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Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in North America, was initially an all-male colony. Though women did migrate to the Chesapeake in subsequent years, they remained relatively few in number: male colonists outnumbered women by roughly six to one in the 1620s and by four to one in later decades. The Chesapeake’s skewed sex ratio made it extremely difficult for men to find wives and establish conventional family households. It also meant that most colonists did not have access to sexual relations with English women during the initial period of settlement. There seems, furthermore, to have been little sexual contact with Indians during these years. 1 It is difficult to believe that a group of young and notoriously unbridled men remained celibate for an extended period of time. Early settlers often paired off to form all-male households, living and working together. As Mary Beth Norton has remarked, ‘it would be truly remarkable if all the male-only partnerships lacked a sexual ingredient.’ 2 Some men may have engaged in sexual relations with each other out of desperation; others may have taken advantage of an unusual situation to form relationships that would have been more controversial under normal circumstances. But whatever their motives, men who coupled sexually with other men are unlikely to have been anomalous in such an environment. It seems reasonable to assume that much of the sex that took place in the first few years of settlement in the south was sodomitical. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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