How Long Does It Take to Starve to Death?

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

How long does it take to starve to death?

                         How long does it take to starve to death? A modern medical study estimates that “Complete starvation in adults leads to death within eight to 12 weeks.” Death can come in a variety of guises: Hypothermia. Pneumonia. Anemia. Chronic diarrhea. Madness.

                            

    Of more than two hundred people alive at Jamestown, Virginia, in October 1609, only sixty survived until May.

 

How many will survive in Gaza in 2024??

A recent news clip breaks my heart. Food being given out: 2 little boys, each with a large pot, get to the supply late, when only crumbs—grain, peas—? remain. The first boy is so hungry he scoops up a handful and crams it into his mouth. The second one scrapes up less than a handful—all that is left—and puts it carefully into his pot—to take back to his family. 

 

Cannibalism at Jamestown, 1609, revisited: Some lines from JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL (available on Amazon):

“Then they took that poor boy’s body, and they washed it, and they chopped off his arms and his legs, and they roasted them and ate them!”  p. 123

 

Three days later, Peter Scott cut his wife and unborn child into pieces and salted them in a chest in his house. p. 126

  Before the winter was out, of some 300 people at Jamestown, only 60 survived until spring. 

A Fateful Anniversary 400 Years Ago

            Four hundred years ago, in August 1619, a Dutch ship brought Africans to Jamestown, Virginia--and sold them. The rest is history. Slavery was about to begin.

           To set the record straight, not one, but two ships arrived in August 1619. Besides    “Dutch ship” with “20. and odd Negroes”,  as John Rolfe’s famous letter noted, “Three or four days after [afterward] the Treasurer arrived.” The Treasurer was an unlicensed privateer in the service of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick. It did not sail upriver to Jamestown, but remained at Point Comfort. Rolfe did not mention them, but the Treasurer also brought more Africans. 

            How do we know? 

            A census of the Virginia colony in March 1620 lists 32 Africans, including the now-famous 20 who came on the Dutch ship in August 1619. Where did the other dozen come from? One of the dozen was a woman named Angelo, who was listed in a 1625 census as having arrived on the Treasurer. 

            But the Treasurer, damaged by years of wind and waves, became a derelict ship, unseaworthy in 1620, so Angelo must have come before that date. She was not the only African who arrived on the Treasurer. The 1625 census also lists a young African couple, William and Isabel, and their child, Willam. They were in the household of William Tucker, commander of the fort at Point Comfort when the Treasurer arrived there in 1619. So was William Pierce, the colonist who bought Angelo. 

            

             We know nothing about Angelo but her name. We do know that William Pierce, her master, had a fifteen-year-old daughter, Jane, who had just married the thirty-four-year-old widower, John Rolfe. His first wife was Pocahontas, who had died in London in 1617. 

            There’s a lot we don’t know about that early history. 

             See my book, A Tale of Two Colonies: What Really Happened in Virginia and Bermuda? 

New Jamestown Mystery Unearthed!

Last week, a new archaeological find at Jamestown: a skeleton that may well have been George Yeardley. 

He’s a central figure in early Virginia history --and in my novel:

http://www.amazon.com/Jamestown-Novel-story-Americas-beginnings-ebook/dp/B00IC8U6BA/ref=la_B001KCUZPC_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406913401&sr=1-4

JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL: The Story of America’s Beginning

(New York: Argo Navis, 2014; originally published as A Durable Fire, New York: William Morrow, 1990; Avon, 1991)

 “A complex tale of courage, treachery, cultural conflict, administrative bungling and desperate choices.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

​ “A captivating first novel that combines Bernhard’s expertise as an American history professor with a vivid, sure prose style to produce a rich tale of suffering and triumph in 1600s America.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS

Fiction, with a supplement of eyewitness accounts.

Now an Amazon paperback and e-book.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Jamestown%3A+The+Novel

Espionage in England

No, not the recent Salisbury spy troubles, but secrets kept in the 400 yeares ago: 

England’s greatest rival was Spain. England’s colonizing ventures in the New World were not for Spanish eyes. 

One of the bearers of secrets for the English was Captain Christopher Newport, who landed the first colonists at Jamestown in April 1607. He had made the crossing from England to Virginia twice more in 1608, each time bringing letters and reports—all of which the Virginia Company classified as top secret.  Places of settlement, numbers of colonists and natives, descriptions of the land, and locations of harbors and rivers were closely guarded. No wonder the Spanish were suspicious. Had the English found gold? Silver? Maps were kept under lock and key and none were to be made public without approval of the royal Privy Council or the Virginia Company Council.

But Spain had spies in London. . . .

Jamestown, the Novel!

"Jamestown: The Novel, the story of America's beginnings" is still available in print & ebook, even if "Jamestown: the Series" is not!
Meanwhile, my World War I book is coming in December. After that, more on Jamestown, etc.

Another Jamestown Mystery?

When in London last week, I read a notice that the last of the 8 episodes of "Jamestown" on Sky TV was to air Thursday. Not much buzz for the whole series. Will it become available in the US??
Who knows?

"Jamestown." When can we see it?

The British-made series about early Jamestown is beginning in the UK May 5!  

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5650650/

Can’t wait to see how it measures up to JAMESTOWN: THE NOVEL.

Watch this space for news!

Jamestown lives!

A new TV series is in the making! JAMESTOWN, made in the UK by the producers of--guess what--"Downton Abbey" is to be released in 2017, date TBA.

"Dec 30, 2016 - The emotional eight-part series will follow Alice, Verity and Jocelyn as they become the first women to settle in the colony." 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/.../downton-abbey-producers-tease-new-period-.... 

"The first women"? Not quite! This series begins in 1619, but the very first Englishwomen--just two of them--arrived in 1608. 

Can't wait for the TV version. 

Stay connected!

A holiday hiatus

Happy holidays to all.
No more blogs till after January 1, 2017!

Thanksgiving Memories

As you eat your Thanksgiving turkey, remember that the Susan Constant got here long before the Mayflower.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Remembering a soldier from long ago

For Veterans’ Day Weekend, a monument to Captain John Smith (1580-1631) soldier, founder.

Lady Frances and Captain Smith in the 1630s. Who knows?

       

        John Smith died on June 21, 1631. His burial place is  in the south aisle of Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate Church, Holborn Viaduct, London. The church is the largest parish church in the City of London, dating from 1137. 

       Captain John Smith's life  is memorialized by a fine stained- glass window in the south wall of the church.

       Who ordered his burial? Who commanded the memorial window?

       Lady Frances kept the title Duchess of Richmond until her death on October 8, 1639. She is buried in Westminster Abbey next to her third husband, in the tomb she had designed in his memory.

       

      Mysteries upon mysteries. 

John Smith and Lady Frances

Portrait of Lady Frances, Countess of Hertford, in 1611.

                 How well did she know John Smith?

         Her husband, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was Smith’s “best friend.” The Earl died at age 81 on April 6, 1621. Lady Frances was then 43 years old. John Smith was 41. A wealthy widow, Frances nonetheless wasted no time in attaching herself to a new husband:  Just two months after Edward died, Frances married a 47-year-old Scottish nobleman, Ludovic Stewart, 2^nd Duke of Lennox. He was a cousin of King James I. A member of the Privy Council, he was also Steward of the Royal Household. Steward became Earl of Newcastle upon Tyne and Duke of Richmond on August 17, 1623, but did not enjoy those titles very long. He died at age 50 in his bed (of a heart attack?) at Whitehall on the morning of February 16, 1624. As his widow, Lady Frances, now wealthier than ever, became known as the “Double Duchess.”

         On July 12, 1624 John Smith’s monumental Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles was published. It was dedicated To the Illustrious and Most Noble Princesse, the Lady Francis, Duchesse of Richmond and Lenox. A  1623 engraving of her image was bound into the original edition.

          Lady Frances financed John Smith’s book.

        

More John Smith Mysteries

John Smith, like many other Englishmen who came to Jamestown in 1607, nearly died there. Critically wounded in the mysterious gunpowder accident in 1609, he had little choice but to return to England.  

Where he stayed, and what he did then, remain mysteries with few clues.

·      After his return to England, Smith put together his book, A Map of Virginia, which was published in 1612 and dedicated “To the right honorable Sir Edward Semer Knight, Baron Beauchamp, and Earle of Hartford.”

·      The dedication is in two surviving copies of Smith’s historic book. One of the copies, now in the New York Public Library, belonged to Edward Seymour.

·      In the dedication, Smith writes: “It is the best gift I can give to the best friend I have. l  . . In the harbour of your Lordships favour, I hope I ever shall rest secure . . . .

Did Smith, recovering from his wound, and writing his book, stay with Seymour from 1609 to 1612--and after?

·      One of Seymour’s properties was Hertford House, a London town house on Cannon Row in Westminster.

Edward Seymour was a nephew of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII

The earl’s wife was Frances Howard, a great beauty. She was 34 years old in 1612. John Smith was 32.

Frances’s husband was 39 years older than she. He was 73 in 1612.

Pity that Frances did not keep a diary.

Summer at Jamestown --and elsewhere

James River

Summertime at Jamestown, 1606

Summertime in Houston, 2016

Look for more blogs in August!

Summer at Jamestown, July 1607: Some good news, some bad.

The first summer at Jamestown, July 1607

In the journal kept by the colony’s first president, Edward Wingfield, on July 3, 1607 there was some good news, and some not so good:

Seven or eight Indians presented President Wingfield with a Dear (sic).”

About this tyme divers (sic) of our men fell sick.”

And some of them died.

Summertime, Jamestown 1607: No vacation!

 Having a hot summer?

Think of the English at Jamestown, summer 1607:  

       There was back-breaking, hand-blistering labor to do as soon as they had picked a place—marshy and unhealthy, as it turned out--to settle. Sailing more than thirty miles up the wide river that they named the James after King James I, they chose a small, wooded peninsula about two miles long and a mile to a mile and a half wide. It was actually an island, separated from the mainland by a shallow creek, but the James River was six fathoms [36 feet], deep enough to moor their ships a stone’s throw from the shore.

        By June 15, seven weeks after they arrived, 104 men and boys (one man had died on the voyage) had finished an enormous task: They had built a fort at the site they called Jamestown. Working and sweating in the hot Virginia sun, they dug over 1,600 feet of trenches nearly three feet deep to form a huge triangle by the river’s edge. They chopped down hundreds of pine and oak and elm trees. They dragged heavy logs of up to one foot in diameter, one by one, to set vertically in the trenches to make a palisade with walls eleven to fifteen feet high. When it was finished, the fort by the river covered about an acre and a half, or roughly the area of two football fields. It was 140 yards long on the side facing the river, and 100 yards on each of the other two sides. With guns mounted at each angle and only one entrance, a massive log gate on the side facing the river, this palisaded fort would be a comforting defense against invaders—either Indian or Spanish.

     Invaders would be the least of their worries. 

A Blog Break

"June is bustin' out all over. . . ." 
Time to take a blog break! 

More later. 

Pocahontas: What’s in a Name?

         Donald Trump recently called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” a name that is offensive in some usages to Native Americans, especially women. Every school child in America knows who Pocahontas was, bur not many know her other names.

         When John Smith met her in 1608, she was a little girl of ten or so. “Pocahontas” was her nickname. It meant “Little Mischief.” Her real name was “Matoaka,” an Algonquin Indian name of unknown meaning. It has been said to mean “Bright Stream between the Hills,” or “One Who Kindles,” but who knows? The first record of it is in a letter by a Virginia colonist in 1614, when she married another colonist, John Rolfe. If, as some have suggested, “Matoaka” was Pocahontas’s secret name, kept secret by a “superstitious fear of hurt by the English,” (Samuel Purchas, 1625), we have no proof that this was so. If Pocahontas’s secret name might cause the English to harm her, why did she let it appear in A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia, a public relations tract put out by the Virginia Company in 1615?

         Her other name was Rebecca, given her when she was baptized as a Christian in 1614.