Sandys’s harder task was persuading potential brides to come to Jamestown. Luckily, the financial obstacles to marriage in 17th-century England worked in his favor. Securing a home and setting up a domestic household were expensive. And unless they were born into wealth, most men and women needed to amass a significant nest egg before they could marry. For working-class Englishwomen, this typically meant years of domestic service. Downton Abbey notwithstanding, many found the prospect of scrubbing other people’s floors and chamber pots less than appealing. Marital immigration offered an attractive alternative.

The Virginia Company offered substantial incentives to the women who signed up to leave England for Jamestown. They were provided a dowry of clothing, linens, and other furnishings, free transportation to the colony, and even a plot of land. They were also promised their pick of wealthy husbands and provided with food and shelter while they made their decision. Like a 17th-century version of The Bachelorette, the women entertained dozens of eager suitors before eventually determining which one would receive the metaphorical rose.

After a husband was chosen, he would reimburse the Virginia Company for the travel expenses, furnishings, and land with 120 pounds (later raised to 150) of “good leaf” tobacco. This is roughly equivalent to $5,000 in today’s currency—an amount that only the relatively well-off could afford to part with. The tobacco payment was intended to cover the cost of the woman’s passage to Virginia and is why the Jamestown brides are sometimes referred to as “tobacco wives.” It is also why the women are frequently accused of having been sold.

Nevertheless, this characterization is false and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the status of women in Jamestown. Although the financially strapped Virginia Company was eager to recoup the costs of sponsoring the Jamestown brides, it was not selling women. The arriving brides had full control over their marital choice, and the Company even accepted the possibility that with this freedom a woman might “unwarily or fondly … bestow her self” on a man who didn’t have enough wealth to put up 120 pounds of tobacco. If that happened, the Company simply requested that the man pay them back if and when he was able to do so.

The fact that the Jamestown brides were not sold is important and represents a conscious decision by the Company, which could have, as was easy and common at the time, kidnapped potential colonists instead. In 1615, King James responded to Virginia Governor Thomas Dale’s request for more colonists by shipping a hundred male felons to the colony. Shortly thereafter, a similar number of street urchins were rounded up and sent to Virginia.

These kidnappings were government-sponsored, but after the Virginia Company instituted a new incentive for immigrants in 1617, private individuals also began kidnapping men and women for the colonies. Under this new arrangement, called the headright system, settlers who financed their own passage to the Virginia colony received 50-acre tracts of land. The same amount of land was offered to anyone willing to sponsor the passage of a new settler. Speculators and planters were eager to take advantage of the latter offer, but they had difficulty finding willing recruits. Paying men and women to kidnap settlers solved this problem. By mid-century, thousands of unwilling immigrants were being shipped to the colony as indentured servants every year. One particularly prolific kidnapper was rumored to have abducted more than 6,000 victims.