Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth CenturyJester, Annie Lash
History
Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century
Jester, Annie Lash
Plantation life; Virginia -- Social life and customs -- To 1775
For protection there were corslets, muskets, swords, lead and powder.
Six bandoleers were listed; they were belts with loops holding pierced
metal cases which held the matches for firing the powder which set off
the charge in guns. The matches mentioned were actually slow burning
fuses, as the modern match did not come into use until the nineteenth
century.
Tragedy followed closely upon this auspicious second start for Berkeley
Hundred. William Tracy was dead by 8 April 1621 and his wife Mary died
the same year. Their daughter Joyce, who had married Captain Nathaniel
Powell, was slain with her husband in the Indian massacre of 1622. A son
Thomas who survived returned to England.
Of the twelve women named in the passenger list of the _Supply_, Joane
Greene failed to make the trip and also, probably, Frances Page, whose
husband was reported not to have come with the party, although he was
booked. Frances Greville, a young gentlewoman, a cousin of the Tracys,
was married by 1621 to young Nathaniel West, son of Lord De La Warr.
Shortly becoming a widow, she thereafter married, as his second wife,
the cape-merchant Abraham Peirsey and upon his death, 1626, she became
the wife of Captain Samuel Mathews of "Denbigh" on the Warwick River.
William Finch, who brought over his wife and daughter Frances, was dead
by 1622, and the widow shortly thereafter became the wife of Captain
John Flood and the mother of three sons and a daughter. Jane Rowles,
with her husband Richard, was slain and, though Joane Coopey and her son
Anthony died, the daughter Elizabeth survived. Elizabeth Webb married in
Virginia, and Isabel Gifford had been wed to Adam Raymer while the
_Supply_ was on the high seas.
THE MAGAZINE SHIPS
As has been previously indicated, all supplies, sent to the Colony
during the first ten years, were paid for through the Company's
treasury, but so great was the financial burden, particularly since the
Colony was not yielding the profit anticipated, that a different
arrangement was sought, in 1617. There was organized within the Company
a "Society of Particular Adventurers for Traffic with the People of
Virginia in Joint Stock." This was known as the Magazine, to which
members of the Virginia Company contributed such sums as they were
willing to venture. In practice, it was an association of private
investors who, upon return of the ship that had been sent stocked to
Virginia, divided the profits from the sale of goods and the tobacco
returned on the ships, according to their investment in the enterprise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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