Governor Dale mounted an expedition to destroy all signs of French occu-
pation along the northern coast. Luckily for them, the French had all
departed, or their fate would probably have been the same as they met at
the hands of the Spanish in La Florida.
Draconian measures and foreign expeditions were unlikely to pacify
people made desperate by starvation or infuriated by vicious punishments;
moreover, such means were also unlikely to increase production. What the
colonists needed was something to fill their stomachs and give them hope.
By 1613 it was clear that even under harsh discipline the collective farming
then practiced in Jamestown was not efficient. Yields were low because no
one wanted to work harder than his neighbor, and no one had an incentive
to cultivate carefully. Governor Dale decided to assign older settlers plots of
3 acres each to cultivate privately (as the contemporary phrase put it, “in
particular”), just as would be done in Soviet collective farms in the 1960s.
Each recipient also had to agree to work one month each year for the gen-
eral community and to pay 2^1 ⁄ 2 barrels of grain. The experiment worked
so well that, a few years later, the governor decided to award plots of up to
100 acres. Some of these lands began, for the first time, to be farmed by
imported “indentured” or contract workers from England, Scotland, and
Wales.
Recognizing that man does not live by bread alone, the company also
arranged, in 1619, the first of many importations of women. In the land of
the blind the one-eyed man is king, and certainly in the land of bachelors
any two-legged woman was a queen. About women, at least, the settlers
were open-minded: any female, regardless of health, previous means of
earning a living, or beauty, was welcome. The home government and the
company viewed women simply as engines of colonialism.
No sooner had the colonists stepped ashore than they prudently set
about constructing some sort of stronghold. The first such strongholds
were so flimsy that nothing remains to show how they were built. Probably,
they were not much more than piles of brush and brambles gathered
around the tents and campfires on the beach. Many of the immigrants
“were for some Time glad to lodge in empty Casks to shelter them from
the Weather, for want of Housing” or in “Tents of Cloath” and “Canvis
Boothes” as colonists did in Massachusetts Bay. But weather was not their
Early Days in the Colonies 111