A covetous haughty person

Love & Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price. Page 15.

Mandarin Class freeloaders were there at the beginning.

The flagship of the voyage, the 120-ton Susan Constant, was modest enough in size, around 116 feet in all. The others were smaller still: the Godspeed was roughly 68 feet long and had a capacity of 40 tons; the Discovery, about 50 feet and 20 tons. Yet even these figures make the ships sound larger than they were. The Godspeed, for instance, was 68 feet long in theory—if one measured from tip to tip. About a quarter of that length, though, was taken up by the spars overhanging her bow and stern, leaving an actual deck length of 52 feet or so. That figure, a more realistic measure of the ship’s usable area for the voyagers, is equivalent in today’s terms to the length of three parking spaces. The Godspeed was around 15 feet wide at its broadest point.

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In a 1985 reenactment of the Jamestown voyage, on a modern replica of the Godspeed, those on board found the situation trying—and that time, there were only fourteen of them. “That, to me, is a really hard one to fathom— fifty-two people on that boat,” said Neil Tanner, a crew member. “We talked about that a lot. With the fourteen of us, it was crowded.”

Apart from the cabins already in place for the crew, the ships undoubtedly had a few cabins jerry-built for some of the more elevated gentlemen of the mission. Foremost among these was Edward-Maria Wingfield, a charter investor in the Virginia Company. Wingfield was wellborn (his father was a godson of Queen Mary) and was accompanied on the voyage by at least two servants. He had been trained as a lawyer; he studied at Lincoln’s Inn, one of London’s four Inns of Court, before taking on military service in the Netherlands and then Ireland. Wingfield would soon become the Jamestown colony’s first president but would slink back to England in disgrace less than a year after the landing. With good reason, the venerable Dictionary of National Biography would, in the late 1880s, deem him “self-confident, pompous, and puffed up by a sense of his own superior birth and position, unable to co-operate with common men and unfit to rule them.” The British Empire in America, John Oldmixon’s history published in London in 1708, would judge him “a covetous haughty person.”

John Smith, like the rest of the passengers, would have slept on a straw mattress on the decks or in a hammock. His companions there were the less exalted gentlemen, as well as the various tradesmen and laborers who had signed on. Among the latter, some are known today only as lines in the passenger list: Henry Tavin, laborer; John Herd and William Garret, bricklayers; Nicholas Scott, drummer. Unlike the Roanoke expedition, this one had no women on board. There were four boys: Samuell Collier, Nathaniell Pecock, James Brumfield, and Richard Mutton.

The difference in approach, objectives, and dynamics between the Virginia settlers - there for commerce, and the Puritans just a handful of years later - there for freedom and settlement is striking. All men versus families. Bi-modal class distribution (the Peacocks and the Dregs) versus the solidly middle class. The chancers versus the believers.

So many of those early Virginia settlers died. What about Samuell Collier, Nathaniell Pecock, James Brumfield, and Richard Mutton? What happened to them, where are there stories?

Samuel Collier was literate and served as John Smith's secretary and even kept a journal. He survived the Starving Time and stayed in Jamestown after John Smith returned to England. He grew to adulthood and became a planter, living in Virginia until his death during the winter of 1622-23. His survival might have had to do with relationships developed during a time when he liwed with the Indians. From John Smith's account about a visit with the Pamunkey Indians in 1608, "Then we departed thence, the president assuring the king perpetual love, and left with him Samuel Collier, his page, to learn the language."

A boy was killed during the attack of the Paspahegh Indians in late May 1607, only a few weeks after the settler's arrival and it is suspected that that boy was James Brumfield.

A modern day reconstruction from the suspected remains of James Brumfield.

Nathaniell Pecock is not mentioned any further than that one account, either as having survived or died but a Nathaniell Pecock did die of fever in 1642. Perhaps it is one and the same.

Richard Mutton's face is uncertain.