I'm Peter Frankopen. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

This season we're revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes.

From Sickly Child to Diamond Tycoon, leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of British imperialism.

Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met by students, chanting Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed.

It's unbelievable how relevant roads still feels and how often his name is invoked by people

contesting really polarizing parts of our contemporary life.

But one of the questions about Rhodes is that he takes all the flag and therefore hides

away all the other people who were responsible for doing things that maybe not quite so bad.

That's why I think it's important to think not just about Rhodes and his own life, but about what that period

of British and colonial history meant.

And one of the things people often say is you have to judge these figures by the standards of their time

that's exactly what we're gonna do Peter isn't it so follow legacy now from

wherever you get your podcasts or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on

Wondery Plus. London, 1621.

All we really understand of the world at large

is one small corner of this British aisle. Of elsewhere, what is out

there beyond the oceans, beyond the forests, up the flowing rivers. Well we've heard

stories of disease, of war, of starvation. Everything elsewhere is blind danger.

But for 56 women, this is about to change.

The Virginia Company of London has put out the call for educated handsome young women

to become wives for the planters of Jamestown colony. Those men will pay for their new wives

with 150 pounds of tobacco, steeply valued at 25 pounds sterling.

...