Cannibalism In The Colonies

A few weeks ago, in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America, the cannibalized remains of a young woman were discovered. Little is known about the identity of the woman, whom investigators named Jane.What is known is that she was one of 300 battered and hungry settlers who arrived in the colony in mid-August 1609, two years after it was founded, aboard one of six ships that had limped into Jamestown after being caught at sea in a hurricane. The fleet had been scattered, its leaders shipwrecked on Bermuda, provisions brought from England ruined, and settlers injured.
To make matters worse, the colony was wholly unprepared to support them. From the very beginnings of the Virginia colony, the English had struggled to feed themselves, relying instead on trading for corn with local Indians or taking food by force.
By the summer of 1609, however, the Indians were no longer willing to supply the increasing numbers of colonists with food, and by October a full-scale war erupted. Indian warriors sealed off Jamestown Island, trapping hundreds of men, women and children within the palisade of the fort on starvation rations with little hope of relief from outside.
As winter set in and the starving colonists became increasingly desperate, many of them went into the woods in search of snakes and wild roots in order to satisfy their hunger. Many of these hapless souls were wiped out by waiting warriors. In desperation, those left behind devoured their horses, dogs, cats, rats and mice, and when these ran out even their boot leather. But worse was yet to come.
Starving settlers dug up corpses from their graves and ate them. Some colonists, who died in their beds or were killed seeking food beyond the palisade, were taken up and eaten by those who found their bodies. Sometime during the winter, 14-year-old Jane died, was eaten and then discarded in a trash pit.
The ravenous Englishmen looked greedily on those alive who still had some meat on their bones. According to the records of George Percy, the colony’s leader, one settler murdered his pregnant wife “as she slept on his bosom,” then “ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food,” for which “barbarous” and unnatural act he was tortured to extract a confession and summarily executed.
Jane’s fate, and that of the other cannibalized victims brings into focus one of the darkest periods in Virginia’s early history. But it also reveals the enormous challenges that Europeans faced and the sacrifices they made in establishing colonies in the New World. During the early phases of colonization, far more colonies failed than succeeded. Failed colonies rarely lasted more than a year.
The unfortunate settlers had arrived in America with little knowledge of the land they were to colonize, let alone the particular practices of the native peoples of coastal Virginia, but with a full awareness of the fearsome reputation of many Indian peoples encountered by Spanish, English and French adventurers in the previous century.
From the first voyages of Christopher Columbus onward, the image of New World Indians as vicious man-eaters became etched on the European mind, shackling them with persistent fears about Indian cannibalism. A whole body of thought emerged over the causes of native cannibalism. Was cannibalism a sign of wanton depravity or was it an innate characteristic of a degenerate people; a consequence of environmental factors such as the extreme heat or cold?
Ironically, despite their deep fears about the depraved habits of the natives and their endless debates over its causes it was the English who were forced to resort to cannibalism.