Bones Tell Tale Of Desperation Among The Starving At Jamestown : The Salt : NPR
Jamestown residents resorted to cannibalism in the winter of 1609-10, after eating the horses, cats and dogs first.
I will frankly admit that I don't know much about this very early period of English colonialism in North America, other than it sometimes strikes me that the colonists were culturally nearly completely unprepared for what they encountered. Almost uniquely, that is. I may be off, but Spanish and French colonists seemed to do better.
Off base? Am I missing something? I get the part about being bottled up in Jamestown by the Indians, but I can't quite grasp who colonists to a seeming wilderness (it wasn't really) could actually starve.
3 comments:
One of the articles I read stated that a boat full of new colonists had just arrived but their second boat loaded with all their staples (ie food) sank. So they became a huge liability going into the winter. And with the Indians they probably did not have any chance to hunt and stock up on provisions. Tough choices and tough place to be.
Didn't they start stealing from the Indians when food got short?
Once the stealing began, all trade stopped and the fighting started. When the fighting started, a bad winter quickly turned into a brutal, horrible winter.
They overestimated their abilities, underestimated the local weather conditions, and underestimated the local's fighting skills.
Very insightful comments.
One thing that Meredith's post reminds me of is that quite a few of these very early English colonial enterprises hit land in early winter. That's often struck me as really bad timing, but the thought was that they'd be ready to plant in the spring. Be that as it may, that put them in a pretty desperate situation, to some degree, right from the onset.
I also think, however, that quite a few colonists, as rural as England was at the time, just weren't prepared at all for North American conditions. So, dependent upon an initial supply line that stretched across the Atlantic, in winter, and use to English farming conditions at best, they weren't really hardy frontiersmen.
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