Word of
Jamestown’s ttroubles made the Spanish gleeful. On June 14, 1610, the Spanish
ambassador in London, Don Alonso de Velasco, wrote to King Philip III of Spain.
Some of Jamestown’s news was old, but he put in all he had heard, aiming to
please the king. His letter repeats the cannibalism stories with grisly relish,
and sees little hope for Virginia’s survival:
... the Indians hold the English
surrounded in the strong place which they had erected there, having killed the
larger part of them, and the others were left so entirely without provisions
that they thought it impossible to escape, because the survivors eat the dead,
and when one of the natives died fighting, they dug him up again, two days
afterwards, to be eaten. The swine which they carried there and which commenced
to multiply, the Indians killed, and almost all who came in this vessel died
from having eaten dogs, cat skins, and other vile stuff. Unless they succor
them with some provisions in an English ship which they met close to the
Azores, they must have perished before this....Thus it looks as if the zeal for
this enterprise was cooling off, and it would on that account be very easy to
make and end of it altogether by sending out a few ships to finish what might
be left in that place, which is so important for pirates.
From Chesapeake Bay, pirates
could prey on Spanish galleons, laden with gold and silver from mines in Spain’s
New World colonies. No starvation there.
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