Woman's Life in Colonial Days

I

With what a valiant and unyielding spirit our forefathers met the unspeak-

able hardships of the first days of American colonization! We of these softer

and more abundant times can never quite comprehend what distress, what

positive suffering those bold souls of the seventeenth century endured to es-

tablish a new people among the nations of the world. The very voyage from

England to America might have daunted the bravest of spirits. Note but

this glimpse from an account by Colonel Norwood in his Voyage to Virginia:

"Women and children made dismal cries and grievous complaints. The in-

finite number of rats that all the voyage had been our plague, we now were

glad to make our prey to feed on; and as they were insnared and taken a well

grown rat was sold for sixteen shillings as a market rate. Nay, before the voy-

age did end (as I was credibly informed) a woman great with child offered

twenty shillings for a rat, which the proprietor refusing, the woman died."

3 CARL HOLLIDAY

That was an era of restless, adventurous spirits-men and women filled with

the rich and danger-loving blood of the Elizabethan day. We should recall

that every colony of the original thirteen, except Georgia, was founded in the

seventeenth century when the energy of that great and versatile period of the

Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The spirit that moved Ben Jon-

son and Shakespeare to undertake the new and untried in literature was the

same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia

wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's

sake on a stern and rock-bound coast. It was the day of Milton, Dryden, and

Bunyan, the day of the Protectorate with its fanatical defenders, the day of

the rise and fall of British Puritanism, the day of the Revolution of 1688

which forever doomed the theory of the divine rights of monarchs, the day

of the bloody Thirty Years' War with its consequent downfall of aristocracy,

the day of the Grand Monarch in France with its accumulating preparations

for the destruction of kingly lights and the rise of the Commons.

In such an age we can but expect bold adventures. The discovery and ex-

ploration of the New World and the defeat of the Spanish Armada had now

made England monarch of sea and land. The imagination of the people was

aroused, and tales of a wealth like that of Croesus came from mariners who

had sailed the seven seas, and were willingly believed by an excited audience.

Indeed the nations stood ready with open-mouthed wonder to accept all

stories, no matter how marvelous or preposterous. America suddenly ap-

peared to all people as the land that offered wealth, religious and political

freedom, a home for the poor, a refuge for the persecuted, in truth, a par-

adise for all who would begin life anew. With such a vision and with such a

spirit many came. The same energy that created a Lear and a Hamlet created

a Jamestown and a Plymouth. Shakespeare was at the height of his career

when Jamestown was settled, and had been dead less than five years when

the Puritans landed at Plymouth. Impelled by the soul of such a day Puri-

tan and Cavalier sought the new land, hoping to find there that which they