The butchered skull and bones of a young girl
now prove what 17th century sources recorded: there was cannibalism
at Jamestown.
Read for yourself:
The
Indians hold the English surrounded...having killed the larger part of
them...the survivors eat the dead....
--Alonso de Velasco to Philip III, June 14,
1610
(The
Spanish ambassador loved to gloat over English failures.}
So
great was our famine, that a savage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort took
him up again and ate him, and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with
roots and herbs. -
-John Smith, Generall Historie, 1624
(Smith
was not an eyewitness: he had left before the Starving Time.)
And
now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing was
spared to maintain life and to do those things which seems incredible, as to
dig up dead corpses out of grave and eat them.
--George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 1624
(Percy
was there. He blamed Smith for the Starving Time.)
[We were]
driven through unsufferable hunger unnaturally to eat those things which nature
most abhorred: the flesh and excrements of man....as of our own nation as [well
as] of an Indian digged by some out of
his grave after he had lain buried three days, and wholly devoured him. Others,
envying the better state of body of any whom hunger had not yet so much wasted
as their own, lay [in] wait and
threatened to kill and eat them.
--“A Briefe Declaration...By the Ancient
Planters now remaining alive in Virginia,” 1624.
(These
colonists blamed the Virginia Company’s mismanagement.)
Until now, many historians, believing that
these people had their own axes to grind, had serious doubts that they were
telling the truth.
Were some more truthful than others?
