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Desperate Shores - The Price of Passage
The Virginia Company had a pitch: seven years of labor in exchange for passage to the New World and ten acres of land at the end of it. The handbill promised a second son his fortune. A new start. A land of butter and honey.
It was a lie — or at least, it was aimed at the wrong man entirely.
The people who actually filled those ships were prisoners purchased from the Crown, orphans bought from English churches, debtors who had no legal right to refuse, and press-ganged laborers who never signed anything at all. Richard Frethorne, a young servant at Martin’s Hundred, wrote home in 1623 begging…
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