London Company sent out ships every year with supplies and fresh
colonists; but, strange as it seems, most of the men sent were
unmarried, and even those who had wives and children left them in
England.

When we think of it, this was a very bad way to begin the work of
settling a new country. The bachelors, of course, did not intend to
stay all their lives in a country where there were no women and
children. They meant to make some money as quickly as they could and
then go back to England to live. The married men who had left their
families behind them were in still greater haste to make what they could
and go home. In short, for a dozen years after the colony was planted,
nobody thought of it as his real home, where he meant to live out his
life. If the colonists had been married men, with wives and children in
Virginia, they would have done all they could to make the new settlement
a pleasant one to live in: they would have built good houses, set up
schools, and worked hard to improve their own fortunes and to keep order
in the colony.

But year after year the ships brought cargoes of single men to Virginia,
and the settlement was scarcely more than a camp in the woods. After the
company had been trying for a good many years to people a new country by
landing shiploads of bachelors on its shores, it began to dawn upon
their minds that if the Virginia settlement was ever to grow into a
thriving and lasting colony, there must be women and children there to
make happy homes, as well as men to raise wheat, corn, and tobacco.

Sir Edwin Sandys was the wise man who saw all this most clearly. He
urged the company to send out hard-working married men, who would take
their wives and children with them to Virginia and settle there for
good. But this was not all. There were already a great many bachelors in
the colony, and there were no young women there for them to marry. Sir
Edwin knew that if these bachelors were to stay in Virginia and become
prosperous colonists they must have a chance to marry and set up homes
of their own. So he went to work in England to get together a cargo of
sweethearts for the colonists. He persuaded ninety young women of good
character to go out in one of the company's ships, to marry young men in
Virginia.

The plan was an odd one, but it was managed with good sense and did well
for everybody concerned. It was agreed that the company should provide
the young women with such clothing and other