The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn

  The company’s coercive power was directed mainly at the most vulnerable element in Jacobean society, the vagrant children. How many hundreds of children and petty criminals the company managed to collect from the streets and public institutions of London is not precisely known, but some of the numbers were recorded. Between August 1618 and August 1620 the company obtained from Bridewell Hospital, a detention center and jail for vagrant children, “idle wastrels, petty thieves, and dissolute women,” at least 337 of its charges to be sent to Virginia as “apprentices.”5

  Transporting vagrant children to Virginia was a process greatly facilitated—indeed, mandated—by London’s Common Council, whose Lord Mayor was an investor in the Virginia Company. In 1619, responding to a petition of the company and drawing on its “superfluous multitude,” the city sent over to Virginia, at a cost to itself of £5 each, 99 children—75 boys and 24 “wenches”—between the ages of eight and sixteen, to serve as apprentices in the colony and to receive, in their maturity, fifty acres of land each. By early January 1620 the city was even more active in the cause. It ordered the constables of all of the city’s wards to “walk the streets…[and] apprehend all such vagrant children, both boys and girls, as they shall find on the streets and in the markets or wandering in the night” and send them to Bridewell, with the clear implication that they were to be shipped to Virginia. And further, the aldermen were to instruct all churchwardens to visit the houses of the poor, to inquire whether these households were “overcharged and threatened with poor children,” and if so, to ask if they would agree to have these children, twelve years or older, sent to Virginia, thereby easing the families’ burdens and providing for the children’s “good education and future maintenance.” And if the poor householders were uncooperative, the churchwardens were to point out that if they “deny or refuse such order … they [will] receive no further relief from the parish wherein they inhabit.” There were other sanctions too. A revolt of some of the Bridewell children, despite—or perhaps because of—the company’s assurance that “under severe masters they may be brought to goodness,” was put down on order of no less a body than the king’s Privy Council, which authorized the city to imprison and punish those who remained “obstinate” in refusing to go to the colony.6

  The result, by the late spring of 1620, was a shipment of at least sixty-five more children, twelve years and older, now on somewhat different terms. The city would still pay the company £5 each for costs, but after their apprenticeship the children were to serve as tenants on the company’s land for seven years and only then receive some land, now reduced to twenty-five acres. But still more children were needed, and so the company petitioned twice again, and succeeded once more, in 1622, in obtaining a shipment of one hundred. By then Sandys’s ambitions, and need, had risen ever higher. In 1621 he turned to Parliament and requested a law ordering every parish in England to send its poor to Virginia, at its own expense. Nothing came of this, but here and there in the countryside the possibilities were seized by hard-pressed parishes, and ruthless operators moved in. In Somerset, in October 1618, a justice of the peace found that one Owen Evans, equipped with fake credentials, had commanded the constables of various hundreds “to press him divers maidens, to be sent to the Bermudas or Virginia,” offering money to some authorities (five or twelve shillings a head) and threats to others for their cooperation. Evans was thrown in jail and “fell upon his knees and humbly confessed his fault,” but not before his “undue proceedings” had created “such terror to the poor maidens as forty of them fled out of one parish into such obscure and remote places as their parents and masters can yet have no news what is become of them.”7

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  So it was that day after day, month after month, crowds of London’s vagrant children, “out of the multitudes that swarm there,” were collected, subjected to official punishment if they caused “any disorder,” jumbled together with assorted thieves, “nippers,” “lewd boy[s] that will not be ruled by [their] parents,” and miscellaneous servants, and distributed among the vessels headed for Virginia or the associated colony of Bermuda. Of their character and condition little was said, but the little that was said reveals something of the desperation of the company’s recruitment. “You shall doe verie well,” George Thorpe wrote the company in 1621, to appoint qualified physicians and surgeons to screen the prospective servants “concerning the health and soundness of theire bodies.” Two of the boys assigned to labor for him on the college lands, he reported, were “soe diseased with olde solcers [ulcers] in their leggs … that I doe dispaire of theire abilitie to woorke.” One was close to death, another “broken-bellied [ruptured], a fourth … is maymed in one of his hands,” a fifth was “soe diseased in his who[le] body that he hath not bine able to help himself.” Many of the new recruits, both men and boys, he wrote, “have died in this countrey of incurable maladies that they brought with them.”8

  But there was no medical screening, and the number of recruits constantly rose. In the first year of Sandys’s regime the company itself and the merchants and planters resident in the colony brought to Virginia some 400 settlers and thereby doubled the colony’s population. In the spring of 1619, 1,261 more were sent, with supplies and cattle. By 1622, 3,500 had been transported to the settlements along the James; by 1624, more than 4,000.9

  Most arrived on small vessels, which began to crowd the makeshift docks at the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay and along the shores of the James and York rivers. In his first five months in Virginia in 1619 Pory reported the arrival of eleven vessels. March 19, 1619, seems to have been a particularly busy day on the Virginia wharves. Both the Gift of God and the Sampson apparently arrived that day with approximately three hundred passengers for Martin’s Hundred, while the George and the Diane also docked, the former with one hundred settlers (fifty to labor on the governor’s land), the latter with eighty to one hundred London children, said to have been starving in the streets. Among the arrivals in August of that year was the Dutch man-of-war that sold to the colony “20 and odd Negroes” (Angolan natives, they were not the first Africans to appear in the colony’s records: thirty-two—fifteen men and seventeen women—were listed in a muster of March 1619 as “in ye service of severall planters”).10 At any one time three or more vessels could be seen unloading their jumbled passengers and supplies and beginning the slow process of reloading with goods for the return to England. One could also see the sailors, temporarily adrift in these crude settlements, doing what they could, by way of private barter, socializing, and entertainment, to pass the time until they sailed again.

  The number of shipments continued at the same high level. In 1620 at least 10 vessels docked along the James, one of them the Duty, with 51 boys, referred to thereafter as “duty boys”; in 1621, at least 9; in 1623, at least 11. In all, in Sandys’s years as the company’s leader (1618–23), there is evidence of 96 separate ship arrivals, most of them small vessels carrying a few dozen passengers; only a small number transported 100 or more; only one—the Abigail of 1621—bore as many as 230.11

  There is no record of the identity of the hundreds of passengers these vessels carried, but it is clear that they were not groups of like-minded, socially or culturally homogeneous people drawn from similar backgrounds, moving together in neighborhood clusters. They were a miscellaneous collection of disparate people, most expecting to be tenants on half profits until they could acquire independent stakes in the land, or servants committed to various terms of indenture. But there is evidence that the company’s enticements were beginning to attract elements of somewhat higher strata of society. The Bona Nova of 1619 carried 92 prospective tenants, who came from 27 English counties and from Wales; 19 of them claimed to be husbandmen (substantial farmers), the rest claimed specific skills in a great variety of trades, in construction, food, and apparel; 2 were identified as goldsmiths, 7 claimed to be gentlemen. And at least 14 were traveling with kin. Of the 103 passengers on the James (1622), more than half we
re financially independent, traveling with wives, servants, and children.12

  The effort to recruit from the more respectable elements of society was reflected in the company’s extraordinary program to attract proper women to the colony, the lack of whom, the company declared, was threatening the success of the enterprise. If the settlers were dejected and sought to return to England, it was, they said, because of the lack of “the comforts without which God saw that man could not live contentedlie, noe not [even] in Paradize.” Lacking wives and children, the settlers viewed Virginia simply as a source of quick profit, ignoring all long-term goals and commitments. Therefore “to tye and roote the planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children,” a number of company investors contributed to a joint stock to subsidize the shipping of “young, handsome and honestlie educated maides … to be disposed in marriage to the most honest and industrious planters” willing and able to repay the investors the cost of the women’s passages.

  How “handsome and honestlie educated” the young women were we cannot know, but the identity and something of the background of fifty-seven of those shipped to Virginia in 1620 and 1621, as well as the supplies provided for their journeys, can be found in the company’s surviving records.

  Most of the women were unmarried orphans in their early twenties or late teens, committed to service or unemployed, adrift in a patriarchal world. All gave evidence of respectability (eight claimed connections with the gentry), presenting the company with written testimonials to their good character, respectable connections, industry, and correct “carriage” (behavior). Thus the recommendations for the twenty-fiveyear-old daughter of a gentleman and niece of a knight; for the twentyone-year-old daughter of “a gentleman of good meanes”; for a “cosen once removed” of an attorney at the law; for the twenty-three-yearold sister (and servant) of “the king’s crossbow maker”; and for the twenty-five-year-old daughter of “gentelfolke of good esteeme” said to be somehow related to Sir Edwin Sandys. Most, like the twenty-year-old woman presented by her widowed mother who swore to her daughter’s “honest Carriage” and capacity to do all kinds of work, were servants, lacking parental protection (in only five cases out of the fifty-seven is it clear that both parents were alive), with poor prospects, attracted by the company’s advertising.

  Recommendations for women shipped to Virginia, 1620–21, with a list of the apparel and bedding sent with them (illustration credit 4.1)

  A Catalogue of the names of the yeoung weomen nowe sent in the Marmaduke

  1 Joane ffletcher widdowe aged 25 daughter of John Egerton gentleman brother to S[i]r Ralph Egerton Knight borne at Morely house neare to Bridge Stafford in Chessheire this is testifide certified by Mr. Gibson dwelling neare to the three Nunns w[i]thout Algate.

  2 An Hramer mayde aged 21 yeares daughter to Mr Harmer of Baldock a gentleman of good meanes nowe lyvinge her Mothers names was Kempton Mr Undwell and Mr ffartlow Grocers in Bucklersbury are her kinsemen and affirme all this and com[m]end her to the Company.

  3 Lettice King Maide aged 23 borne at Newebury in Barkshire her father is deade her brother an Atturney at the Lawe S[i]r Wm Udall is her Cosen once removed shee hath been in div[er]s good services whene shee cometh recom[m]ended.

  4 Allice Burges mayd aged 28 her parent deade were countire ffolke dwelling at Linton come out of service and recommended.

  5 Katherine ffinch: aged 23 borne in Mardens parish in Herfordshire her ffather and Mother are dead shee was in service with her brother Mr Erasmus ffinch the kings Crossbow maker who brought her and com[m]ended her to the Company She was likewise com[m]ended by her other two brothers Edward ffinch goldsmith and John ffinch Crossbow maker all three dwelling in the Strand.

  (illustration credit 4.2)

  The company said it would, and did, make every effort to provide for the welfare of these certified young women. They issued clothes, bedding, food, and other supplies and gave instructions for their careful treatment upon arrival in the colony. And though they were to be sold as soon as possible only to “honest and sufficient” planters for at least 150 pounds “of the best leafe tobacco” (c. £22), the company conceded to wayward sensibilities. Since they “dare not infrindge” on the “libertie of mariadge” they allowed the husband of any woman who “unwarily or fondly bestow[ed] herself … uppon such as shall not be able to give present sattisfaccon” to postpone payment until he could pay, that debt to have precedence over all other obligations. But romance seems to have played little part in these transactions. The women were snapped up by the more affluent planters, bought at such high rates, it was said, that poor men never got near them, and for a time—before Indian attacks and a starving season in the years immediately ahead—they must have considered themselves fortunate.

  How attractive was the company’s appeal to these young, insecure, vulnerable women is indicated by the geographical spread of their origins. Only between a quarter and a third can be said to have had their origins in or around London; the rest came from nineteen of England’s thirty-nine counties, ranging from Yorkshire to Dorset; four of the women came from Wales. In their geographical diversity they were typical of the company’s recruitment at large.13

  The English immigrants of the Sandys era came from no one region of the country, no one subculture, no one economic environment. The company was boasting when it declared that most of the settlers it sent were “choise men, borne and bred up to labour and industry,” but it stated the truth when it noted, in its Declaration, that while many of the hundreds came from Devonshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, and Sussex, most came “dispersedly out of divers shires of the realm.”14

  Nor was there uniformity of religion among the English. Between 1618 and 1621, three contingents of radical dissenters, parts of the diaspora of English separatists exiled in Holland, settled in Virginia. The first was headed by Christopher Lawne, a fiery theological polemicist, who led a group to what he named “Lawne’s Plantation,” south of the James—an isolated spot that he wrongly believed could be defended against the Indians. Within a year he was joined in that exposed area by a more numerous and better-financed group of dissenters sponsored by Edward Bennett, an affluent member of the Virginia Company who was also an elder of the separatist church in Amsterdam. His plantation, Bennett’s Welcome, adjoining Lawne’s, had all the advantages that money could supply, but it too was perilously perched on the southern frontier. Bennett’s son Richard led that Puritan settlement, which would eventually move again, in search of a more tolerant regime.15

  The third group of Anglo-Dutch religious radicals to settle in Virginia was initially the most tragic. Of the 180 passengers whom the embattled Elder Francis Blackwell led from Amsterdam to Virginia, no fewer than 130, including Blackwell himself, died on that voyage of seven months. They had been “packed together,” it was reported, “like herrings; they had amongst them the flux, and also want of fresh water, so as it is here [London] wondered at that so many are alive, than that so many are dead.” Yet by 1622 religious dissent—both radical separatism and more moderate Puritanism—was well established in Virginia, though vulnerable to pressure ecclesiastically from Anglican churchmen and physically from resentful Indians.16

  The horror of Blackwell’s notorious voyage was only an extreme example of the miseries of the transportation and resettlement process of those years. For most of the voyagers, emigration was a shocking experience; for some it was as deadly as it was for Blackwell’s pilgrims. The Virginia Company published guidelines for the supplies necessary for such voyages but did nothing to enforce them, with the result that the provisions on board were so poor that they became a subject of complaint to the Privy Council. The voyages on these small, ill-equipped, rocking vessels lasted two to three months; food and drink were bad (“stinckinge beere”) in quality and short in quantity; sanitation was primitive; and sickness swept through the passengers like deadly storms. Each year, each shipping season, many died at sea: most of the carefully recruited iron
workers were lost on a single voyage. The survivors were so weakened by disease and exhaustion that they quickly fell victim to debilitating attacks of dysentery and other afflictions. Whole shiploads that had been sent over to work on various “publique” enterprises had to be transferred to whatever private plantations would take them simply to assure their survival. And the “guest houses,” of which Sandys spoke so happily, did not exist. Only one building—forty feet by twenty—is known to have been built for that purpose, and so, since “it is mortall for new comers to ly [on] the ground,” the hundreds of new arrivals had to be added to the crowds that already filled the small, flimsy dwellings that were being hastily constructed. Even that might have been tolerable if the timing of the voyages had been right. But despite bitter protests from Virginia, the vessels typically left England early in the spring and arrived at the worst possible time: at the beginning of the hot season and before the year’s harvest had come in.