December 17, 2019 • 21 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 second 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. Ye,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so
much for tuning in. I often say welcome back to
the show, but in this case, not to quote Fox News.
Now more than ever it applies. My name is Ben,
and this is part two of a series. My name
is known. We are joining part two of the Jamestown
cannibal epidemic, already in progress. The new arrivals were not
(00:51):
particularly helpful. The cruise of the ship's thought, why should
we feed you? We just have enough food for ourselves, right,
I mean we talked about earlier in the episode. I
mean this literally would have been a liability. It was,
you know, I don't understand what they were thinking. I
guess they weren't. It was just an another active desperation UM.
But no, they their their supplies were already depleted. They
were going through the worst drought in eight hundred years,
(01:15):
and the crops that they had been able to grow
um were barely in it to few people that were
already there, let alone an additional three hundred mouths. So
folks were hungry, angry, and life was just getting worse
and worse every day UM than we had, of course
the starving time that would have arrived. So when you
look at the fragments of Jane Skull, this is a
(01:37):
conjecture from a mental Flaws article. Early Jamestown colonists were cannibals. Apparently.
UM researchers found a night was called a nitrogen profile
UM and enriched nitrogen profile that showed that it was
It was basically they were able to kind of track
her history of nourishment and it showed that she was
(01:58):
at one point well perished and had a very protein
rich diet UM, which would have indicated that she came
from a higher class UH and likely came over with
a large group UM in search of a new life
in this new world, not realizing I guess what they
were going into. The communication must have been incredibly, incredibly difficult,
(02:21):
if not impossible. They wouldn't have known what conditions they
were going into, right, Yeah, they would have had UM,
they would they would have had some sense that the
colony was in trouble, but maybe not a sense of
the degree of trouble that they had found themselves in.
So Jane most likely went through an intense trauma because
(02:44):
she had been living an okay life, and now you
know she and her parents or her relatives, her caretakers
who were probably there were having to fight the existing
colonists to preserve what food they had and then also
eating their livestock. This, unfortunately jibes with the contemporaneous accounts
(03:07):
that describe corpses being dug up or people who had
just died being butchered. And what's interesting is they found
this one body, and this is pretty disturbing stuff. Now
that we see there is one body as clear proof
of posthumous cannibalism, we know that there's a lot of
(03:32):
sand to these other reports of multiple acts of cannibalism,
which means that the next question is where are the
rest of those corpses right now? The plan is to
display james remains as well as a reconstruction of what
she looked like during her life in Jamestown, and archaeologists
(03:55):
are planning to continue to investigate the last days of
her life. I found it's interesting. I found this BBC
article that has, you know, proof Jamestown settlers turned to cannibalism,
and they note something that is just an additional disturbing
twist here. Whomever butchered this child's body was We know
(04:19):
they weren't skilled, so they weren't a butcher by trade.
But we also know this person who committed this act
was likely a woman based on the statistics the majority
of the fort's inhabitants were women. Really. Yeah, so it
wasn't just some you know, creepy grave robbing dude on
the edge of town. So we can't we can't end there, right,
(04:42):
that's a terrible note to end on what happened to
the colonists who survived after this starving time? Yeah, there
was another another expedition that set out, the Sea Venture,
which arrived from Bermuda in May of sixteen. That's the
ship that that's the largest ship, the one that had
supplies that wrecked us. Right, that's right, finally got there
(05:05):
and at that point they found only sixty colonists were
still alive. Um. After this six month period of of starvation,
Thomas Gates, who was then the president of Jamestown, realized
that there would be way more starvation um within just
a couple of weeks. Uh, So he decided that it
(05:25):
was time to just you know, jump, just abandon the
colony and sail back for England, and so they packed
up their stuff. They headed down the river, the James River,
and they said, we're gonna return to England. Until that
was Lord Date la Noir think about it, there's a
(05:49):
state named after him. Came to stop them. He had
a relief fleet, he had a hundred and fifty new settlers,
and he led the colonists back to the four work
and they laid the foundations to make this work. So
they did a take two and they succeeded. Now, of course,
as you know on ridiculous history, we don't want to
(06:10):
end on these down or depressing notes. Let's look into
a little a little bit more. We've been talking a
lot about dr Owsley. Why is he the authority here?
Oddly enough, if you look at his resume and his experience,
he is uniquely suited to be an expert in this
(06:31):
particular investigation. He's one of the country's most well known
physical anthropologists, and he studied not just this skeleton, but
multiple cannibalized skeletons from ancient history. He works with the
FBI as a forensic investigator, like a dexter, but without
all the you know, without all the murder. And he's
(06:54):
examined the bodies of victims of Jeffrey Dahmer. He thinks,
over the course of his career, this guy has examined
more than ten thousand bodies from people involved in nine
eleven to kidnap journalists murdered in Guatemala, and most of
his work, he's quick to add, is uh, involves ancient corpses,
(07:17):
not newer victims. So he's he's he's the right guy
to go to for this kind of information. But he focuses,
you know, primarily on this this sort of physical anthropology,
let's call it long range forensics, if we're thinking of
time as distance. He is, not, however, an expert on
(07:40):
everything about Jamestown. So in the interest of not ending
on a dark tale of cannibalism, we we thought maybe
we could laundry list some other things you might not
know about James Hown Jamestown silver linings. Uh, they're they're
actually worth something that you wouldn't think about. It turns
out the the colony did kind of have a bit
(08:02):
of a turnaround. UM John Rolf who became the new
president UM resettled it essentially after it was abandoned. UM
discovered uses for tobacco seeds that he had received from
trading with Trinidad, and that became a pretty valuable cash
crop for them. Yeah, and it also had a really strange,
(08:24):
uh social dynamic because Jamestown was saved in part by
what we would call today mail order brides. Back in Mary,
Old England, a lot of people had heard these horror
stories about conditions at the colony, so they weren't, you know,
they weren't super happy to throw their comfortable European life
(08:45):
away and join these people at Jamestown. And the colony
knew that a gender imbalance is unsustainable over the long term.
So this guy named Edwin Sandys, who was a Virginia
Company treasurer, convinced his ward members that they should advertise
for women to immigrate to Jamestown and Mary colonists. And
(09:06):
they offered these incentives. They said, look, we'll pay for
you to travel there. We will give you land, will
give you clothing, will give you furniture, you can choose
your husband. We'll just have like, we'll have a bevy
guys show up and you know what, you just picked
one you like. And then this tactic had some success,
(09:26):
and that is why in theory. If we look at
it this way, the first quote unquote mail order brides
in North America were these people who traveled to Jamestown.
That's weird. Yeah, And and it was a place for
another first, which was the establishment of the House of Burgesses,
which was America's first democratically elected legislative body. Uh. It
(09:49):
really set the precedent for democracy as as we know it. UM.
After that, every new English colony UM would us ablished
its own legislative body. And of course, you know it
wasn't always easy, but UM the ideas that you know
went on to permeate the foundation of the United States.
(10:12):
Things like elections and laws and balance of power and
all of that, UM were very much established there at Jamestown.
And as we said, it did ultimately improve under John Rolfe. UM.
It actually gave King James quite a bit of success
(10:33):
when he established the Virginia Company there and gave it
a monopoly on tobacco being shipped back to England. There
was even a lottery that some of this money was
used to give additional funds for some of this UM
Jamestown commerce. And that's according to the website Historic Jamestown UM.
(10:55):
It would continue to thrive um wonderfully for over a
hundred close to a hundred years, and was the capital
of the Virginia Colony. Um. It was eventually abandoned and
the capitol was moved to Williamsburg in sixte nine, but
it was taken back over by a preservationist group in
the late eighteen hundreds, and today is a National Historic park.
(11:19):
You can take tours. There's a museum there. Uh. And
of course they're ongoing archaeological digs that keep uncovering new
m relics and evidence of these very difficult times there
and what was a very fascinating part of of American history,
and that is available again on the Live Science article
(11:40):
we mentioned the top which is James Town Facts in History.
I want to add something for everybody who thought we
were gonna skip this. It's its own episode. Perhaps what
is the true story of Pocahontas and John Smith? We
mentioned John Smith a couple of times, we didn't mention Pocahontas,
of got give her her due, the daughter of Chief Powaton.
(12:04):
The story of how she saved John Smith's life likely
didn't happen, or at least it didn't happen the way
a lot of people think of it, and it definitely
was not the way that Disney wants you to think
of it. So first things first, Pocahontas was about ten
years old at the time seven, and she frequently visited Jamestown.
(12:29):
She would deliver messages from her father, the chief. She
would bring food and furs to trade for hatchets and
manufactured goods. Like we mentioned earlier, her name was actually
Mattauka m A t o a k a, and Pocahontas
was a nickname that meant little wanton, like w A
(12:50):
n t o na. That's sort of a dig. And yeah, see,
so it's it's way. It's it's much less cool than
that song. Pay with all the colors of the wind.
Here's what we think really happened, So Smith writes, We
know that Smith writes at some point in December seven,
so winter is beginning. He's captured. He's brought to the
(13:13):
chief and the community. He's welcomed. They give him a feast.
Then he was grabbed and stretched out on two large
flat stones. The community stood over him. They had clubs
like they were gonna beat him to death if they
were ordered to and then Pocahuntas Mattaaluka rushes in and
she grabs Smith by the head and lays her own
(13:37):
head on him as if to save him from death.
This is Smith's firsthand account. And then she pulls him
to his feet. The chief Palatan says, okay, now we're friends,
and you are my son or a subordinate chief. That's
the thing that translations weird. So this becomes a legend.
(13:57):
He loves this story. He tells it urn over, and
like a lot of those kind of autobiographical adventure stories,
it gets a little bigger and more grand. Right. So
he only told this story after Matalka converts to Christianity,
and he never mentioned it in his earlier accounts of
(14:17):
his adventures in Virginia. So is it true. We don't
really know. And if it is true, then it may
have just been uh ceremony and adoption ceremony that was
traditional in the community, and Pocahonas, instead of being like
the hero my life for yours kind of person, may
have just been a kid playing a part in the
(14:40):
ritual that happened with other outsiders, you know what I mean.
So you have to take a little of the romance
out there. But the truth is better even when it's ugly. UM.
Have you ever been to the Jamestown historical sites? Have not?
It's pretty cool? I bet it is. I'd like to go.
I want to plant one final point that is a
little in the depressing. I know we promised on too
(15:01):
and with something too depressing, but UM, just to to
establish it's really quick, we've mentioned the Virginia Company, just
to really make that super clear. That was a two
joint stock companies that were started under James the first
and the goal was to settle the colonies UM there
in UH on the coast of the what is now
the United States. UH. And it was founded in sixteen
(15:23):
o four and ended operating in sixteen twenty four. UM.
So part of that was to grow cash crops and
to UH create um a source of revenue stream to
funnel back to the mother the motherlands. I guess, um,
but this is really interesting. The Virginia Company UM insisted
that the dead be buried in unmarked graves so that
(15:48):
the folks arriving wouldn't notice that there were so many
deaths and the population and dwindled significantly. I mean, that's
what I do with my interns. Well, I mean, of course,
but you know, you just didn't want you don't want
to discourage anybody, you know, you don't. It's all about morale,
it's future facing. Is That's the thing that blows me
(16:14):
away about the lack of communication. I would argue, you're right,
been there, there would have been some channels for communication
for those colonists coming on that second round. But I
think it was probably by design that they weren't told
how horrible things were, right because that no one would
come yeah. Yeah, they would try to say, you know,
they would want to control the narrative and say, well,
(16:36):
you know, we had a couple of bumps in the road.
We gotta break some eggs to make it, to make
the American omelet. But a lot of that stuff is
just you know, uh scuttle butt. Uh what's the word
that uh former Justice Anton and Scalia used, argyl bargel. Yes,
argyl bargel. I don't know about that one. I would
never use that myself, but it's definitely fun to say, um, yeah, no,
(16:59):
it's it's an interesting thing, um kind of controlling the
narrative situation, And ultimately it was a success. H They
you know, they did establish a decent stronghold there, and
you know, have those cash crops in the form of tobacco.
And you know, just last year the researchers at Jamestown
found a headless body inside a church. So the mystery continues.
(17:23):
They're hoping to match DNA from different corpses that they're
finding different human remains. So if you are listening, uh,
your DNA may come up. You may have, uh, you
may have a past story of which you are unaware
that may be rediscovered very soon. So I think we
managed to make this not entirely uh depressing, harrowing journey. Nol.
(17:48):
What do you say, I think that's probably smart. Ben. Oh,
we did say. We were talking about this off Mike. Uh,
why did England start so late in the game. Yeah,
it's funny exactly because that was the thing that occurred
to me, just you know, uh, in the moment where
it's like, okay, so England got a really late start
to colonize the United States, and yet we know that
(18:09):
the Revolutionary War was literally the colonists taking back the
entire country from England. So something happened in the interim
between King James the First and King George, it would
have been correct. Yeah. It goes back to a thing
called the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three. It
ended the war called the French and Indian War, the
(18:31):
Seven Years War between Great Britain and France. In the treaty,
France gives up all of its territories in mainland North America,
and this means that there's no military threat to the
British colonies there, at least from European forces. And this
is part of a larger kind of war with more allies.
(18:52):
They were also fighting in India. They captured colonies in
the Caribbean, and they sliced up They sliced up the land,
of course, you know, spoil or alert. They didn't really
ask the people who lived on the land what they
thought or who should own it, you know what I mean.
What's that old saying when elephants make war, only the
(19:13):
grass suffers. That is exactly what they say. They also say, um,
how do you eat an elephant one piece at a time.
I never quite understood what that was meant to imply.
I guess it's just, you know, take small bites. It's
like a culinary version maybe of the journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step. That is another one. Yeah,
I don't know, Like I think a lot of these
(19:34):
aphorisms are kind of useless at the end of the day,
at the end of the day, at the end of
I'm a Monster, they did get me. Well, I think
that is the best place for us to drop off
at this point. But this has been a really fascinating,
if not slightly grizzly conversation and an interesting look inside
the formation of this uh these United States. You can
(19:57):
join the conversation, post your response to every episode we
do two of them a week over on our Facebook
group Ridiculous Historians UM. You can write us an email
where We're ridiculous at my heart radio dot com. You
can hit up me and Ben individually. We are, in fact,
you know, perfectly sentient, individualist to human beings. I am
on Instagram exclusively at how Now Noel Brown, and I
(20:20):
can be found at Twitter at Ben Bolan hs W.
You can also see some of my strange and completely
non sketchy adventures around the globe on Instagram where I
am at Ben Bowland. Thanks as always to our super
producer Casey Pegram. Thanks of course to Alex Williams who
(20:43):
created the breakout single that is known as our Intro Music,
and of course thank you Gabe Lousier. Also, Christopher Haciota
is here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, that rascally quizzler quiz quit,
little old little quizzles. What is it, young quizzle young quizzles?
The quizzler exactly makes mouths happy and ridiculous historians cringe. E.
(21:10):
Thanks to you, Ben, I think that's it right, But yeah,
thanks to Owsley and all of the other hardworking anthropologists
researching this story of our past, it does indeed tell
us what could be this story of our future. Uh,
we're close to the end of the year. Is this
(21:32):
our end of the year episode? No, not yet, not yet, Okay,
a little further down the road. Indeed, let's see you
next time, folks,
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Ye,
(00:27):
welcome back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so
much for tuning in. I often say welcome back to
the show, but in this case, not to quote Fox News.
Now more than ever it applies. My name is Ben,
and this is part two of a series. My name
is known. We are joining part two of the Jamestown
cannibal epidemic, already in progress. The new arrivals were not
(00:51):
particularly helpful. The cruise of the ship's thought, why should
we feed you? We just have enough food for ourselves, right,
I mean we talked about earlier in the episode. I
mean this literally would have been a liability. It was,
you know, I don't understand what they were thinking. I
guess they weren't. It was just an another active desperation UM.
But no, they their their supplies were already depleted. They
were going through the worst drought in eight hundred years,
(01:15):
and the crops that they had been able to grow
um were barely in it to few people that were
already there, let alone an additional three hundred mouths. So
folks were hungry, angry, and life was just getting worse
and worse every day UM than we had, of course
the starving time that would have arrived. So when you
look at the fragments of Jane Skull, this is a
(01:37):
conjecture from a mental Flaws article. Early Jamestown colonists were cannibals. Apparently.
UM researchers found a night was called a nitrogen profile
UM and enriched nitrogen profile that showed that it was
It was basically they were able to kind of track
her history of nourishment and it showed that she was
(01:58):
at one point well perished and had a very protein
rich diet UM, which would have indicated that she came
from a higher class UH and likely came over with
a large group UM in search of a new life
in this new world, not realizing I guess what they
were going into. The communication must have been incredibly, incredibly difficult,
(02:21):
if not impossible. They wouldn't have known what conditions they
were going into, right, Yeah, they would have had UM,
they would they would have had some sense that the
colony was in trouble, but maybe not a sense of
the degree of trouble that they had found themselves in.
So Jane most likely went through an intense trauma because
(02:44):
she had been living an okay life, and now you
know she and her parents or her relatives, her caretakers
who were probably there were having to fight the existing
colonists to preserve what food they had and then also
eating their livestock. This, unfortunately jibes with the contemporaneous accounts
(03:07):
that describe corpses being dug up or people who had
just died being butchered. And what's interesting is they found
this one body, and this is pretty disturbing stuff. Now
that we see there is one body as clear proof
of posthumous cannibalism, we know that there's a lot of
(03:32):
sand to these other reports of multiple acts of cannibalism,
which means that the next question is where are the
rest of those corpses right now? The plan is to
display james remains as well as a reconstruction of what
she looked like during her life in Jamestown, and archaeologists
(03:55):
are planning to continue to investigate the last days of
her life. I found it's interesting. I found this BBC
article that has, you know, proof Jamestown settlers turned to cannibalism,
and they note something that is just an additional disturbing
twist here. Whomever butchered this child's body was We know
(04:19):
they weren't skilled, so they weren't a butcher by trade.
But we also know this person who committed this act
was likely a woman based on the statistics the majority
of the fort's inhabitants were women. Really. Yeah, so it
wasn't just some you know, creepy grave robbing dude on
the edge of town. So we can't we can't end there, right,
(04:42):
that's a terrible note to end on what happened to
the colonists who survived after this starving time? Yeah, there
was another another expedition that set out, the Sea Venture,
which arrived from Bermuda in May of sixteen. That's the
ship that that's the largest ship, the one that had
supplies that wrecked us. Right, that's right, finally got there
(05:05):
and at that point they found only sixty colonists were
still alive. Um. After this six month period of of starvation,
Thomas Gates, who was then the president of Jamestown, realized
that there would be way more starvation um within just
a couple of weeks. Uh, So he decided that it
(05:25):
was time to just you know, jump, just abandon the
colony and sail back for England, and so they packed
up their stuff. They headed down the river, the James River,
and they said, we're gonna return to England. Until that
was Lord Date la Noir think about it, there's a
(05:49):
state named after him. Came to stop them. He had
a relief fleet, he had a hundred and fifty new settlers,
and he led the colonists back to the four work
and they laid the foundations to make this work. So
they did a take two and they succeeded. Now, of course,
as you know on ridiculous history, we don't want to
(06:10):
end on these down or depressing notes. Let's look into
a little a little bit more. We've been talking a
lot about dr Owsley. Why is he the authority here?
Oddly enough, if you look at his resume and his experience,
he is uniquely suited to be an expert in this
(06:31):
particular investigation. He's one of the country's most well known
physical anthropologists, and he studied not just this skeleton, but
multiple cannibalized skeletons from ancient history. He works with the
FBI as a forensic investigator, like a dexter, but without
all the you know, without all the murder. And he's
(06:54):
examined the bodies of victims of Jeffrey Dahmer. He thinks,
over the course of his career, this guy has examined
more than ten thousand bodies from people involved in nine
eleven to kidnap journalists murdered in Guatemala, and most of
his work, he's quick to add, is uh, involves ancient corpses,
(07:17):
not newer victims. So he's he's he's the right guy
to go to for this kind of information. But he focuses,
you know, primarily on this this sort of physical anthropology,
let's call it long range forensics, if we're thinking of
time as distance. He is, not, however, an expert on
(07:40):
everything about Jamestown. So in the interest of not ending
on a dark tale of cannibalism, we we thought maybe
we could laundry list some other things you might not
know about James Hown Jamestown silver linings. Uh, they're they're
actually worth something that you wouldn't think about. It turns
out the the colony did kind of have a bit
(08:02):
of a turnaround. UM John Rolf who became the new
president UM resettled it essentially after it was abandoned. UM
discovered uses for tobacco seeds that he had received from
trading with Trinidad, and that became a pretty valuable cash
crop for them. Yeah, and it also had a really strange,
(08:24):
uh social dynamic because Jamestown was saved in part by
what we would call today mail order brides. Back in Mary,
Old England, a lot of people had heard these horror
stories about conditions at the colony, so they weren't, you know,
they weren't super happy to throw their comfortable European life
(08:45):
away and join these people at Jamestown. And the colony
knew that a gender imbalance is unsustainable over the long term.
So this guy named Edwin Sandys, who was a Virginia
Company treasurer, convinced his ward members that they should advertise
for women to immigrate to Jamestown and Mary colonists. And
(09:06):
they offered these incentives. They said, look, we'll pay for
you to travel there. We will give you land, will
give you clothing, will give you furniture, you can choose
your husband. We'll just have like, we'll have a bevy
guys show up and you know what, you just picked
one you like. And then this tactic had some success,
(09:26):
and that is why in theory. If we look at
it this way, the first quote unquote mail order brides
in North America were these people who traveled to Jamestown.
That's weird. Yeah, And and it was a place for
another first, which was the establishment of the House of Burgesses,
which was America's first democratically elected legislative body. Uh. It
(09:49):
really set the precedent for democracy as as we know it. UM.
After that, every new English colony UM would us ablished
its own legislative body. And of course, you know it
wasn't always easy, but UM the ideas that you know
went on to permeate the foundation of the United States.
(10:12):
Things like elections and laws and balance of power and
all of that, UM were very much established there at Jamestown.
And as we said, it did ultimately improve under John Rolfe. UM.
It actually gave King James quite a bit of success
(10:33):
when he established the Virginia Company there and gave it
a monopoly on tobacco being shipped back to England. There
was even a lottery that some of this money was
used to give additional funds for some of this UM
Jamestown commerce. And that's according to the website Historic Jamestown UM.
(10:55):
It would continue to thrive um wonderfully for over a
hundred close to a hundred years, and was the capital
of the Virginia Colony. Um. It was eventually abandoned and
the capitol was moved to Williamsburg in sixte nine, but
it was taken back over by a preservationist group in
the late eighteen hundreds, and today is a National Historic park.
(11:19):
You can take tours. There's a museum there. Uh. And
of course they're ongoing archaeological digs that keep uncovering new
m relics and evidence of these very difficult times there
and what was a very fascinating part of of American history,
and that is available again on the Live Science article
(11:40):
we mentioned the top which is James Town Facts in History.
I want to add something for everybody who thought we
were gonna skip this. It's its own episode. Perhaps what
is the true story of Pocahontas and John Smith? We
mentioned John Smith a couple of times, we didn't mention Pocahontas,
of got give her her due, the daughter of Chief Powaton.
(12:04):
The story of how she saved John Smith's life likely
didn't happen, or at least it didn't happen the way
a lot of people think of it, and it definitely
was not the way that Disney wants you to think
of it. So first things first, Pocahontas was about ten
years old at the time seven, and she frequently visited Jamestown.
(12:29):
She would deliver messages from her father, the chief. She
would bring food and furs to trade for hatchets and
manufactured goods. Like we mentioned earlier, her name was actually
Mattauka m A t o a k a, and Pocahontas
was a nickname that meant little wanton, like w A
(12:50):
n t o na. That's sort of a dig. And yeah, see,
so it's it's way. It's it's much less cool than
that song. Pay with all the colors of the wind.
Here's what we think really happened, So Smith writes, We
know that Smith writes at some point in December seven,
so winter is beginning. He's captured. He's brought to the
(13:13):
chief and the community. He's welcomed. They give him a feast.
Then he was grabbed and stretched out on two large
flat stones. The community stood over him. They had clubs
like they were gonna beat him to death if they
were ordered to and then Pocahuntas Mattaaluka rushes in and
she grabs Smith by the head and lays her own
(13:37):
head on him as if to save him from death.
This is Smith's firsthand account. And then she pulls him
to his feet. The chief Palatan says, okay, now we're friends,
and you are my son or a subordinate chief. That's
the thing that translations weird. So this becomes a legend.
(13:57):
He loves this story. He tells it urn over, and
like a lot of those kind of autobiographical adventure stories,
it gets a little bigger and more grand. Right. So
he only told this story after Matalka converts to Christianity,
and he never mentioned it in his earlier accounts of
(14:17):
his adventures in Virginia. So is it true. We don't
really know. And if it is true, then it may
have just been uh ceremony and adoption ceremony that was
traditional in the community, and Pocahonas, instead of being like
the hero my life for yours kind of person, may
have just been a kid playing a part in the
(14:40):
ritual that happened with other outsiders, you know what I mean.
So you have to take a little of the romance
out there. But the truth is better even when it's ugly. UM.
Have you ever been to the Jamestown historical sites? Have not?
It's pretty cool? I bet it is. I'd like to go.
I want to plant one final point that is a
little in the depressing. I know we promised on too
(15:01):
and with something too depressing, but UM, just to to
establish it's really quick, we've mentioned the Virginia Company, just
to really make that super clear. That was a two
joint stock companies that were started under James the first
and the goal was to settle the colonies UM there
in UH on the coast of the what is now
the United States. UH. And it was founded in sixteen
(15:23):
o four and ended operating in sixteen twenty four. UM.
So part of that was to grow cash crops and
to UH create um a source of revenue stream to
funnel back to the mother the motherlands. I guess, um,
but this is really interesting. The Virginia Company UM insisted
that the dead be buried in unmarked graves so that
(15:48):
the folks arriving wouldn't notice that there were so many
deaths and the population and dwindled significantly. I mean, that's
what I do with my interns. Well, I mean, of course,
but you know, you just didn't want you don't want
to discourage anybody, you know, you don't. It's all about morale,
it's future facing. Is That's the thing that blows me
(16:14):
away about the lack of communication. I would argue, you're right,
been there, there would have been some channels for communication
for those colonists coming on that second round. But I
think it was probably by design that they weren't told
how horrible things were, right because that no one would
come yeah. Yeah, they would try to say, you know,
they would want to control the narrative and say, well,
(16:36):
you know, we had a couple of bumps in the road.
We gotta break some eggs to make it, to make
the American omelet. But a lot of that stuff is
just you know, uh scuttle butt. Uh what's the word
that uh former Justice Anton and Scalia used, argyl bargel. Yes,
argyl bargel. I don't know about that one. I would
never use that myself, but it's definitely fun to say, um, yeah, no,
(16:59):
it's it's an interesting thing, um kind of controlling the
narrative situation, And ultimately it was a success. H They
you know, they did establish a decent stronghold there, and
you know, have those cash crops in the form of tobacco.
And you know, just last year the researchers at Jamestown
found a headless body inside a church. So the mystery continues.
(17:23):
They're hoping to match DNA from different corpses that they're
finding different human remains. So if you are listening, uh,
your DNA may come up. You may have, uh, you
may have a past story of which you are unaware
that may be rediscovered very soon. So I think we
managed to make this not entirely uh depressing, harrowing journey. Nol.
(17:48):
What do you say, I think that's probably smart. Ben. Oh,
we did say. We were talking about this off Mike. Uh,
why did England start so late in the game. Yeah,
it's funny exactly because that was the thing that occurred
to me, just you know, uh, in the moment where
it's like, okay, so England got a really late start
to colonize the United States, and yet we know that
(18:09):
the Revolutionary War was literally the colonists taking back the
entire country from England. So something happened in the interim
between King James the First and King George, it would
have been correct. Yeah. It goes back to a thing
called the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three. It
ended the war called the French and Indian War, the
(18:31):
Seven Years War between Great Britain and France. In the treaty,
France gives up all of its territories in mainland North America,
and this means that there's no military threat to the
British colonies there, at least from European forces. And this
is part of a larger kind of war with more allies.
(18:52):
They were also fighting in India. They captured colonies in
the Caribbean, and they sliced up They sliced up the land,
of course, you know, spoil or alert. They didn't really
ask the people who lived on the land what they
thought or who should own it, you know what I mean.
What's that old saying when elephants make war, only the
(19:13):
grass suffers. That is exactly what they say. They also say, um,
how do you eat an elephant one piece at a time.
I never quite understood what that was meant to imply.
I guess it's just, you know, take small bites. It's
like a culinary version maybe of the journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step. That is another one. Yeah,
I don't know, Like I think a lot of these
(19:34):
aphorisms are kind of useless at the end of the day,
at the end of the day, at the end of
I'm a Monster, they did get me. Well, I think
that is the best place for us to drop off
at this point. But this has been a really fascinating,
if not slightly grizzly conversation and an interesting look inside
the formation of this uh these United States. You can
(19:57):
join the conversation, post your response to every episode we
do two of them a week over on our Facebook
group Ridiculous Historians UM. You can write us an email
where We're ridiculous at my heart radio dot com. You
can hit up me and Ben individually. We are, in fact,
you know, perfectly sentient, individualist to human beings. I am
on Instagram exclusively at how Now Noel Brown, and I
(20:20):
can be found at Twitter at Ben Bolan hs W.
You can also see some of my strange and completely
non sketchy adventures around the globe on Instagram where I
am at Ben Bowland. Thanks as always to our super
producer Casey Pegram. Thanks of course to Alex Williams who
(20:43):
created the breakout single that is known as our Intro Music,
and of course thank you Gabe Lousier. Also, Christopher Haciota
is here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, that rascally quizzler quiz quit,
little old little quizzles. What is it, young quizzle young quizzles?
The quizzler exactly makes mouths happy and ridiculous historians cringe. E.
(21:10):
Thanks to you, Ben, I think that's it right, But yeah,
thanks to Owsley and all of the other hardworking anthropologists
researching this story of our past, it does indeed tell
us what could be this story of our future. Uh,
we're close to the end of the year. Is this
(21:32):
our end of the year episode? No, not yet, not yet, Okay,
a little further down the road. Indeed, let's see you
next time, folks,
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