December 12, 2019 • 26 mins
While children are often taught a sanitized version of early American history, the reality of life in a European colony was brutal -- and, at times, fatal. During the winter of 1609 to 1610, the colonists of Jamestown struggled to survive siege, starvation and fractured leadership. As their stores of food ran low, the increasingly desperate colonists began to eat horses, pets, vermin, shoe leather and, eventually, one another. At least, that's the rumor. Join the guys as they separate the fact from fiction in the first part of this two-part episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Holy Moly,
(00:28):
Holy smokes. Here we are. It's ridiculous history. Technically it's
winter here in Atlanta, and I gotta say the winter
is not hitting us that hard yet, right Hi, I'm ben?
Is it the winter of our discontent? It may well be?
Is that Shakespeare Abraham Lincoln who said that? Uh? Shakespeare?
(00:49):
I think Richard the Third as spoken by I know here?
Now here we go, we'll ge Let's get another fun pronunciation,
Gloucester or is it Glouoster g l o U c
E s t r gloud star glass? I believe there
you go? Correct us if we're wrong, I'm null. By
the way, And as you said, Ben, this is ridiculous history.
And today we're talking about cannibals. Right well, no bearing
(01:10):
the lead here, no, I I guess we're just jumping
straight to it. But before we do, there's our super producer,
Casey Pegram in spirit. Casey had to Casey had to
make a run, but he'll be back. We understand this
is La Bouche related business, so we won't ask too
many questions before we get to cannibalism. Let's start with
(01:33):
let's ease into cannibalism through a little bit of US
history or what used to be called the New World.
So we know, we know that a lot of children
growing up in public school were taught this sort of
sanitized version of colonialism, right like the indigenous people, these
(01:55):
European colonists getting together having some Kumbaya moments, and that
was very much not the case. You know, some some turkeys, cornycopia,
all that stuff. They were politely asked to, you know,
get a move on. Now that that's not how how
it went down at all, um. But I'll tell you
another sort of sanitizing uh is the idea that European
(02:17):
settlers had it easy exactly. So this is the thing.
People moving from Europe, from whichever country they were coming from,
to the New World as they would call it, North
and South America found themselves very much in an alien environment.
They were unfamiliar with the ecosystem, they were unfamiliar with
(02:39):
the flora and the fauna, and many times early settlers
were starving. We're talking about resorting to eating um, not rats, dogs,
family pets, even boiling shoe leather to subsist on that,
which is a thing you can do you can't that
(03:00):
would really do that? Would would that actually provides you
some nourishment. I mean, there's a reason you don't see
it as a special at your local restaurant. But yeah,
in a pinch, in a pinch, interested in a very
difficult pinch. Today's story is about Jamestown, Jamestown, Virginia. Now,
of course Jamestown was not the first successful permanent settlement,
(03:25):
uh in what would become the United States. That prize
goes to St. Augustine in Florida, which was founded by
the Spanish in fifteen sixty five. Have you ever been there?
It's pretty cool, it's pretty it's got some history to it. Anyway,
that's a that's a story for another day. Right. Uh So,
let's get the lay of the land. What brought England?
(03:48):
How did they become the driving force in Jamestown's establishment? Right, So,
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, UM, England was
not doing such a hot job when it came to
colonizing America. Spain obviously at first to the party in
that respect, was kind of the main player controlling vast
(04:09):
swaths of this new world. UM, in addition to South America,
Central America, Mexico even and and parts of the Caribbean
that had a settlement in Florida. There the Spanish, um,
we're beginning to also considing kind of what is now
considered the Americans southwest, and the French, who are even
(04:30):
starting to explore Canada. So with the British, you know,
being noticeably behind, they decided they really needed to to
get behind the eight ball here, so they decided to
establish a permanent English colony in North America in the
form of Jamestown, which would have been founded in May
of sixteen oh seven UM just over one hundred settlers.
(04:50):
Um came on three different chips, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed,
and the Discovery, and they settled on a y, very
very narrow, little finger of land in the James River Peninsula.
They built themselves the kind of infrastructure you would think
would be necessities for a small kind of upstart colony,
(05:12):
and things like store houses, forts, sort of fortifying themselves
so they could protect themselves from any attacks, and of
course a church and some small houses. And everything was terrible,
It really really was terrible. Everything was terrible. The settlers
were in a constant state of emaciation. Near starvation. Also, again,
(05:35):
I cannot over emphasize how alien this land was to them.
There were diseases with which they were unfamiliar. You can
read reports about this on Live science dot com and
also on History dot com. Look of the what what
do we say? A hundred and four people arrived aboard
three ships, you know in god Speed Discovery the Susan Constant,
(05:58):
which is like the coolest name of those one d
and four nine months later, only thirty eight people were alive.
And there's some research that says a lot of the
problems and the fatalities can be attributed to contaminated drinking water.
There was human waste in the drink of what even
(06:19):
today sanitation kills millions of people each year. There's a
lack of there's a crazy conspiracy theory. I mean it's
it's it's a little more than the theory at this point,
um though, hasn't been hundreds improven that you know, we
mentioned all of these different countries vying for superiority in
the New World, Spain being first and foremost, controlling so
much of the land. There's a theory that secret agents
(06:39):
of Spain actually poisoned the well at Jamestown with arsenic,
and there were very high but varying levels of arsenic
found in trace amounts in the groundwater near that form.
And that's that's fascinating. You know, you have to wonder
about the ruthlessness imprescience that would take on this Spanish side.
(07:01):
But even if the Spanish Empire had no hand in this,
played no part in it. The timing for the colonists
was also terrible, the worst possible timing. They arrived in
the middle of one of the worst droughts in hundreds
of years. So even if they were used to hard
agricultural work, the hard work of farming and plowing and harvesting,
(07:26):
they would have had a tough time. Notice I said,
even if they were, they were very unfamiliar with this.
They were dependent upon supplies from other boats arriving from Europe,
as well as any trade they could conduct with the
people who were already living there, the first nations, the
(07:47):
indigenous people of the land. And they did not spoiler. Uh,
they did not do a great job of keeping those
diplomatic channels open. By the winter of sixteen o nine,
which was just like what two years later. Uh, they
had already kind of irreparably damaged their relations with members
(08:10):
of the local indigenous community, and there were still being
haunted by drought. Uh. They were still, as you said,
just drinking our snic in the water along with human waste,
and the ship that was supposed to feed them was
lost in the Atlantic, real perfect storm. So the from
(08:35):
sixteen o nine to sixteen ten as a period referred
to in the history on some of the records as
the starving time. The leadership of the colony was in
absolute disarray, and the Powatan Indians, because of that poorly
cultivated relationship, killed two of every three colonists at at
(08:57):
the fourt there. So it was just a salute hell
on Earth. The trade relations they had with the tribes
of the Virginia Indians was also not very good, so
they really had no recourse at all without any outside assistance. Yeah,
for the first two years sixteen or seven to sixteen
(09:19):
o nine, Captain John Smith was able to trade European
manufactured goods for corn. This would have been the leader
of the colony, but he also was a real pill
and the tribal communities did not care for this. So
the Virginia Company knew that people were running short of food.
(09:40):
They sent a fleet of nine ships to the colony
in July sixteen o nine. They bought enough supplies to
last through the winter. They also brought new colonists, which
I guess is sort of replacing the population because so
many people had died or were died a hurricane came.
That's not a quote from Hamilton's that's the real thing.
(10:02):
The fleet got damaged the c venture which we mentioned
or alluded to earlier. The largest ship was shipwrecked on Bermuda,
and it was carrying a bulk of supplies and also
a lot of three prominent leaders. By mid August, some
of these nine ships arrived at Jamestown, and although they
(10:23):
lost a ton of supplies, guess what, they didn't lose
three d colonists. So now there are three hundred more
mouths two feet just adding insults and injury there. So
at this point our boy Captain John Um really did himself,
did a number on himself when a mysterious gunpowder explosion
(10:46):
injured him quite significantly, and he had to return to
England in October um and he never would return. George
Percy became the new president of the Jamestown council and
really just stepped into an absolute mess. As as as
we know, Um, there was just this the food supply
(11:07):
was completely depleted. There were these very cantanker's relationship with
the native people. The chief of the Powhatan had actually
um instructed his warriors to attack any livestock or members
of the colony who were spotted outside of the fort um.
(11:28):
So it was just an absolute untenable situation. They had
targets on their backs. Um disease was running rampant um.
The numbers were dwindling, and now, as you mentioned Ben,
now that their numbers were increased way beyond what their
supplies could sustain. So it was really really just getting
(11:48):
absolutely dire and they were forced to do some serious
rationing of the supplies they did have, right, and we
have both statements from Percy at the time as well
as statements in retrospect at the time. He said, look,
if we give everybody just half a can of meal
(12:10):
a day, then maybe we can make it halfway through winter.
And he said, to satisfy our cruel hunger, we have
to You know, colonists have gone in the woods looking
for serpents, snakes, wild unknown roots. But these people are
cut off and slain by this by what he called
(12:30):
the salvages. Add to this disease, right, because starvation weakens
your immune system, so people start falling prey to typhoid,
to dysentery. Colonists each shoe leather. They kill the horses
that were brought from England during the summer, and Percy
would later describe this in the following way, having fed
(12:51):
upon now horses and dalla beast as long as they lasted,
we are glad to make shift with vermin as, dogs, cats,
rats and mice as to eat boot shoes or any
other leather. So what this is showing us is a unsustainable,
untenable situation, as you mentioned earlier, Noll, it's also showing
(13:14):
us an escalation and increasing desperation. And at this point
we want to say, for our more sensitive listeners, we
are including some graphic material here because of course, eventually,
just like the starvation in the DPRK in the nineties,
(13:37):
eventually the people ran out of dogs and cats and
mice and leather and they had one thing left. Because
let's not forget, I mean, this was just an absolute
frozen wasteland at this point I mean, these creatures would
have had just as hard a time surviving, especially when
they became, you know, the food source for these starving colonists.
(13:59):
So yeah, what is left ben? I mean, you know,
they only have a finite amount of things that they
can turn to, and things are just getting desperate, and
they're so very isolated, and they make that choice that
we read about in fiction, you know, um, that the
idea that you're so desperate that you turn to your
(14:21):
fellow man and woman um to sustain you. And you
have to start making those choices as to who gets
to live and who has to die, and and for
the benefit of those who are maybe more healthy and
stronger who could carry on. Yeah, we have we have
one recording from Captain Smith that we'll just read the
(14:44):
following two. You one amongst the rest did kill his wife,
powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it
was known, for which he was executed as he well deserved.
That's a relief that part was us And he continues,
he says, now, whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonadoed,
which was their word for barbecue, I know not, but
(15:06):
of such a dish as powdered wife I had never
heard of. That's from mental floss. And that sounds almost fictitious,
doesn't it. It really does. I mean, that is one
of the most maccab things I've ever heard, especially when you,
you know, connected up with the fact that that was
actually a genuine account. And the thing is, we we
have had these accounts of cannibalism in James Town for
(15:28):
a long time, but only recently did we really get
the grizzly you know, proof um that a lot of
this stuff did take place. And when we'll get to that,
but here's another account from George Percy. Um. He wrote
this in nine after this type of behavior had begun,
And it's a little and in the Old English I
guess type style, um, well, not Old English, I don't know,
(15:49):
just kind of a dated dialect, but I'm gonna do
my best to read it. Um. And now famine beginning
to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing
was spared to maintain life, and to do those things
that seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out
of graves and to eat them. And some have licked
(16:09):
up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows.
Oh bleak, it's heavy. The thing is, we don't just
have Percy and Smith writing about this. There are multiple
other accounts that you can find today that refer to
(16:33):
cannibalism at Jamestown during this time. Now, when we talk
about cannibalism, if anyone's interested in the grizzly story of this,
we recommend the cannibalism episode of Stuff they Don't Want
You to Know, which UH analyzes the reports of cannibalism,
analyzes the types of cannibalism without going too far into
(16:57):
the grizzly morbid weeds here want to establish that this
is a type of cannibalism known as survival cannibalism. It's
not ritualized. It's not a ceremonial thing to commune with
ancestors or to reinforce any spiritual belief. This is, as
Percy said, a matter of survival. But for a long time,
(17:21):
as I believe you alluded to earlier, noal we had
no solid proof. We just had multiple accounts of people
saying that someone else did it, you know what I mean.
We didn't have anybody writing something along the lines of
a first person experience with cannibalism, just that you know,
this person killed their wife. These other people are victimizing
(17:44):
the weak. In earlier excavations at the Jamestown site, which
has been extensively analyzed, there were bodies of dogs and
horses and cats that they could determine were consumed during
this went or the starving times sixteen o nine to
sixteen ten. But it wasn't until August of two thousand
(18:06):
and twelve that archaeologists working for the Preservation Virginia Jamestown
Rediscovery Project found some fragments. They found skeleton fragments belonging
to a girl who was around probably around the age
of fourteen when she died. She was buried in a
trash filled cellar inside the Jamestown Fort. And you know,
(18:30):
like you said earlier, the Jamestown Fort is on the
on Jamestown Island. It's pretty small. It's twenty two and
a half acres. After they were examining these bones, a
physical anthropologists working for the Smithsonian named Douglas Owsley noticed something.
He said, you know, the girls remains, her skull, her jaw,
(18:53):
leg bone. They bore some disturbing marks. They had marks
of um marks of a man made cutting instrument like butchery,
essentially like hacking from the outside that would have been
so violent. Um, picturing the scene and scraping off of
the meat, which would have left additional you know, traumas
(19:17):
too to the bones. Yeah. So according to Ousley, we
can glean a bit about the situation and context from
reading the remains here. Osley says that the chops to
the forehead were tentative and incomplete, which to him indicates
(19:41):
that there was some hesitance there. But then the body
was turned over and there were multiple strikes to the
back of the head, and then there was a wound
made to the left temple, which was most likely the
point of these blows was to was to open the
(20:03):
skull and retrieve the brain for consumption. Yeah. Um, And
this is something that's still a topic of pretty hot
debate among historians. Osley told the Smithsonian Uh that given
that these bones were found in a trash pit um
all cut and chopped up, he says, to quote him,
(20:24):
it's clear that this body was dismembered for consumption. So
while everything isn't known about what would have gone into
this process, it's a lot of kind of post mortem
reverse engineering detective work. Um, we don't know who the
girl was exactly. They're calling her Jane Um. Also not
(20:46):
sure whether she was murdered. Again, my my thought is
maybe some of these folks might have been sickly and
dying and they just got that blow to the back
of the head to take them out, or possibly she
could have died of natural causes. Whether there this is
an individual acting alone who would have done this butchery,
(21:06):
or whether it was something that was a little more organized,
that's not clear either, right, because it goes back to uh,
social dynamics when we're talking about survival cannibalism. You know,
this debate continues. We know, however, that the attacks on
the skull were almost certainly meant just to be a
(21:31):
way of accessing the brain or the flesh for consumption.
It wasn't necessarily murder just for murder's sake, because at
the time, brain matter from other animals was considered a delicacy,
and that's why the settlers may have gone straight forward
this poor child's head. And one thing that is hopefully
(21:55):
reassuring maybe a bit of a cold comfort, is that
we know with a good degree of certitude that the
child was dead before they started conducting cannibalism, because there
were no indications of a struggle, you know what I mean,
no wounds uh to her body that would show she
(22:18):
was defending herself. They also, however, know that whoever was
doing this, uh, this was probably their first rodeo, they
did not appear to be experienced in any kind of
butchering or dressing of an animal. Uh. And like you said, no,
(22:39):
it's it's clear that this body was destroyed for one thing.
But we don't know very much about this victim. We
know that we're calling this person Jane, but we don't
know very much about Jane. We can hypothesize a bit.
We're theorized when we ask ourselves what series of terrible
(23:00):
events could have led to this grizzly fate. So, as
we said, in sixteen o nine, there was a second
fleet of ships leaving Plymouth. They had reinforcements. Seven of
the nine ships survived the hurricane landed Jamestown in mid August.
They had those three under colonists. They had lost their
biggest supply ships. They believe that this child had arrived
(23:25):
on one of those seven surviving ships. And it looks
like we should pause here. You know that's right, folks,
this is a two parter. Yeah. I mean, look, you know,
say what you will about two parts and that they're
an afterthought. That's not entirely true. It might be a
little bit true, but you know what, it helps us sects.
We do two a week and it's the holiday time,
(23:46):
and it said, well, you know, I can't speak for
anyone but myself. It doesn't to me. It feels more
like an opportunity for us to go longer because we
get to this point where we want to tell the
whole story. We want to give you more facts, more context,
want to dive in. But sometimes it's too much for
one episode, you know. So I so we hope that
(24:07):
you enjoy part one. Please tune in to part two.
Please please please tune into part two. We promise that
we have a nice ending at the end. I know,
I know this one is really getting a little dark,
but it does. There is there is a bit of
a silver lining coming up for you. Um. You can
join the conversation about this part and subsequent parts in
(24:27):
any other part or episode that we do on Ridiculous
History and our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians, where you can
post memes. Real good group of folks there to engage with.
We pop on there pretty regularly and even young Quizzles himself,
Jonathan Strickland, the quister uh is a bit of a
lurker there, and he might even insult you if you
if you want him to, or if you don't. You know,
(24:48):
he's a hot take Strickland, as we called. You can
also find your roll as individuals on Instagram. I'm also
on Twitter Instagram Appen Bullen on Twitter at ben bullin
hs W. You can find me exclusively on Instagram at
how Now Nolan Brown. Big thanks to Alex Williams who
composed our theme, Gabe Louisier, our fabulous research associate, Christopher
(25:13):
Hasciots Here in spirit, Jonathan Strickland, that devious quister um
also here in spirit sort of in the form of
like a weird, funky miasma that is sort of fills
up the corners of the podcast shipping containing I mean Jonathan, yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, the Quister of course. Big thanks too,
super producer Casey Begram, Thanks to Eve's Jeff Code, and
(25:36):
thanks to all of the fantastic, hard working researchers who
are helping us learn more about what actually happened in
this wide old world before we arrived. I'll see you
next time. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
(26:01):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Holy Moly,
(00:28):
Holy smokes. Here we are. It's ridiculous history. Technically it's
winter here in Atlanta, and I gotta say the winter
is not hitting us that hard yet, right Hi, I'm ben?
Is it the winter of our discontent? It may well be?
Is that Shakespeare Abraham Lincoln who said that? Uh? Shakespeare?
(00:49):
I think Richard the Third as spoken by I know here?
Now here we go, we'll ge Let's get another fun pronunciation,
Gloucester or is it Glouoster g l o U c
E s t r gloud star glass? I believe there
you go? Correct us if we're wrong, I'm null. By
the way, And as you said, Ben, this is ridiculous history.
And today we're talking about cannibals. Right well, no bearing
(01:10):
the lead here, no, I I guess we're just jumping
straight to it. But before we do, there's our super producer,
Casey Pegram in spirit. Casey had to Casey had to
make a run, but he'll be back. We understand this
is La Bouche related business, so we won't ask too
many questions before we get to cannibalism. Let's start with
(01:33):
let's ease into cannibalism through a little bit of US
history or what used to be called the New World.
So we know, we know that a lot of children
growing up in public school were taught this sort of
sanitized version of colonialism, right like the indigenous people, these
(01:55):
European colonists getting together having some Kumbaya moments, and that
was very much not the case. You know, some some turkeys, cornycopia,
all that stuff. They were politely asked to, you know,
get a move on. Now that that's not how how
it went down at all, um. But I'll tell you
another sort of sanitizing uh is the idea that European
(02:17):
settlers had it easy exactly. So this is the thing.
People moving from Europe, from whichever country they were coming from,
to the New World as they would call it, North
and South America found themselves very much in an alien environment.
They were unfamiliar with the ecosystem, they were unfamiliar with
(02:39):
the flora and the fauna, and many times early settlers
were starving. We're talking about resorting to eating um, not rats, dogs,
family pets, even boiling shoe leather to subsist on that,
which is a thing you can do you can't that
(03:00):
would really do that? Would would that actually provides you
some nourishment. I mean, there's a reason you don't see
it as a special at your local restaurant. But yeah,
in a pinch, in a pinch, interested in a very
difficult pinch. Today's story is about Jamestown, Jamestown, Virginia. Now,
of course Jamestown was not the first successful permanent settlement,
(03:25):
uh in what would become the United States. That prize
goes to St. Augustine in Florida, which was founded by
the Spanish in fifteen sixty five. Have you ever been there?
It's pretty cool, it's pretty it's got some history to it. Anyway,
that's a that's a story for another day. Right. Uh So,
let's get the lay of the land. What brought England?
(03:48):
How did they become the driving force in Jamestown's establishment? Right, So,
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, UM, England was
not doing such a hot job when it came to
colonizing America. Spain obviously at first to the party in
that respect, was kind of the main player controlling vast
(04:09):
swaths of this new world. UM, in addition to South America,
Central America, Mexico even and and parts of the Caribbean
that had a settlement in Florida. There the Spanish, um,
we're beginning to also considing kind of what is now
considered the Americans southwest, and the French, who are even
(04:30):
starting to explore Canada. So with the British, you know,
being noticeably behind, they decided they really needed to to
get behind the eight ball here, so they decided to
establish a permanent English colony in North America in the
form of Jamestown, which would have been founded in May
of sixteen oh seven UM just over one hundred settlers.
(04:50):
Um came on three different chips, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed,
and the Discovery, and they settled on a y, very
very narrow, little finger of land in the James River Peninsula.
They built themselves the kind of infrastructure you would think
would be necessities for a small kind of upstart colony,
(05:12):
and things like store houses, forts, sort of fortifying themselves
so they could protect themselves from any attacks, and of
course a church and some small houses. And everything was terrible,
It really really was terrible. Everything was terrible. The settlers
were in a constant state of emaciation. Near starvation. Also, again,
(05:35):
I cannot over emphasize how alien this land was to them.
There were diseases with which they were unfamiliar. You can
read reports about this on Live science dot com and
also on History dot com. Look of the what what
do we say? A hundred and four people arrived aboard
three ships, you know in god Speed Discovery the Susan Constant,
(05:58):
which is like the coolest name of those one d
and four nine months later, only thirty eight people were alive.
And there's some research that says a lot of the
problems and the fatalities can be attributed to contaminated drinking water.
There was human waste in the drink of what even
(06:19):
today sanitation kills millions of people each year. There's a
lack of there's a crazy conspiracy theory. I mean it's
it's it's a little more than the theory at this point,
um though, hasn't been hundreds improven that you know, we
mentioned all of these different countries vying for superiority in
the New World, Spain being first and foremost, controlling so
much of the land. There's a theory that secret agents
(06:39):
of Spain actually poisoned the well at Jamestown with arsenic,
and there were very high but varying levels of arsenic
found in trace amounts in the groundwater near that form.
And that's that's fascinating. You know, you have to wonder
about the ruthlessness imprescience that would take on this Spanish side.
(07:01):
But even if the Spanish Empire had no hand in this,
played no part in it. The timing for the colonists
was also terrible, the worst possible timing. They arrived in
the middle of one of the worst droughts in hundreds
of years. So even if they were used to hard
agricultural work, the hard work of farming and plowing and harvesting,
(07:26):
they would have had a tough time. Notice I said,
even if they were, they were very unfamiliar with this.
They were dependent upon supplies from other boats arriving from Europe,
as well as any trade they could conduct with the
people who were already living there, the first nations, the
(07:47):
indigenous people of the land. And they did not spoiler. Uh,
they did not do a great job of keeping those
diplomatic channels open. By the winter of sixteen o nine,
which was just like what two years later. Uh, they
had already kind of irreparably damaged their relations with members
(08:10):
of the local indigenous community, and there were still being
haunted by drought. Uh. They were still, as you said,
just drinking our snic in the water along with human waste,
and the ship that was supposed to feed them was
lost in the Atlantic, real perfect storm. So the from
(08:35):
sixteen o nine to sixteen ten as a period referred
to in the history on some of the records as
the starving time. The leadership of the colony was in
absolute disarray, and the Powatan Indians, because of that poorly
cultivated relationship, killed two of every three colonists at at
(08:57):
the fourt there. So it was just a salute hell
on Earth. The trade relations they had with the tribes
of the Virginia Indians was also not very good, so
they really had no recourse at all without any outside assistance. Yeah,
for the first two years sixteen or seven to sixteen
(09:19):
o nine, Captain John Smith was able to trade European
manufactured goods for corn. This would have been the leader
of the colony, but he also was a real pill
and the tribal communities did not care for this. So
the Virginia Company knew that people were running short of food.
(09:40):
They sent a fleet of nine ships to the colony
in July sixteen o nine. They bought enough supplies to
last through the winter. They also brought new colonists, which
I guess is sort of replacing the population because so
many people had died or were died a hurricane came.
That's not a quote from Hamilton's that's the real thing.
(10:02):
The fleet got damaged the c venture which we mentioned
or alluded to earlier. The largest ship was shipwrecked on Bermuda,
and it was carrying a bulk of supplies and also
a lot of three prominent leaders. By mid August, some
of these nine ships arrived at Jamestown, and although they
(10:23):
lost a ton of supplies, guess what, they didn't lose
three d colonists. So now there are three hundred more
mouths two feet just adding insults and injury there. So
at this point our boy Captain John Um really did himself,
did a number on himself when a mysterious gunpowder explosion
(10:46):
injured him quite significantly, and he had to return to
England in October um and he never would return. George
Percy became the new president of the Jamestown council and
really just stepped into an absolute mess. As as as
we know, Um, there was just this the food supply
(11:07):
was completely depleted. There were these very cantanker's relationship with
the native people. The chief of the Powhatan had actually
um instructed his warriors to attack any livestock or members
of the colony who were spotted outside of the fort um.
(11:28):
So it was just an absolute untenable situation. They had
targets on their backs. Um disease was running rampant um.
The numbers were dwindling, and now, as you mentioned Ben,
now that their numbers were increased way beyond what their
supplies could sustain. So it was really really just getting
(11:48):
absolutely dire and they were forced to do some serious
rationing of the supplies they did have, right, and we
have both statements from Percy at the time as well
as statements in retrospect at the time. He said, look,
if we give everybody just half a can of meal
(12:10):
a day, then maybe we can make it halfway through winter.
And he said, to satisfy our cruel hunger, we have
to You know, colonists have gone in the woods looking
for serpents, snakes, wild unknown roots. But these people are
cut off and slain by this by what he called
(12:30):
the salvages. Add to this disease, right, because starvation weakens
your immune system, so people start falling prey to typhoid,
to dysentery. Colonists each shoe leather. They kill the horses
that were brought from England during the summer, and Percy
would later describe this in the following way, having fed
(12:51):
upon now horses and dalla beast as long as they lasted,
we are glad to make shift with vermin as, dogs, cats,
rats and mice as to eat boot shoes or any
other leather. So what this is showing us is a unsustainable,
untenable situation, as you mentioned earlier, Noll, it's also showing
(13:14):
us an escalation and increasing desperation. And at this point
we want to say, for our more sensitive listeners, we
are including some graphic material here because of course, eventually,
just like the starvation in the DPRK in the nineties,
(13:37):
eventually the people ran out of dogs and cats and
mice and leather and they had one thing left. Because
let's not forget, I mean, this was just an absolute
frozen wasteland at this point I mean, these creatures would
have had just as hard a time surviving, especially when
they became, you know, the food source for these starving colonists.
(13:59):
So yeah, what is left ben? I mean, you know,
they only have a finite amount of things that they
can turn to, and things are just getting desperate, and
they're so very isolated, and they make that choice that
we read about in fiction, you know, um, that the
idea that you're so desperate that you turn to your
(14:21):
fellow man and woman um to sustain you. And you
have to start making those choices as to who gets
to live and who has to die, and and for
the benefit of those who are maybe more healthy and
stronger who could carry on. Yeah, we have we have
one recording from Captain Smith that we'll just read the
(14:44):
following two. You one amongst the rest did kill his wife,
powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it
was known, for which he was executed as he well deserved.
That's a relief that part was us And he continues,
he says, now, whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonadoed,
which was their word for barbecue, I know not, but
(15:06):
of such a dish as powdered wife I had never
heard of. That's from mental floss. And that sounds almost fictitious,
doesn't it. It really does. I mean, that is one
of the most maccab things I've ever heard, especially when you,
you know, connected up with the fact that that was
actually a genuine account. And the thing is, we we
have had these accounts of cannibalism in James Town for
(15:28):
a long time, but only recently did we really get
the grizzly you know, proof um that a lot of
this stuff did take place. And when we'll get to that,
but here's another account from George Percy. Um. He wrote
this in nine after this type of behavior had begun,
And it's a little and in the Old English I
guess type style, um, well, not Old English, I don't know,
(15:49):
just kind of a dated dialect, but I'm gonna do
my best to read it. Um. And now famine beginning
to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing
was spared to maintain life, and to do those things
that seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out
of graves and to eat them. And some have licked
(16:09):
up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows.
Oh bleak, it's heavy. The thing is, we don't just
have Percy and Smith writing about this. There are multiple
other accounts that you can find today that refer to
(16:33):
cannibalism at Jamestown during this time. Now, when we talk
about cannibalism, if anyone's interested in the grizzly story of this,
we recommend the cannibalism episode of Stuff they Don't Want
You to Know, which UH analyzes the reports of cannibalism,
analyzes the types of cannibalism without going too far into
(16:57):
the grizzly morbid weeds here want to establish that this
is a type of cannibalism known as survival cannibalism. It's
not ritualized. It's not a ceremonial thing to commune with
ancestors or to reinforce any spiritual belief. This is, as
Percy said, a matter of survival. But for a long time,
(17:21):
as I believe you alluded to earlier, noal we had
no solid proof. We just had multiple accounts of people
saying that someone else did it, you know what I mean.
We didn't have anybody writing something along the lines of
a first person experience with cannibalism, just that you know,
this person killed their wife. These other people are victimizing
(17:44):
the weak. In earlier excavations at the Jamestown site, which
has been extensively analyzed, there were bodies of dogs and
horses and cats that they could determine were consumed during
this went or the starving times sixteen o nine to
sixteen ten. But it wasn't until August of two thousand
(18:06):
and twelve that archaeologists working for the Preservation Virginia Jamestown
Rediscovery Project found some fragments. They found skeleton fragments belonging
to a girl who was around probably around the age
of fourteen when she died. She was buried in a
trash filled cellar inside the Jamestown Fort. And you know,
(18:30):
like you said earlier, the Jamestown Fort is on the
on Jamestown Island. It's pretty small. It's twenty two and
a half acres. After they were examining these bones, a
physical anthropologists working for the Smithsonian named Douglas Owsley noticed something.
He said, you know, the girls remains, her skull, her jaw,
(18:53):
leg bone. They bore some disturbing marks. They had marks
of um marks of a man made cutting instrument like butchery,
essentially like hacking from the outside that would have been
so violent. Um, picturing the scene and scraping off of
the meat, which would have left additional you know, traumas
(19:17):
too to the bones. Yeah. So according to Ousley, we
can glean a bit about the situation and context from
reading the remains here. Osley says that the chops to
the forehead were tentative and incomplete, which to him indicates
(19:41):
that there was some hesitance there. But then the body
was turned over and there were multiple strikes to the
back of the head, and then there was a wound
made to the left temple, which was most likely the
point of these blows was to was to open the
(20:03):
skull and retrieve the brain for consumption. Yeah. Um, And
this is something that's still a topic of pretty hot
debate among historians. Osley told the Smithsonian Uh that given
that these bones were found in a trash pit um
all cut and chopped up, he says, to quote him,
(20:24):
it's clear that this body was dismembered for consumption. So
while everything isn't known about what would have gone into
this process, it's a lot of kind of post mortem
reverse engineering detective work. Um, we don't know who the
girl was exactly. They're calling her Jane Um. Also not
(20:46):
sure whether she was murdered. Again, my my thought is
maybe some of these folks might have been sickly and
dying and they just got that blow to the back
of the head to take them out, or possibly she
could have died of natural causes. Whether there this is
an individual acting alone who would have done this butchery,
(21:06):
or whether it was something that was a little more organized,
that's not clear either, right, because it goes back to uh,
social dynamics when we're talking about survival cannibalism. You know,
this debate continues. We know, however, that the attacks on
the skull were almost certainly meant just to be a
(21:31):
way of accessing the brain or the flesh for consumption.
It wasn't necessarily murder just for murder's sake, because at
the time, brain matter from other animals was considered a delicacy,
and that's why the settlers may have gone straight forward
this poor child's head. And one thing that is hopefully
(21:55):
reassuring maybe a bit of a cold comfort, is that
we know with a good degree of certitude that the
child was dead before they started conducting cannibalism, because there
were no indications of a struggle, you know what I mean,
no wounds uh to her body that would show she
(22:18):
was defending herself. They also, however, know that whoever was
doing this, uh, this was probably their first rodeo, they
did not appear to be experienced in any kind of
butchering or dressing of an animal. Uh. And like you said, no,
(22:39):
it's it's clear that this body was destroyed for one thing.
But we don't know very much about this victim. We
know that we're calling this person Jane, but we don't
know very much about Jane. We can hypothesize a bit.
We're theorized when we ask ourselves what series of terrible
(23:00):
events could have led to this grizzly fate. So, as
we said, in sixteen o nine, there was a second
fleet of ships leaving Plymouth. They had reinforcements. Seven of
the nine ships survived the hurricane landed Jamestown in mid August.
They had those three under colonists. They had lost their
biggest supply ships. They believe that this child had arrived
(23:25):
on one of those seven surviving ships. And it looks
like we should pause here. You know that's right, folks,
this is a two parter. Yeah. I mean, look, you know,
say what you will about two parts and that they're
an afterthought. That's not entirely true. It might be a
little bit true, but you know what, it helps us sects.
We do two a week and it's the holiday time,
(23:46):
and it said, well, you know, I can't speak for
anyone but myself. It doesn't to me. It feels more
like an opportunity for us to go longer because we
get to this point where we want to tell the
whole story. We want to give you more facts, more context,
want to dive in. But sometimes it's too much for
one episode, you know. So I so we hope that
(24:07):
you enjoy part one. Please tune in to part two.
Please please please tune into part two. We promise that
we have a nice ending at the end. I know,
I know this one is really getting a little dark,
but it does. There is there is a bit of
a silver lining coming up for you. Um. You can
join the conversation about this part and subsequent parts in
(24:27):
any other part or episode that we do on Ridiculous
History and our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians, where you can
post memes. Real good group of folks there to engage with.
We pop on there pretty regularly and even young Quizzles himself,
Jonathan Strickland, the quister uh is a bit of a
lurker there, and he might even insult you if you
if you want him to, or if you don't. You know,
(24:48):
he's a hot take Strickland, as we called. You can
also find your roll as individuals on Instagram. I'm also
on Twitter Instagram Appen Bullen on Twitter at ben bullin
hs W. You can find me exclusively on Instagram at
how Now Nolan Brown. Big thanks to Alex Williams who
composed our theme, Gabe Louisier, our fabulous research associate, Christopher
(25:13):
Hasciots Here in spirit, Jonathan Strickland, that devious quister um
also here in spirit sort of in the form of
like a weird, funky miasma that is sort of fills
up the corners of the podcast shipping containing I mean Jonathan, yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, the Quister of course. Big thanks too,
super producer Casey Begram, Thanks to Eve's Jeff Code, and
(25:36):
thanks to all of the fantastic, hard working researchers who
are helping us learn more about what actually happened in
this wide old world before we arrived. I'll see you
next time. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
(26:01):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
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