The Tobacco Brides

In 1618, a man named Owen Evans went to Somerset and actually kidnapped a number of unsuspecting young women and was caught in the process of forcing them on board a ship. The ships destination? Virginia. Women were needed in the colony, but even the Virginia Company in London would not have sanctioned kidnapping. (Evans would be hanged, drawn and quartered for his efforts.) Which is not to say that the incident put an end to kidnapping: it did not. Late during the seventeenth-century, a widow named Ann Servant succeeded where Evans had failed, possibly because she was not as ambitious as he, kidnapping just one young woman, Alice Flax. Alice was forced to board the The Elizabeth and Katharine bound for Virginia, where she was sold 'into bondage', with Servant profiting. (Servant was fined; had she stolen a horse she would have been hanged.) Another young woman, Alice Deakins, was 'assaulted' by an older woman in London and taken on board The Concord, then in the Thames with the intention of selling her into servitude in Virginia. But the Evans scandal forced the Virginia Company to take action: they advertised. In 1619, the Company sent ninety 'tobacco wives' to Jamestown and another fifty-six 1621-22. The Company paid for passage. The voyage must have been horrendous, with literally dozens of people confined to a restricted space, the wooden ship creaking as it crossed 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean. The smells must have been awful given the proximity to so many unwashed bodies. Many passengers were seasick. The drinking water was stale, the food very likely riddled with insects. Far worse was the very real chance of dying of disease in Virginia. Or being slaughtered by Indians. Elizabeth and Henry Southey arrived in 1623 with five of their six children (one may have died on the voyage) and ten servants. Southey, a Somerset gentleman, gambled with his life and the lives of others for 900 acres of and lost: Within weeks, he and all of children bar one were butchered. (Elizabeth Southey hid or ran with daughter Anne; both survived.) Suffice to say, the massacre could not have encouraged Englishwomen to go to Virginia as prospective brides. The Virginia Company appreciated the importance of women to the colony, so offered women parcels of land an incentive meant to attract Englishwomen of marriageable age. This was tremendous: only women at the top of the social pyramid could expect to own land; one can understand why women of slender means would overlook the malaria rampant in Virginia, the hot, humid climate an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Seventeenth-century English marriages had everything to do with money; a woman with a scant dowry (or none at all) could not expect to marry well. Going to Virginia would not only take care of that problem, there were prosperous tobacco planters eager to take an English bride. (There were men who went to live in the Indian villages, given the lack of Englishwomen in Virginia, but they were in the minority; even so, at least one minister felt duty-bound to warn his flock against this.) And there was an advantage to look forward to, assuming one did not succumb to disease or Indian raids: in England, a widow received one-third of her late husband's estate; in Virginia, she could expect to receive more. Women enjoyed a greater degree of independence in Virginia; a woman named Sarah Harrison refused to marry her husband until the word 'obey' had been excised from the ceremony. Understandably, the minister was not pleased but acquiesced once the groom, eager to marry, agreed. (Incidentally, after the wedding, the new husband was expected to reimburse the Company with 120 - 150 pounds of 'good leaf tobacco.) Women seeking better lives were attracted to Virginia; in this they had much in common with countless other immigrants to what became the United States: a desire for a better life.