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Desperate Shores - The Price of Passage · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to American Political History Desperate Shores The Price of Passage.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Picture a handbill nailed to a post near the London docks, passed around a tavern table, read aloud by a recruiter working the crowd on a street corner near the Southwark Markets.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company is looking for men, seven years of labor in exchange for your passage to the New World, ten acres of land at the end of it, a place described in the words of explorer John Smith as a land filled with butter and honey.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: A new start in a new world, and all it will cost you is seven years of labor.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, who was that handbill aimed at?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company recruiters would tell you the second sons, England's landed estates passed entirely to the eldest by law, a system designed to keep the landed estates from being carved into small portions of uselessness across generations.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The second sons inherited nothing.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Land was closed to them.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The guilds were closed to them.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: London was overcrowded, wages were low, the plague came through every decade and killed ten to twenty percent of the city.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: For a man like that, a man with connections, but no prospects, a man who knew what comfort looked like but couldn't reach it, Virginia was a pitch worth hearing.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that was what the advertisement was pitching.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was who the Virginia Company wanted you to imagine when you thought about the men crossing the Atlantic.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The men who were actually filling those ships were not second sons.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: They were the cheapest labor England had to offer, drawn from the very bottom of society that had no shortage of people at the bottom.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the story of who they actually were and how they actually got on those ships is the story this episode is going to tell.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because what the handbell promised and what Virginia delivered were two entirely different realities.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Here is how the charter system worked.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: The crown issued a charter, the legal instrument that helped colonize the New World, and these they could do without spending a penny of their own.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: A person or a company would receive a legal monopoly over a defined stretch of land for a set number of years.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: They could settle it, trade from it, govern it.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: In exchange, the crown received a percentage of any wealth it extracted in gold, silver, or trade profits, and the political benefit of claiming that this was now English territory.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: The crown risked nothing, the crown spent nothing, and the crown received.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The charter holder then turned around and sold shares in the venture to investors, a hundred pounds today for prospects of a thousand acres of productive farmland or an exclusive right to the fur trade or a cut on the sassafras harvest, which in the fifteen eighties and the fifteen nineties was believed to be a cure all medical wonder commanding extraordinary prices in Europe.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: The investors risked money, but they were in London.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were not getting on a ship.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: The people who got on the ship, those were the third party in the arrangement, and their terms were considerably less favorable.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Indenture was not an invention of the New World practices.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was a commonplace arrangement in England, a legal contract binding a person's labor to another party for a fixed term.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It came in three forms, and understanding all three matters for understanding exactly who ended up on the ships.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: The first was an apprenticeship.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: A craftsman's family paid a skilled tradesman, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a glassmaker, for the right to train their son.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: The son would work for the tradesman for seven years, producing nothing for himself, receiving no wages.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: His labor was the payment for the training, and in a guild economy, where the king's guild might decree that only two blacksmiths could operate in a given city, being apprenticed to the right craftsman was also politically valuable.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: There was no free market, apprenticeships were the gate.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The second type was passage debt.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you wanted to cross the Atlantic but couldn't afford the fare, and most couldn't who wanted to, you could sign an indenture agreeing to work for the company or a landowner the company assigned you to for seven years.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of those seven years you received freedom dues, typically a small land grant, some tools, and perhaps a set of clothes.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: That was the deal on the handbill.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: That was the promise.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: The third type was not a deal at all.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: A company could purchase prisoners from the crown, receiving them as contracted labor for the remainder of their sentence.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: It could purchase orphans from English churches, which was considered a social good at the time, giving a child without prospects a trade in a future, at least in theory.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: It could take on vagrants, debtors, prisoners of war, Irish soldiers who had fought on the losing side recently, or men who just happened to be in prison when the ship needed filling.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And here is what you need to understand about debt in seventeenth century England.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Being unable to pay a debt was a criminal offense.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: You could be imprisoned for it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And a debt passed down generationally, you could be jailed for your father's debts.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Break an apprenticeship contract, and you could be imprisoned.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Found vagrant on the street, and you could be seized.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Once you were imprisoned for any of those reasons, a company could purchase your labor and ship you across the Atlantic.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: You did not have to agree, and it was not part of any contract.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company's own colonial leadership was unsentimental about this.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Their labor force was described in a blunt language of the era.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: The scum of the earth taken up promiscuously.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: This phrase tells you exactly what the English elite thought of the men and women filling those ships.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Almost none of them were second sons of landed gentry.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Those men had options.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: These men did not.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have a letter that tells us what it was actually like.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Richard Faythorne was a young indentured servant, perhaps little more than a boy, sent to Martin's Hundred, a plantation a few miles from Jamestown.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: He arrived late in 1622, a year after the Powhatan attack had killed hundreds of settlers in the surrounding area.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Three months after arriving in March 1623, he wrote his parents in England.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: His letter survived.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the only direct accounts we have of the laboring classes that built the settlement.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I, your child, am in a most heavy case by reason of nature of the country.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It causes much sickness as the scurvy and bloody flux and a diverse other diseases which makes the body very poor and weak.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when we are sick, there is nothing to comfort us, for since I came out of the ship, I never ate anything but peas and water gruel.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: He goes on, no shirt on his back but rags, his cloak stolen by a fellow servant, half the strength he had in England, from want of food, men dying around him weakly.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: He begs his parents to redeem him, to buy him out of the indentureship.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: He tells them that a neighbor, a man named Goodman Jackson, had taken pity on him and sometimes fed him fish from the river, and he passes along what Goodman Jackson had said when he heard that Richard's own parents had sent their son to this colony.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: You would have better been knocked over the head than sent here, young man.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Richard Faythorne died in Virginia in sixteen twenty four.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: He never went home.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was one of hundreds of thousands.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Of the roughly one hundred thousand people known to have immigrated to Virginia and the plantation colonies in the seventeenth century, historians estimate around eighty percent had no meaningful choice in the matter.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Indentured servants, press gang laborers, vagrants, orphans, debtors, prisoners of war, sold to Virginia's plantations to fill the need for labor in a tobacco economy that could never get enough bodies.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it was not only men on these ships.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen twenty and sixteen twenty one years into the Jamestown experiment, with the colony still struggling to sustain itself, the Virginia Company ran a specific program to address what they called the colony's want for wives.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: They recruited somewhere between 140 and 150 women, poor, orphans, women with no other prospects, and shipped them to Virginia.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: When a planter wanted one of these women as a wife, he paid the company 150 pounds of tobacco to cover the cost for passage, then he proposed.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: She could technically refuse.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But she was already in Virginia, she had no money, she had no indenture with a defined end date, no land grant coming, no path home.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: The choice she was offered looked like freedom on paper, and very little of it in practice.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company called the program Maids for Virginia.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: The women who went through it had no such name for it.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what most of them called it because none of them left a written record for us.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: They arrived, they were purchased, they disappeared into the colonial record as wives, names on plantation documents.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is all the machinery that built the first English settlement in America.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company's five stated objectives for Jamestown, the colony it planted in 1607, tell us something about what the investors expected to find.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: First, was to establish a fort and claim English territorial control.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Second, create a permanent trading station for native trade for fur and sassafras.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Third, learn native languages and cultures to gain a commercial advantage over their other European competitors.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth, prospect for mineral deposits, gold, silver, copper.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every charter of this era included a crown claim to any precious metals found, because the dream of what Spain had found in Mexico and Peru never died.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And fifth, the Virginia Company genuinely expected its colonists to find what they called the Northwest Passage, a supposed waterway or narrow landmass crossing through North America that could allow the English ships to reach Asia by sailing west.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: The discovery of the new world had happened.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: In Columbus's mind, it was an accident on his way to Asia.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Asia had always been the prize, the spice trade, the silk trade.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: That was the real money.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Americas were in the way.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the men who designed this venture expected furs, sassafras, gold, silver, Asian trade routes, and a manageable labor force working a trading post in the land of plenty.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: The Atlantic crossing was roughly six to twelve weeks, depending on the weather.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Passengers were held in the ship's lower decks, cramped, dark, with minimal ventilation, sharing the space with livestock, cargo, and each other.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: These were not passenger vessels, they were cargo ships that happened to be carrying people, and the people were loaded with roughly the same logic as the barrels and crates stocked around them.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: What mattered was how many bodies could fit, not how the bodies would fare for six weeks in a dark hold without adequate air and fresh food.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Rations were fixed and often ran short on long crossings.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Disease moved through the packed hold with nothing to stop it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: The food, salt, meat, and ship's biscuits, hard enough to break teeth, offered almost no protection from scurvy, which began to show within weeks when vitamin C was absent.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: We have jokes about pirates with scurvy, but it's not a joke for them.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Scurvy killed, dysentery killed.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: The ship itself, with its unventilated lower decks and its standing water, and its accumulation of filth from weeks at sea, was a disease incubator before anyone set foot on shore.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the men and women who stepped off the ships in Virginia were already malnourished and sick.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some were buried at sea before the crossing was done.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then, after all of that, they arrived in Virginia.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the new world, it turned out, was not a land of butter and honey, it was a place that killed people with extraordinary efficiency.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: The problem had a name the colonists eventually gave it, the seasoning, the period of adjustment, usually the first one to three years, during which new arrivals encountered diseases their body had no experience with, in a climate hotter and more humid than anything they'd known in England.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Doing physical labor they were often wholly unprepared for, eating food they didn't know how to find or grow in a landscape they didn't understand.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The seasoning killed at rates that, had they been honestly published in London, would have ended the Virginia Company's ability to recruit overnight.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: In Jamestown's first few decades, the average life expectancy of an arrival was measured in months.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not years, months.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: The colony had to be continuously resupplied, not just with goods, but with bodies, because the attrition rate was so severe that without constant new arrivals, the settlement would simply cease to exist.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: By sixteen sixteen, nine years after Jamestown's founding, of the roughly two thousand people who had been sent to Virginia, three hundred and fifty one remained alive.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Three hundred and fifty one out of two thousand.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The investors in London were not writing those numbers in their advertisements.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: For those who made it through the seasoning, this is what daily life in a plantation colony looked like.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your home was a single communal room, earthen floors, beaten dirt, nothing else.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: There might be a rolled mattress shared among a family.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: A table was unlikely.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: You had a single bowl and spoon for meals, forks were rare.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: You mostly used your hands.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: You slept in your clothes because blankets were too expensive.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: There was no toilet, not even a latrine, usually.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Just the side of a building or somewhere nearby.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: In summer, the smell was extraordinary, and the insects a plague on humanity.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: One in three infants died before their first year.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Of the children who survived infancy, forty percent died before the age of twenty.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: The average marriage in Virginia lasted nine years before one partner died.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Half of all children lost a parent before age fifteen.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: One third lost both parents before the age of fifteen.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Almost no one ever met their grandparents.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about these settlements as if they were rough but manageable.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Wilderness camping.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: They were not.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were a sustained catastrophe endured by people who had been promised something else entirely or mostly, people who had no choice.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, this is what life looked like for the fortunate ones that survived.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get to what happened at the end of that seven years, it's worth stopping and understanding why Virginia needed so many bodies in the first place.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: In 1612, five years after Jamestown's founding, in the middle of all the starvation and war with the Powaton, a man named John Rolfe successfully grew and exported the first commercial crop of Virginia tobacco.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: It sold in England.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: It sold well, and that single crop changed the entire equation for the colony.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Tobacco was labor intensive in a way that fur trading was not.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't grow it in a trading post.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: You needed cleared land, and you needed hands, many hands, working from spring planting through summer cultivation through fall harvest.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And here is the other thing about tobacco.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: It exhausts the soil within three to seven years, which means you always need more land, and you always need more labor to work it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Every successful tobacco planter in Virginia had the same need.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: More land, more labor.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the labor had to be cheap because the margins on tobacco, which were good initially, were always being squeezed as production expanded and prices fell.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: The charter system produced exactly what a tobacco economy needed, an endless supply of disposable labor at the lowest cost possible, drawn from a pool of people in England who had no other options.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: The seasoning killed sixty to seventy percent of them, but that was priced in, because the cost of replacing a dead servant was low enough that it simply factored into the business model.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is what Richard Faythorne was describing in his letter.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: He was not a victim of individual cruelty, though there was plenty of that.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: He was a unit of input in an agricultural system designed to consume him.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: By law, the company or landowner who held an indentured was required to deliver freedom dues at the end of the term.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Corn, clothes, sometimes land, sometimes tools, sometimes a small sum of money.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: That was the promise on the handbill.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was what seven years would buy.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: What actually happened when those indentured servants came to collect?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Masters routinely delayed.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Masters disputed the terms.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Masters claimed the servant had violated some clause of the contract, had been lazy, had stolen something, had talked back, and used that as grounds to withhold the dues or extend the term.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: In sixteen seventy five, a servant who charged his master with cheating him took his case to the general court of Virginia and won.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: His prize?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Three barrels of corn.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you received your freedom dues, and you did receive your land, the amount and terms varied wildly by contract and period.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yet you still faced one final problem.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Where was that land located?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: The now free laborer had traded seven years of his life for a patch of ground on the most dangerous margins in Virginia.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was a free man.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He did own land.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Normally, the land the Virginia Company considered its and the native warriors also considered theirs.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you were one bad harvest, one native raid, one run of bad luck away from losing it and ending up back in indentureship in the labor markets where it had all started.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for many, that is exactly what happened.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the thing about the charter system that becomes clear only when you look at the full picture.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was never primarily about the settlers.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: The settlers were an input, a resource to be consumed in the production of returns for investors and political advantage for the crown.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company, through its history, went through multiple restructurings, multiple resupply efforts, multiple crises.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Burning through investor capital for nearly two decades, it would be dissolved by the crown in 1624 after a Powhatan attack devastated the colony, and an investigation revealed just how badly the company had mismanaged everything.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: The investors lost their money.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: The directors lost their positions.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: The settled who had arrived, the ones who had actually built something in Virginia with their bodies and their years, they kept going, because they had nowhere else to go, and because the land they had cleared was the only thing they had.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: That is the deep irony of the charter system.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every company that funded the first English settlements eventually failed or was dissolved, every single one of them.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Virginia Company, the Plymouth Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company would later face royal revocations of their charter.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: The corporate machinery that launched English America did not survive.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the settlements did, because the people in them had no choice but to keep building.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: The companies failed, the colonists remained, and what they built out of desperation and labor and survival became the foundation of something the London Borderms never envisioned and never understood.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The second sun on the handbill and the free man choosing his own adventure in the new world were all sales pitches, a fiction printed to fill ships.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: The people who actually filled those ships were prisoners, orphans, debtors, vagrants, men and women who had no better option and in many cases no options at all.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe and leave a five star rating, and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.