"Gallants, to Bohemia" and Maids for Virginia: The London Port Register of 1635

Alison Games

The 1635 London port register, the largest register for a single year in the colonial period, contains the names and ages of almost five thousand people who left London in that one year for the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Barbados, Nevis, and Saint Christopher, Bermuda, and Providence, Rhode Island. These 5,000 people participated in a crucial migration that established the viability of England's nascent Atlantic empire. Altogether, however, 7,500 people traveled from the port of London in 1635. Just over one thousand of these people voyaged to destinations on the Continent, while 1,595 were soldiers bound to the Continent. The London port register is unique in this respect, depicting as it does a tripartite movement through London. Thus the London port register offers an unusual opportunity to place Atlantic migrations in a broad context circumscribed not by colonial aspirations alone, but by global imperial and commercial endeavors as well. In contrast to the trend among historians of colonial migration, this paper insists on the role migration played in creating not isolated and discrete colonies, but instead a single Atlantic world.

[WP #96009]