James Horn is the vice president for research and historical interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and one of the scholars involved in the recent discovery of Jane’s remains. Horn sets the scene in his editorial:

"....We know little about the identity of the young woman whose remains were recently discovered at Jamestown, though the investigative team — of which I am part — calls her Jane. We know that she was one of 300 battered and hungry settlers who arrived in the colony in mid-August 1609, two years after it was founded, aboard one of half a dozen ships that had limped into Jamestown after being caught at sea in a hurricane. The fleet had been scattered, the colony’s leaders shipwrecked on Bermuda, provisions brought from England ruined, and settlers injured.

"To make matters worse, the colony was wholly unprepared to support them. From the very beginnings of the Virginia colony, the English had struggled to feed themselves, relying instead on trading for corn with local Indian peoples or taking food by force. By the summer of 1609, the Indians were no longer willing to supply the increasing numbers of colonists with food, and by October a full-scale war erupted. Indian warriors sealed off Jamestown Island, trapping hundreds of men, women and children within the palisade of the fort on starvation rations with little hope of relief from outside.

"....To satisfy their cruel hunger, some colonists went into the woods in search of snakes and wild roots, where they were killed by the waiting warriors. In desperation, those left behind devoured their horses, dogs, cats, rats and mice, and when these ran out even their boot leather. But worse was to come.

"....As hunger became etched “ghastly and pale in every face,” Percy recalled, nothing “was spared to maintain Life.” Starving settlers dug up corpses out of graves and ate them. Some colonists, who died in their beds or were killed seeking food beyond the palisade, were taken up and eaten by those who found their bodies. Sometime during the winter, 14-year-old Jane died, was eaten and then discarded in a trash pit. The famished looked hungrily on those alive who still had some meat on their bones. One settler murdered his pregnant wife “as she slept on his bosom,” then “ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food,” for which “barbarous” and unnatural act he was tortured to extract a confession and summarily executed.

"By the end of the siege, in May 1610, the fort had taken on the appearance of a charnel house. Empty houses had been torn down for firewood, the church was ruined and abandoned, and the remains of bodies and trash lay everywhere. Only 60 of the original 300 settlers were alive, and they were so famished they resembled skeletons.

"Jane’s fate brings into vivid relief one of the darkest periods in Virginia’s early history. But it also reveals the enormous challenges that Europeans faced and the sacrifices they made in establishing colonies in the New World. During the early phases of colonization, far more colonies failed than succeeded. Lost colonies, whether Spanish, French or English, rarely lasted more than a year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/opinion/consuming-colonists.html?hp 

William
www.milaminvirginia.com 

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html