Unfortunately, too much of this report was wishful thinking. Life on the Chesapeake continued to be a struggle. In the same month as the Company was singing Virginia’s praises to potential investors, the colony’s Governor, Sir George Yeardley, was complaining that new settlers arrived with insufficient provisions, necessitating his supporting them out of his own supplies. “I pray sir,” he pleaded with Edwin Sandys, “give me both tyme to pvide meanes and to build and settell” before sending more colonists and, when more were sent, “send at least 6 monthes victuall with them” (Figure 2.1). Yet when Yeardley wrote, the colony had just brought in a fairly substantial harvest. For some, at least, Virginia was fulfilling its promise, but not in the direction intended by the Virginia Company, nor in a way that it could control. The instructions issued by
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figure 2.1. Virginia Company, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia (London: Felix Kyngston, 1622).
the Company the following year (1621), when Yeardley was replaced as Governor by Sir Francis Wyatt, emphasized the importance of “setting upp and upholding those staple Comodities w[hich] are necessarie for the subsisting and Encrease of the Plantation.” They specifically sought to restrict the “excessive planting of tobacco” by, among other methods, prohibiting the colonists from wearing “any Gold in ther Clothes or any apparel of silke, until such time they have itt of the silk ether made by Silkewormes & raised by ther owne industry.”2 The colonists, however, were clearly less concerned with fashion than the Company hoped, and few on the Chesapeake heeded such advice.
Tobacco did not just purchase wives - who were initially valued at 120 pounds of tobacco, which retailed at three shillings a pound in 1619 - it offered a fast track to wealth in a period where tobacco, like other New World produce, found a growing market in Europe. Virginian tobacco, introduced to the colony by John Rolfe, was not considered to be as fine in quality as Spanish varieties, but it still commanded a high enough price to make it worth planting in place of corn or any of the other staples more necessary for sustenance. Yet beyond its pecuniary advantages, tobacco proved no better for the colony’s health, indeed, than it was for the individual’s. Although the idea behind the sale of wives, for example, was that it would induce the men engaged in this far-flung frontier venture to consider the benefits of family alongside that of fortune, it did not work out quite so neatly.
When women arrived in Virginia (Figure 2.2), the demand for them was high enough that their “bride price” swiftly rose from 120 pounds to 150 pounds of tobacco, placing them in the category of a commodity affordable only by the more successful planters. And the women themselves were unable to compete against what the Virginia Company critiqued as the colony’s “overweening esteeme of theire darling Tobacco, to the ou’throw of all other Staple Comodities,” and the market in wives, if it did not exacerbate this trend, did nothing to diminish it. The fact was that tobacco had become, by 1620, the standard unit of currency and would remain so for many years. Despite the Company’s “extraordinary diligence and care in the choice” of wives for Virginia, and its expectation that the women concerned would marry “honest and sufficient men,” the commercial-exchange element to the whole transaction undermined its domestic ambitions. Detailing the shipment of women that arrived aboard the Tyger in 1621, the Company made clear that economic concerns were paramount by noting that it expected “one hundredth and fiftie of the best leafe tobacco for each of them” but also that
“if any of them dye there must be a proportionable addition upon the rest.”3
This commoditization of women highlighted the main problem facing the colony on the Chesapeake and reflected its attitude toward both goods and individuals from the outset. In its first few decades, it remained overly reliant on both the Powhatan Confederacy and on the Virginia Company itself for the basic means of sustenance and dependent on the constant influx of new arrivals from the poor houses and parishes of England for labor, most of which was put to work growing tobacco. The colony never managed to become either the self-sufficient reflection of English society or the New World gravy train supplying the home market that its promoters had hoped it would be. Jamestown remained a frontier town, hard-drinking, not particularly hard-working, under threat from outside attack and undermined by unrealistic expectations - both those of the Virginia Company and of the settlers themselves - of what was required for long-term success in Virginia. As one nineteenth-century history of Virginia described it, tobacco had a visibly detrimental effect on the colony: