Jamestown As An Indentured Servant Frethorne Summary

An Analysis of Life in Jamestown As An Indentured Servant Jamestown, Virginia, in 1623 was far from the land of opportunity many imagined. For Richard Frethorne, a young man who entered the colony as an indentured servant, it was a place of relentless suffering and despair. In a letter to his mother and father, he detailed his experiences of convincing his parents to purchase his indenture. Surrounded by disease and death, his time there was unbearable, as evident in the lack of resources he described, the continual devolution of order in the colony, and the tonality of the letter. Frethorne’s depiction of life in Jamestown was altogether grim, recounting several times how limited resources had impacted him. The constant threat of sickness
What Frethorne longed for, despite his freedom, was enough to eat. He only used “want” once in his letter, “all is for want of victuals.” This want was so consuming, that he included instructions to preserve food for transport, as it was common to lose provisions to leakage or spoilage from heat. Such restricted access to this fundamental human need was a major contributor to the suffering Frethorne, and many other indentured servants, experienced in Jamestown. Frethorne also dealt with the continual degradation of order in the colony due to diminishing population, lack of leadership, theft, and threat of attack. Only three of the twenty men who arrived at the colony before him were left. With this knowledge, Frethorne watched as over half of his cohort continued to die. The sense of loss was only exacerbated by the death of their lieutenant; a central figure who may have maintained order and boosted morale was instead another body to tally. With so much desolation around them, some turned to burglarizing items from others for
The deteriorating state of the colony exacerbated an already dreadful atmosphere, pushing Frethorne down an unrelenting spiral of hopelessness. It is evident that Frethorne’s predicament was quite gruesome, but his tone throughout the letter truly underscores the distressing nature of his experience. For example, after mentioning rampant disease in the plantation, he begins a series of rambling sentences, “And they are half dead..and our Lieutenant is dead, and his father and his brother. And there was some.And yet we are but 32.” Reading through this evokes a feeling of breathlessness, eliciting a shared sense of anxiety. This style of prose appears again in the following paragraph, arousing urgency when discussing a lack of clothes, “But I have nothing.no, not a shirt to my back.nor clothes.nor but one pair of shoes, but one pair of stockings, but one cap, [and] but two bands”. Frethorne emphasizes how scarce resources are through repetition and establishes a tone of