Percy, Smith, and the
other writers mention cannibalism without calling it by name. Percy supplies
the details of the starving man who murdered his pregnant wife and ate part of
her remains [see blog of 1/4/14], and Smith’s Generall Historie elaborates on the consuming of at least one
corpse: “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.” Horrific
as it sounds, it is not impossible to imagine. Jamestown in the winter of
1609-10 was a place where, as Percy says, starving people were desperate enough
to lick up the blood which had “fallen from their weake fellowes.”
Another account of
the Starving Time, also written by those who had lived through it, told of
eating “vermin or carrion [what]soever we could light on, as also toadstools,
jew’s ears [Auricularia
auricula-judaea, a
small, ear-sized tree fungus], or whatever else we found growing upon the
ground that would fill either mouth or belly.” As that terrible winter went on,
they were “driven through unsufferable hunger unnaturally to eat those things
which nature most abhorred: the flesh and excrements of man.”
They
ate these things “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.”
We
now know that in at least one instance, the butchered corpse of a 14-year-old
girl, cannibalism was real in early Virginia.
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