Although only the wealthy families possessed an occasional large and elaborate silver piece of London manufacture—such as epergnes and monteiths—many Virginians not of the planter aristocracy did own silver. Alexander Purdie, for example, one proprietor of the _Virginia Gazette_, owned real estate, nine slaves, and 130 ounces of plate when he died. Other professional men and even artisans in colonial Virginia also owned silver in amounts that seem large in contrast to what their modern counterparts generally possess. One other circumstance that helps explain the dearth of silver articles made in Williamsburg was the scarcity of raw material. There simply was not very much silver or gold in Virginia for colonial craftsmen to work with. Despite the great hopes of the early Jamestown settlers—hopes that in Captain John Smith’s day nearly cost the settlement its life—no silver has ever been mined in Virginia, and precious little gold. For his raw material, the colonial Virginia silversmith thus had to depend on imports. Precious metal might come into the silversmith’s hands in any of three forms. One was bullion, bars of the virgin metal fresh from the mines and refineries of Mexico or Peru. Another was in the form of minted coins of various countries. The third consisted of silver or gold articles already wrought, but available for one reason or another to be melted down and reworked. Perhaps in the seventeenth century a certain amount of bullion reached the English colonies from the Spanish Main in pirate ships. But there is no reason to suppose that this flow continued in the eighteenth century—and certainly not into Virginia. Governor Spotswood’s expedition in 1718 had returned with Blackbeard’s head swinging from a bowsprit and his followers in irons, most of them to be hanged afterward at Williamsburg. Of course, pirates would as soon have coin as bullion, and pirate ships sometimes found haven in colonial ports, especially in those where no official inquired how poor sailor men suddenly acquired such great wealth. Some said that the colonial officials of North Carolina, New England, New York, and even Pennsylvania could be encouraged to look the other way on such occasions. At any rate, a sizable amount of silver coin entered the colonies in this fashion, at least in the seventeenth century. Little of this lucre came directly into Virginia, but for other reasons than the attitude of the governors. The rural colonies of the South could offer neither the concealing refuge of large cities nor the lusty recreation that such cities in the middle and northern colonies promised to pleasure-hungry sailors.