| OCR Text |
Show Page 41 Mistress Pierce joined us then, and remembering the other one who had stood apart at the courting, the man called John, I thought to ask her why a grown man would need permission to wed. "Likely he is indentured," she replied. "You mean a servant?" I asked, marvelling at the thought of such a one being servant to any man. "It is not uncommon, you know," Mistress Pierce replied. "And they are valuable members of our colony," she added, a touch of rebuke in her voice. "When the merchant adventurers formed the Virginia Company of London, she continued, "they had many hopes for the New World, most of them unseemly and unsound. They believed they would find gold lying upon the ground for the picking. They believed they would find a new passage to India if only they searched long enough. They saw the settlement of Virginia as an opportunity to deny the Spanish, the Catholics, more land, as an opportunity to gain more followers for the Protestant Church by converting the heathens. "So the first colonists who came in 1607 were gentlemen adventurers and dandies, hoping to become wealthy with little effort on their part. With few men about who were willing to soil their fingers, the settlement foundered and nearly sank into oblivion. It would have, too, had it not been for the efforts of Captain John Smith. |
