The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the PeopleEggleston, Edward
History
The Beginners of a Nation: A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People
Eggleston, Edward
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Manuscript Book of Instructions, etc., Library of Congress. Letter to
the Governor and Council by the ship Marmaduke, August 12, 1621. A
proposal to send women had been made seven years earlier. Commons
Journal, 1, 487, May 17, 1614. Extract from Martyn's Speech (for which
he was reprimanded): "That they require but a few honest Labourers
burthened with Children.--Moveth, a committee may consider of the
means for this, for Seven Years; at which some of the Company may be
present." On November 17, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys pointed out in the
court of the company that the people of Virginia "were not settled in
their mindes to make it their place of rest and continuance." "For the
remedying of the Mischiefe and for establishing a perpetuitie of the
Plantation," he proposed the sending of "one hundred young maides to
become wives." Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company, i, 44, 45.
Two women, the first in the colony, had arrived in September, 1608.
Oxford Tract, 47. There were women in Gates's party in 1610. It was
even reported that some English women had intermingled with the
natives. Calendar Colonial Papers, i, 13. An allowance of food to
women in De la Warr's time is proof that women were there. In 1629
there was living Mistress Pearce, "an honest, industrious woman," who
had been in Virginia "near twenty years." Rolfe (a copy of whose
Relation is among the Duke of Manchester's MSS. now in the British
Public Record Office) sets down a remainder of seventy-five of the
three hundred and fifty-one persons in the colony at Dale's departure,
as women and children. It is worth recalling here that D'Ogeron, who
governed Santo Domingo in 1663 and after, supplied the buccaneers
with wives brought from France; and the plan was also put into
practice in Louisiana about a century later than the Virginia
experiment, and the same expedient, as is well known, was resorted to
in Canada. In Virginia more pains were taken to have all the women
thus imported of a good character than in some of the French colonies.
[Sidenote: Note 19, page 58.]
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