. The words of the old English ballad came instantly to mind, sung to a jaunty air:
The brown, or the black, or the mackarel-back.
Or if a buxome, brisk Damsel you lack,
As plump as a Doe, both above and below,
You may have what you can desire I know
For Clip’d Money.9
Of course. Until that moment I had carelessly assumed that clipping a coin was a guarantee of authenticity, proving that it had been properly minted. In fact the opposite is true. ‘Clip’d Money’ might result from the practice of shaving off the edges of silver or gold coins to make counterfeit coins or to sell on to goldsmiths. Or it might indicate coins that had been clipped into bits to make small change, each piece valued by weight. Examples on display in the Archaearium included a silver English three halfpence and a half groat, both from the time of Queen Elizabeth I.
Unlike the cut-price women offered for sale in the ballad, the Jamestown brides were in truth quite expensive, but their real worth lay in their courage and in the steadfast way they made this brave New World their own.
