Colonial dames and good wives

								

The settlement of Virginia bore an entirely different aspect from that
of New England. It was a community of men who planted Jamestown. There
were few women among the early Virginians. In 1608 one Mistress Forrest
came over with a maid, Anne Burraws, who speedily married John Laydon,
the first marriage of English folk in the new world. But wives were
few, save squaw-wives, therefore the colony did not thrive. Sir Edwin
Sandys, at a meeting of the Emigration Society in London, in November,
1619, said that “though the colonists are seated there in their persons
some four years, they are not settled in their minds to make it their
place of rest and continuance.” They all longed to gather gold and
to return to England as speedily as possible, to leave that state of
“solitary uncouthness,” as one planter called it. Sandys and that
delightful gentleman, the friend and patron of Shakespeare, the Earl
of Southampton, planned, as an anchor in the new land, to send out a
cargo of wives for these planters, that the plantation might “grow in
generations and not be pieced out from without.” In 1620 the Jonathan
and the London Merchant brought ninety maids to Virginia on a venture,
and a most successful venture it proved.
There are some scenes in colonial life which stand out of the past with
much clearness of outline, which seem, though no details survive, to
present to us a vivid picture. One is this landing of ninety possible
wives--ninety homesick, seasick but timidly inquisitive English
girls--on Jamestown beach, where pressed forward, eagerly and amorously
waiting, about four hundred lonely emigrant bachelors--bronzed,
sturdy men, in leather doublets and breeches and cavalier hats, with
glittering swords and bandoleers and fowling-pieces, without doubt in
their finest holiday array, to choose and secure one of these fair
maids as a wife. Oh, what a glorious and all-abounding courting, a
mating-time, was straightway begun on the Virginian shore on that
happy day in May. A man needed a quick eye, a ready tongue, a manly
presence, if he were to succeed against such odds in supply and
demand, and obtain a fair one, or indeed any one, from this bridal
array. But whosoever he won was indeed a prize, for all were asserted
to be “young, handsome, honestly educated maids, of honest life and
carriage”--what more could any man desire? Gladly did the husband pay
to the Emigration Company the one hundred and twenty pounds of leaf
tobacco, which formed, in one sense, the purchase money for the wife.
This was then valued at about eighty dollars: certainly a man in that
matrimonial market got his money’s worth; and the complaining colonial
chronicler who asserted that ministers and milk were the only cheap
things in New England, might have added--and wives the only cheap
things in Virginia.
It was said by old writers that some of these maids were seized by
fraud, were trapanned in England, that unprincipled spirits “took up