The question has been asked, "What was the name of the ship that brought the Second Germanna Colony to Virginia?" Many answers have been put forth, but I believe the correct answer is " Scott ". Most people, though, say Scott was the name of the Captain, but this is because of an erroneous statement published by the Germanna Foundation.
B. C. Holtzclaw, writing in a publication (Germanna Record Six, page 5) of the Germanna Foundation, says that an importation records says, " . . about nine years since with Capt. Scott. " The record is a part of a set of three for the Broyles, Yeager, and Paulitz families, made on 2 May 1727, at the Spotsylvania Court House (Order Book, 1724-1730). The statement that Holtzclaw makes is in error in two ways.
First, the word " about " does not appear in the record. Second, the word which he quotes as " with " actually reads as " in ". By comparison to an extended sample of the writing, one can see that it is not reasonable to read the word " in " as " with ".
What should one make of a statement that reads " in Capt. Scott "? One does not normally refer to ships' Captains in this way. Yet, the clerk at the courthouse surely did not dream up the name Scott . The Germans must have said something with the name Scott in it. The logical answer is that Scott might be the name of a ship, not the name of a man.
The State of Virginia, shortly after World War II, sent teams to England to microfilm records which pertained to Virginia. There are thousands of such records from Colonial times. Back in Virginia, an index to these microfilms has been prepared. This index is now online and can be searched from one's own computer. One of the ways of searching is by the name of a person. A search shows many ships' Captains with the name Scott , but none of these are in the right time period.
A search by the name of a ship shows there was a ship named the Scott in this time period.
With a ship in the 1717 period named Scott , but with no captain named Scott , how should we interpret the statement " in Capt. Scott "? Remember that the speakers making the statement were Germans whose knowledge of English was limited. Surely, what they were saying was something like " with the Captain of the Scott ." The clerk misunderstood the meaning of this and confused the name of the ship with the name of the Captain.
If we accept for the moment that Scott is a reasonably correct word itself, then it is very probable that the Second Colony came on the ship Scott . In the next note we will examine who the Captain was.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.