On November 8, 1610, another piece
of propaganda, the Virginia Company’s latest booklet, went on sale at the Black
Bear in St. Paul’s churchyard. Its title is self-explanatory: A
True Declaration of the estate of the colony in Virginia, with a confutation of
such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an
enterprise. It celebrated the earlier safe return of Gates, Newport, and
others from the Sea Venture expedition,
and did its best to dispel the worst of the Virginia reports, especially the
“Starving Time” and the “tragical history of the man eating of his dead wife in
Virginia.”
Sir Thomas Gates appeared before
the Virginia Company’s Council and tried to the record straight about the
Jamestown colonists who had killed and eaten his wife, a story that had shocked
all of London. (Apparently no one asked where Gates came by this information,
since he himself had been in Bermuda when the wife-butchering incident took
place.) According to Gates the man “mortally hated his wife.” So he “secretly
killed her, then cut her in pieces and hid her remains in divers parts of his
house.” The implication being that the husband did not kill his wife because he
was starving—though he “fed daily upon her.” As further proof that there was
plenty to eat in Jamestown, Gates reported that besides the wife’s dismembered
body the man’s house contained “a good quantity of meal, oatmeal, beans, and
peas.” Such a larder would have been news to the starving inhabitants inside
the fort, who remembered existing on half a can of meal per day.
And perhaps a little meat. . . .
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