William Strachey wrote of Jamestown’s poor inhabitants that
there were “many more particularities of their sufferances . . . than I have the
heart to express.” He had seen people starving, out of their minds from hunger.
What did they say? What did they do? He did not say.
George Percy, the man who surely must
share blame for the pitiful conditions at Jamestown, did not hesitate to set
down the ugly details that accompanied starvation. He wrote of a colonist named
Hugh Pryse, “beinge pinched with extreme famin, in a furious distracted moode“
who ran into the center of the marketplace “Blaspheameinge exclaimeinge and
Cryeinge outt thatt there was noe god, alledgeinge thatt if there were a god he
would not Suffer his Creatures whome he had made and framed, to indure those
miseries and to perish for wante of food and Sustenance.”
Percy
did not know that people in the last stages of starvation may become mentally
disturbed and experience hallucinations. When Pryse and another colonist, “a
Butcher, a Corpulentt fatt man” went into the woods to look for something to
eat, the Indians killed them both. Percy wrote with some satisfaction that God
had punished Pryse for his earlier blasphemous talk, because his corpse was
dismembered, perhaps by wolves, and his bowels torn out of his body. But the
fat butcher, “not lyeing above sixe yardes from him, was fownd altogether
untouched, onely by the salvages arrowes whereby he Receaved his deathe.”
“
Poor
Hugh Pryse. Poor butcher. Poor Jamestown.
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