Peevish Pen: Jamestown Brides

I first visited Jamestown, Virginia, in November 1957. I was among the seventh graders from Lee Junior High School who boarded three Greyhound buses and spent three days touring Richmond, Williamsburg, and Jamestown. At that time, all seventh graders studied Virginia history, so the trip was meant to enhance what we'd been studying. But this history had happened long ago and didn't have anything to do with me. Or so I thought.

Then, I didn't know that I had any connections to Jamestown—that my 10th great-grandfathers on my Nace side, Jonathan Giles (who arrived in 1619) and John Haynie (who arrrived in 1621) both survived the March 22, 1622 massacre, and on my Smith side that another ancestor, William Hancock (who arrived in 1619), didn't survive it. I don't remember hearing much about about the massacre on the school trip. But I remember standing in the church at Jamestown and being told that Queen Elizabeth had stood in that church a few weeks earlier.

Now, having learned a lot about my genealogy, I decided to learn more about what my 17th century Virginia ancestors endured. (I recently blogged about what I'd learned from books I'd read about colonial life.) From my 7th grade Virginia history class, I knew that the original settlers were all men, but later a few brought their wives from England and also some single English women were sent to become wives. In 1621, the Virginia Company, responsible for Jamestown's settlement, having advertised in London for potential brides, sent more young women from England to become wives of planters who could pay their passage in tobacco. Some of my ancestors no doubt witnessed these maidens' arrival aboard the ships Marmaduke and Warwick. Recently I read about these women in The Jamestown Brides by Jennifer Potter.

The Jamestown Brides is a hefty book. The paperback edition, including endnotes and index, is 372 pages in a fairly small font. It is apparent the author did considerable research prior to writing this book, and for that I'm grateful. (Note: I'm also grateful the author used endnotes instead of footnotes. There are so many citations that the text would have been unnecessarily choppy if footnotes had appeared on each page.) While the writing is a bit academic, it is also quite readable.

Potter gives considerable background about what both England and Jamestown—like in 1621, why wives were needed for Jamestown, how the potential brides were selected, what their lives were like aboard ship during the voyage, how Jamestown appeared to them when they arrived, and how different life in Jamestown was from London. And then, of course, there was the Massacre of 1622.

The Marmaduke and the Warwick left London in September 1621 and arrived in Jamestown in November. The maidens had to be housed in homes where there was a wife in residence, but there weren't enough suitable accommodations at Jamestown itself. Consequently, many potential brides were dispersed to different settlements until they found husbands.

The book has many illustrations and maps. An especially useful one shows where the different settlements were. Berkeley Hundred is where my Hancock ancestor, who was reportedly staying at George Thorpe's house, was among those murdered there on March 22, 1622, although he isn't on the list of nine killed. At least 347 men, women (including some potential brides), and children are known to have died during the massacre, but the number is likely higher. Some—including a few of the potential brides—were taken as captives.

Page197, paperback edition of The Jamestown Brides

I'm glad I read this book for the background it gave me in an important part of Virginia history. I especially recommend it to all those whose ancestors lived in early 17th century Virginia.

If you're interested in Virginia's early years, another resource is Mary Newton Standard's out-of-print 1928 edition The Story of Virgnia's First Century.