Recent excavations at
Jamestown give grim testimony to some of Percy’s journal entries. Did the
starving colonists actually eat shoes, snakes, rats, dogs, etc.? Shoes would
not leave much evidence, but animal bones would--even 400 years later. In the
cellar pit of the barracks inside the fort archeologists have unearthed the
bones of poisonous snakes and musk turtles, butchered horse bones, the bones of
the black rat, and dog and cat bones.The dog
bones are probably those of a mastiff, which the English used for hunting. In
their desperate need, they killed and ate the dogs that might have hunted for
game.
But hunting for game assumes the
hunters were not afraid to venture outside the fort.
When the boots and
shoes and dogs and cats were gone, what was left to eat?
George
Percy’s journal, continued:
And now famin beginneinge to Looke [so] ghastly and
pale in every face, that notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe
those things which seame incredible, as to digge up deade corpes outt of graves
and to eate them.
And 400 years later,
we have evidence that they did.
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