THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 30, 1994 TAG: 9407300181
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
That was a whale of a year, 1619.
We still feel the reverberations.
It set so much in motion.
Just today, over in Jamestown, members of the Virginia General Assembly will be celebrating the convening on July 30, 375 years ago, of the first English legislative body in the New World.
The 27 elected burgesses met in the Jamestown Church and adopted, among other things, a law fixing the price of tobacco. Already, it was Virginia's money crop.
It's doubtful they realized they were beginning a great experiment in self-government.
A greater stir that year must have greeted the arrival of a shipload of 90 young women as prospective wives of the colonists.
Given a choice of attending one of the two events, I don't know but what I'd rather have watched that ship dock with those women at the rail, waving handkerchiefs.
More likely they were mute, still, fearful over what awaited them in the precarious New World.
It was the greatest blind date in history.
Some commentators have depicted the maids as being sold as so much merchandise. That's untrue.
The Virginia Company of London arranged for the women to live in the homes of married settlers until they found mates and then charged each suitor only the cost of passage for his bride-to-be - 120 pounds, and, later, 150 pounds of the best leaf of tobacco.
The very best.
Usually when people speak of the First Families of Virginia, they think of the Founders as the planters and their wives in the great plantations, the likes of the Blands, the Byrds and the Randolphs; but the first First Families were those brave women crossing the pitchy sea to a raw land and rough men.
They were iron stock.
Seldom have husband and wife been better situated to appreciate one another.
Far from being utilitarian, their marriage, spiced by danger, focused by hardship on the first frontier, must have had the air of a deeply romantic, continuing affair.
Colonists had to undergo a ``seasoning'' of scurvy, typhoid, malaria, famine, flu, fire and Indian raids. Among 1,600 who came during the first seven years after the original landing in 1607, 1,000 died.
An impressive artifact at Jamestown is a brick bearing the imprint of a woman's shoe, caught as she moved with a quick, light step about her business of civilizing the island.
The third event in 1619 was the landing of 20 or so blacks from a Dutch man-of-war. They became indentured servants and probably earned their freedom - a chance denied slaves later on.
That single year the land received the means for self-government, a civilizing influence with women, and from the Dutch ship an intimation of what was to become one of the many challenges for the new nation.
It was a long journey.
We're still at it. by CNB