Were America’s Esteemed Forebears Actually Cannibals?

While browsing on my iPad as I was watching Thanksgiving Day football games, I ran across the following post on G+ and you know I just had to read more.  Cannibals? No, it couldn’t be.  At first I thought it might be a reference to the Pilgrims since it was Thanksgiving Day. Instead, the story by Nina Strochlic, who is a reporter and researcher for The Daily Beast online news site, was about the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 which was 15 years before the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving.

Were America’s esteemed forebears actually cannibals? In her story, Nina Strochlic points out that new archeological evidence indicates a firm yes. According to Smithsonian magazine, a recent excavation in the Jamestown Colony in Virginia finally turned up evidence of what’s long been hinted at. During particularly harsh beginnings upon landing in the New World,desperate colonists resorted to eating each other to stay alive. Always be thankful you weren’t around 400 years ago!

While the Pilgrim’s did most things right after landing at Plymouth Rock, the 104 colonists who landed at Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607 and founded Jamestown three weeks later seemed to do everything wrong. Trouble rose almost right away and within three months one of the six original councilors was charged with mutiny and executed. Within the first nine months of life in Jamestown, the original 104 colonists had dwindled down to 38,

All the while they were subjected to attacks by Native Americans who surrounded the fort and blocked any food and supplies from getting in. Somehow, colonists continued to arrive by ship over the new 2 years, maybe as many as 800.  But, the dying continued as they were starving from the lack of food and water. Men died “of the boudie Flixe,”; “of the swelling,” ; “of a wound given by the Savages,”.  It wasn’t long before there there were only 90 colonists left who had survived drought, famine, attacks, and widespread disease.

So, what do you do when you’re dying of starvation?  Well, you eat each other, of course. From documents written during and after the time, historians gleaned that the desperate settlers may have engaged in cannibalism:

“And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them,”…. ” Another testimony describes a man who killed, salted, and ate his wife, and later was executed for the crime.

Somehow the colonists of Jamestown hung on and survived but things didn’t get any easier for them. This was just the beginning of years of settler vs. natives brutality on both sides. For the Jamestown settlers, in 1622, just months after the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving with Indians in New England, 347 colonists in Jamestown were killed in an attack by Powhatan Indians.

So my American friends, be thankful that yesterday as you sat around tables laden with fresh bread, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh vegetables and wine to toast your good fortune with family and friends, that you were eating Turkey to celebrate and not your “salted neighbours”.

Thanks for visiting!