Cannibalism at Jamestown

On May 1, 2013, forensic evidence confirmed what survivors had reported: Colonists at Jamestown resorted to cannibalism during the winter of 1609-1610, known as the Starving Time. But the colony of Jamestown was troubled from the start.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And as I think
everyone knows at this point, recently news broke that there

(00:22):
is confirmed forensic evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown. Indeed, lots
of people wrote us to make sure we knew we
had heard the news. Everyone at not many many people,
and then many many people also asked us if we
were going to podcast about it, and there is yes. Yeah.
First the answer was I don't think I have anything
to say about that. But then the more people asked,

(00:44):
the more I thought, maybe I should look into this,
Maybe we should take a little time see what this
what this is all about. So we did. Yeah, and
that's what we're talking about today. Yeah, so we'll give
you a little background on Jamestown and kind of how
it came to be that they found them else in
a position where cannibalism was the option that they were
going to need to engage. So James Town was founded

(01:08):
in six seven, and it was the first permanent English
colony in what would become the United States. The Virginia
Company got a charter from James, the first to establish
a colony in the Chesapeake area, and this was actually
a for profit venture. The goal there was to find gold,
to raise silkworms, and to find a water route to Asia.

(01:29):
And the focus on profit actually set the tone on
where the settlers were putting their priorities. So, for example,
given the choice to build a house or chop down
lumber to send back to England, or between digging a
well and searching for the gold, they would choose the latter,
like the profitable enterprise. Right. So, I think people have
an idea that people were sailing from Europe to quote

(01:50):
the New World, to uh seek opportunities or to escape
religious persecution. And while that was the case in some areas,
that's not what was happening in the early days of Jamestown.
Early days of Jamestown were about making money. So the
people who were traveling to Jamestown sailed on three ships.

(02:10):
They were the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery,
and they were under the command of Christopher Newport. These
ships landed on Jamestown Island and established James Fort on
May fourteenth, sixteen o seven. There were no women on
these first three ships. Um, this was really a military
and exploratory settlement, not a town with homes and families

(02:31):
in it. There were no women in Jamestown until late
September of sixteen o eight, when a ship brought all
of two of them. We'll let that settle for a moment.
They wound up on the James River, which is about
sixty miles from the mouth of the Chess of Chesspeake Bay.
And while some accounts say that they chose this location
because the water was deep enough for them to bring

(02:53):
the ships close in to shore, they built a fort
in a more secure location so warships couldn't just sail
up this same channel and fired directly at their fort.
The relationships with Native Americans in the area were strained.
There were times when the colony was basically hobbling along
along with help from nearby tribes, and at other times

(03:15):
the colonists and Native Americans were actively at war with
one another, and some historians really think that this colony
was doomed from the start. Uh There were craftspeople and
laborers aboard some of the ships, but a significant number
of the settled settlers were gentlemen. They weren't used to
manual labor, they weren't expecting to do manual labor, uh,

(03:36):
and the swampy ground in the area was not great
for farming and building. So combined with the ongoing fighting
that was on and off happening with the Algonquin tribe
and the in fighting among the leaders of the colony,
things really were on a downhill slope pretty quickly. Half
of the original settlers were dead within a year. And really,

(03:57):
although the starving time gets a lot of the the attention,
things were meager from the very start, and real problems
started in August of sixteen oh seven, so not many
months after they arrived, when bad water and mosquitoes led
to a wave of illnesses that killed a lot of
the settlers and weakened just about everyone in the colony.

(04:18):
Captain Christopher Newport arrived with two ships of supplies in
early sixteen o eight. But not long after that big
assistance in that big bolstering Jamestown caught fire and it
destroyed most of the provisions in the equipment and the
colony essentially had to start from scratch. Captain John Smith,
who had been named as one of the seven Council
members to run the colony. Eventually took control of it

(04:41):
and he was made president of the colony in September
of sixteen o eight. And he has this sort of
reputation of being the man who saved Jamestown, like he
was really the one that came in and got people's
acts together. But he had been accused of plotting a
mutiny while on the way over from England, so he
had been a late addition to the council. There was
a lot of resistance. Even though he was named as

(05:02):
one of the people in charge, there was a lot
of resistance to actually letting him build that role. And
he was also one of the council's least experienced members.
And as you said, he put rules and discipline into place,
and he really fortified the colony's defenses, and he also
tried to put a stop to some of the laziness
problems they were having. It was pretty rampant in the
colony with um and he set up the rule he

(05:25):
that will not work shall not eat except by sickness.
He be disabled, so he who doesn't work doesn't eat,
just to set up a situation of you have to
do your part if you want to continue to live here.
You can't just fly around and watch other people work
and then still get food. The colony made it through
the winter of sixteen o eight and sixteen o nine

(05:46):
by making increasingly desperate trades with the local Native Americans.
They had planned on trading things like copper and beads
for corn, but as the winter went on and they
started to run out of those things, people were making
increasingly desperate trades. They were trading stuff that was more
and more scarce and important, like their swords, to try

(06:08):
to get food, and in the late summer of sixteen
o nine, a fleet meant to bring supplies and additional
settlers was scattered by a hurricane on the way to Virginia.
One of the ships, the Sea Venture, wound up shipwrecked
in Bermuda, which you can hear about in our previous episode,
The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown. The remainder of the ship's

(06:29):
kind of hobbled into Jamestown to bring what they had
After the storms, many of the people who arrived aboard
this fleet were sick or injured or or dying, and
there wasn't anywhere to house them in the forts, so
they were sent out to bivouac in the corn fields,
and they allegedly ate their way through all the corn

(06:49):
that had been planted within a few days um and
this is really a running theme. Every time ships show
up at Jamestown, they bring more supplies, but they also
bring more mouths defeat and maybe also rats which infested
the corn that had been stored and ate all of it.
And this actually caused john Smith to at one point

(07:10):
sends some of the colonists elsewhere to try to live
on fish and oysters because the corn was gone. It
had either spoiled or been ruined by rats. But what
really happened is they all just fought a lot and
we're slaughtered by the Native Americans. So while john Smith
did seem to hold the colony better than the previous
committee had, as we said before, that committee was really

(07:32):
a lot about in fighting and not about leading things,
he had his share of jealousy and and detractors from
the rest of the colony's leadership, And in October of
sixteen o nine, john Smith actually had to return to
England after being severely burned by an exploding bag of gunpowder.
And the circumstances around that are pretty mysterious. We don't

(07:53):
really know the scoop uh. He was though at this
point on his way out as president of the colony. Anyway,
new orders had arrived from England that Sir Thomas Gates,
who was at that point sitting shipwrecked shipwrecked off of Bermuda,
was going to be the man in charge. After Smith left,
war broke out between the settlers and the Powatan Indians.

(08:15):
These were a collection of tribes who were all tied
to Chief Powhatan and Chief Power to Powetan's goal was
to get rid of all the English settlers. He was
done with them and one of them gone, so they
lay siege to James Fort and stopped trading with settlers elsewhere.
Um The tribes killed livestock along with any settlers who

(08:37):
left the protection of the fort's palisade, and the winter
that followed has become sort of famously known as the
Starving Time. Only about sixty of the settlers, who initially
numbered between two five hundred depending on the source that
you see, survived. This was a really harsh winter. They

(08:57):
ran completely out of food and because of the siege,
they couldn't go for help. Help couldn't really come to
them from elsewhere, and they were all packed inside this fort.
The fort was basically just a triangular palisade that surrounded
a few wattle and daubed thatch roofed buildings. So on
top of there being no food and this constant threat

(09:17):
of attack from the Native American population, they were horribly overcrowded,
so illness was rampant, and it's also possible that their
drinking water was contaminated with arsenic and human waste. So
at that point, Acting Governor George Percy had sent fifty
men to try to trade with the Powatin Indians, and
only sixteen of those fifty returned. Then he sent sent

(09:40):
a ship up the Potomac River to try to trade
with a tribe there. They did manage to secure some corn,
but when they heard reports of cannibalism at the fort,
they decided a better idea than to go back there
was to go home to England, and that's what they did.
So uh completely out of food because they did not
get that corn, the colonists were forced to eat rats, dogs, cats, horses,

(10:04):
and even shoe leather. Apart from the other reports of
cannibalism there was also a report of a man who
had killed his pregnant wife, butchered her and salted her
body to preserve the meat. Governor Percy had him hanged
by his thumbs with his feet weighted until he confessed
to the crime, and then as a punishment, he was
burned alive. So I think this sort of speaks to

(10:27):
what the mental state of the colony was at this point,
that they had burned this man alive for uh, for
killing and salting his pregnant wife. And Percy himself, sixteen
years later wrote about people digging up bodies to eat
them or licking up the blood from their quote their
weak fellows. Uh. So it was an extremely desperate situation.

(10:51):
I think it would be hard for most people to
really imagine living through something like that, right, And so
the news reports that started making their way around in
this ring of weren't really about a new theory about
how the colonists made it through that winter. Uh. It's
more about actual forensic proof of what people already suspected

(11:11):
or maybe just took for granted. And the proof actually
came from work that was being done at the Smithsonian.
So Preservation of Virginia found the skeleton and forensic anthropologist
Douglas Ousley analyzed the remains, and the study was a
joint effort among the Smithsonian, Colonial Williamsburg and Preservation Virginia,

(11:32):
which is a nonprofit that is dedicated to historic preservation.
The bones are a tibia, which is a leg bone,
and part of a human skull, and they were found
in a seventeenth century pile of refuse in July of
The scarbage pile was inside a seller inside of James Fort,
which was being excavated for an archaeological study. The feller

(11:53):
was filled in hundreds of years ago, probably during the
efforts to clean up and rebuild the colony, which were
started by a new governor, Thomas West in sixteen ten
after the starving time was over. And also in the
pile were the bones of butchered animals. Uh they found
other partial human remains in the same area, but these

(12:13):
particular remains that we're talking about had obvious damage that
called for a closer investigation. They were also in the
cellar under a layer of newer artifacts, so you can
kind of imagine that there was the seller people had
been throwing butchered animals into it at some point the
structure above it had broken down and collapsed, and it
became sort of a convenient place for people to just

(12:36):
throw their trash. So there are whole layers of more
recent artifacts over these bones strata in there UH. And
the bones in question are a girl's bones, estimated to
be about age fourteen, and they can tell this from
both the bones themselves and the condition of her teeth.
So she had wisdom teeth and partially developed roots for them,

(12:57):
but they hadn't yet broken through. The growth plates in
her tibia had started to close, which happens around in
your early teen years. UH. And they determined her sex
by the shape of her skull. The team has named
her Jane, and they've taken DNA samples, but it's pretty
unlikely that they'll be able to link her up to
modern relatives. The damage to the skull that they investigated

(13:21):
included four shallow cuts with an attempt to break into
the skull to get to the brain UH, the shattering
of the skull to get to the brain, and marks
from two fine bladed knives that were used to remove
the face and the tongue. They are also cuts along
her tibia and the marks when they look at them

(13:42):
under heavy magnification, are consistent with known cannibalism from other cultures.
So by comparing these cuts two other times when we
know cannibalism was taking place, they look pretty similar. And
if we also compare them to um, the cuts on
the Jane skull too cuts on animal skull alls. Normally,
the butchering that you would see on animal skulls is

(14:04):
much deeper. It's the uh cuts are more forceful, but
with Jane, they're not like that. They're hesitant and kind
of tentative. So the overall analysis is that these cuts
were made by people who were really desperate for food. UM.
On top of not being used to butchering animals. Uh,
you know, there's the obvious taboo element of what's going on,

(14:27):
and that probably is one of the things that led
to the fact that these cuts seemed to be hesitant
and unsure. The combination of not really being familiar with
butchering and the just massive cultural taboo going along with
with what's happening and the cuts also suggests that the
brain and tongue were removed, which, uh, it sounds really
grizzly to the modern ear, I think, but they were

(14:49):
both very common pieces that would be used in recipes
at the time they get for an animal, it would
be the same things that they would be taking right So,
based on other evidence in the layer of the dig
where she was found, as well as some scientific study
of her bones, they think that she arrived in Jamestown
in August of sixteen o nine, probably along with the

(15:09):
damaged fleet that had been scattered by the hurricane, and
researchers used isotopic testing to determine where she came from
and when, and based on the isotopes in her bones,
they determined that she had been eating a European wheat
based diet, whereas the American diet at the time was
based primarily on corn. And based on this evidence, uh

(15:30):
they've determined that she was probably middle to upper class
a young woman born in the coastal plains of southern England,
or she also could have been employed with a middle
to upper class family and consequently was eating the same
food that they would have been eating. The team used
CT scans of all the pieces of her skull to
make a model of what the whole skull would have

(15:51):
looked like before it was damaged. Then a forensic sculptor
created a reconstruction of what she actually would have looked like.
What's not known in all of this is how she
actually died. Accounts from the time described colonists living on
the people who died first rather than just killing them

(16:12):
to eat them, apart from that case of the man
who killed his wife. So uh, presumably Jane died of
some other of some natural cause. We hope she wasn't
killed for me, right right. It does not appear that
there's no evidence at this point to suggest that she
was murdered and then eaten, but that she died in
some other way and then was eaten. So this was

(16:37):
all over the news when it came out. In addition
to it being all over the news, there's a whole
section of the Historic Jamestown site dedicated to her remains
into her story, along with a book and a video
on DVD and Blu ray ready for purchase, and an
exhibit historic Jamestown. So this right out of the gate,
all kinds of stuff to explore about Jane Jane and

(17:00):
her story. Well, because I think you could pretty easily
predict that people would be fascinated and really engaged by
this information based on our our mail, yeah, we and
our Facebook and Twitter and all that after after it
came out, yet people really really interested in it. Um.
The excavation that this came from is an excavation of

(17:21):
the Jamestown Fort site that has been ongoing since Before
that point, people thought that the original fort had washed
into the river like that. It was considered to be
a lost site, and it was discovered in and since
that time archaeologists have discovered the palisade lines, bowl works

(17:41):
for the Cannons, Fellers, Wells burial sites, and more than
a million other artifacts. So analysis will probably still be
ongoing for quite some time, and we may get more
new revelations about Jamestown, yes, and more confirmation of things
people already suspected are new. Uh So, yeah, that is

(18:03):
the story of Jane and the story of this uh
the starving time. In addition to it being bad enough
that people were resorted to cannibalism, it was bad enough
that when the winter was over, the colonists were on
the verge of abandoning the site. And they only didn't
when new bosses showed up and we're like, no, we're
staying here. Here's somewhere, here's somewhere, equipment and more miles. Defee,

(18:27):
that's a lot. That's a lot to go through for
a human, so so yes, and if I'm not mistaken,
you also have listener mail. I have to listener mails.
These are both about our recent episode, The Princess who
Swallowed the Glass Piano. The first is from Laurie. Laurie says,
I listened to your podcast about the lady who thought

(18:47):
she swallowed a glass piano and thought it was fascinating.
I was wondering about one thing. You said that the
delusions occurred in people from the Middle Ages to the
nineteenth century and people just stopped getting this particular delusion
for some read and can a kind of mental illness
just die off or do doctors call it something else? Today?
I really enjoy your podcast and we'll continue to work

(19:08):
my way through the archive, So thank you, Laurie. The
answer to this question is that the around the nineteenth century,
uh psychologists and psychiatrists started changing the way that they
classified mental disorders. We weren't quite to the point of
the diagnostic manuals that exist today, but the the way

(19:29):
that they looked at mental illnesses was a little different,
and so there's no longer a broad category of like
glass delusions, but there are things that people believe that
are not true that are kind of group in under
mental illnesses, under other mental illnesses. So uh, people can
still have glass collusions, they're just categorized differently. Yes, there
there are certainly people still who believe that they're breakable

(19:51):
in one way or another, but that's usually lumped into
some greater diagnosis than just a glass dellusion. Um. The
other that we got is from Molly, and Molly says,
thank you for the research you do and you're wonderfully
insightful podcasts. Upon hearing your Glass Piano episode, I was
reminded of a character from one of my favorite films, Emily.

(20:13):
The character is nicknamed the glass Man. I had never
questioned his history, but your story shed light on his
reclusiveness and his relationship with Emily, a woman who received
no physical affection in her childhood. After feeling that I
had exhausted the secrets and stories of these characters, you
renewed my interest in them. Thank you for teaching me
and helping me make this connection and many others. First

(20:35):
of all, thank you, Molly. I love that movie it's
one of my big favorite at our house. Yeah, it's
one of my favorite movies ever. And I have always
viewed him as having a real condition that does exist
called FOP, which is a disease where your bones don't
solidify correctly. Um, and so your bones are really fragile
and breakable. And it's the same thing that Samuel L.

(20:58):
Jackson's character as an unbreakable uh. And so I've always
thought of that as a real thing, but reading it
as maybe something that's all in his head, I kind
of adds a fun layer to that. I need to
go rewatch it now and think of it that way
instead of thinking it as like a real, actual condition
that he is affected by. So thank you very much, Molly,

(21:21):
and thank you also, Laurie. If you would like to
write to us about this or anything else, you can.
We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class Stuff,
and on Twitter at mt in History. You can find
our tumbler at MSSON history dot tumbler dot com. Plus

(21:42):
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more about the grizzly subject matter of today's episode, you
can go to our website. Put the word cannibalism in
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You can do all that and a whole lot more
at our website, which is how stuff Works dot com.

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