Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
Speaker 1: Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And as I think
Speaker 1: everyone knows at this point, recently news broke that there
Speaker 1: is confirmed forensic evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown. Indeed, lots
Speaker 1: of people wrote us to make sure we knew we
Speaker 1: had heard the news. Everyone at not many many people,
Speaker 1: and then many many people also asked us if we
Speaker 1: were going to podcast about it, and there is yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: First the answer was I don't think I have anything
Speaker 1: to say about that. But then the more people asked,
Speaker 1: the more I thought, maybe I should look into this,
Speaker 1: Maybe we should take a little time see what this
Speaker 1: what this is all about. So we did. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about today. Yeah, so we'll give
Speaker 1: you a little background on Jamestown and kind of how
Speaker 1: it came to be that they found them else in
Speaker 1: a position where cannibalism was the option that they were
Speaker 1: going to need to engage. So James Town was founded
Speaker 1: in six seven, and it was the first permanent English
Speaker 1: colony in what would become the United States. The Virginia
Speaker 1: Company got a charter from James, the first to establish
Speaker 1: a colony in the Chesapeake area, and this was actually
Speaker 1: a for profit venture. The goal there was to find gold,
Speaker 1: to raise silkworms, and to find a water route to Asia.
Speaker 1: And the focus on profit actually set the tone on
Speaker 1: where the settlers were putting their priorities. So, for example,
Speaker 1: given the choice to build a house or chop down
Speaker 1: lumber to send back to England, or between digging a
Speaker 1: well and searching for the gold, they would choose the latter,
Speaker 1: like the profitable enterprise. Right. So, I think people have
Speaker 1: an idea that people were sailing from Europe to quote
Speaker 1: the New World, to uh seek opportunities or to escape
Speaker 1: religious persecution. And while that was the case in some areas,
Speaker 1: that's not what was happening in the early days of Jamestown.
Speaker 1: Early days of Jamestown were about making money. So the
Speaker 1: people who were traveling to Jamestown sailed on three ships.
Speaker 1: They were the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery,
Speaker 1: and they were under the command of Christopher Newport. These
Speaker 1: ships landed on Jamestown Island and established James Fort on
Speaker 1: May fourteenth, sixteen o seven. There were no women on
Speaker 1: these first three ships. Um, this was really a military
Speaker 1: and exploratory settlement, not a town with homes and families
Speaker 1: in it. There were no women in Jamestown until late
Speaker 1: September of sixteen o eight, when a ship brought all
Speaker 1: of two of them. We'll let that settle for a moment.
Speaker 1: They wound up on the James River, which is about
Speaker 1: sixty miles from the mouth of the Chess of Chesspeake Bay.
Speaker 1: And while some accounts say that they chose this location
Speaker 1: because the water was deep enough for them to bring
Speaker 1: the ships close in to shore, they built a fort
Speaker 1: in a more secure location so warships couldn't just sail
Speaker 1: up this same channel and fired directly at their fort.
Speaker 1: The relationships with Native Americans in the area were strained.
Speaker 1: There were times when the colony was basically hobbling along
Speaker 1: along with help from nearby tribes, and at other times
Speaker 1: the colonists and Native Americans were actively at war with
Speaker 1: one another, and some historians really think that this colony
Speaker 1: was doomed from the start. Uh There were craftspeople and
Speaker 1: laborers aboard some of the ships, but a significant number
Speaker 1: of the settled settlers were gentlemen. They weren't used to
Speaker 1: manual labor, they weren't expecting to do manual labor, uh,
Speaker 1: and the swampy ground in the area was not great
Speaker 1: for farming and building. So combined with the ongoing fighting
Speaker 1: that was on and off happening with the Algonquin tribe
Speaker 1: and the in fighting among the leaders of the colony,
Speaker 1: things really were on a downhill slope pretty quickly. Half
Speaker 1: of the original settlers were dead within a year. And really,
Speaker 1: although the starving time gets a lot of the the attention,
Speaker 1: things were meager from the very start, and real problems
Speaker 1: started in August of sixteen oh seven, so not many
Speaker 1: months after they arrived, when bad water and mosquitoes led
Speaker 1: to a wave of illnesses that killed a lot of
Speaker 1: the settlers and weakened just about everyone in the colony.
Speaker 1: Captain Christopher Newport arrived with two ships of supplies in
Speaker 1: early sixteen o eight. But not long after that big
Speaker 1: assistance in that big bolstering Jamestown caught fire and it
Speaker 1: destroyed most of the provisions in the equipment and the
Speaker 1: colony essentially had to start from scratch. Captain John Smith,
Speaker 1: who had been named as one of the seven Council
Speaker 1: members to run the colony. Eventually took control of it
Speaker 1: and he was made president of the colony in September
Speaker 1: of sixteen o eight. And he has this sort of
Speaker 1: reputation of being the man who saved Jamestown, like he
Speaker 1: was really the one that came in and got people's
Speaker 1: acts together. But he had been accused of plotting a
Speaker 1: mutiny while on the way over from England, so he
Speaker 1: had been a late addition to the council. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of resistance. Even though he was named as
Speaker 1: one of the people in charge, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of resistance to actually letting him build that role. And
Speaker 1: he was also one of the council's least experienced members.
Speaker 1: And as you said, he put rules and discipline into place,
Speaker 1: and he really fortified the colony's defenses, and he also
Speaker 1: tried to put a stop to some of the laziness
Speaker 1: problems they were having. It was pretty rampant in the
Speaker 1: colony with um and he set up the rule he
Speaker 1: that will not work shall not eat except by sickness.
Speaker 1: He be disabled, so he who doesn't work doesn't eat,
Speaker 1: just to set up a situation of you have to
Speaker 1: do your part if you want to continue to live here.
Speaker 1: You can't just fly around and watch other people work
Speaker 1: and then still get food. The colony made it through
Speaker 1: the winter of sixteen o eight and sixteen o nine
Speaker 1: by making increasingly desperate trades with the local Native Americans.
Speaker 1: They had planned on trading things like copper and beads
Speaker 1: for corn, but as the winter went on and they
Speaker 1: started to run out of those things, people were making
Speaker 1: increasingly desperate trades. They were trading stuff that was more
Speaker 1: and more scarce and important, like their swords, to try
Speaker 1: to get food, and in the late summer of sixteen
Speaker 1: o nine, a fleet meant to bring supplies and additional
Speaker 1: settlers was scattered by a hurricane on the way to Virginia.
Speaker 1: One of the ships, the Sea Venture, wound up shipwrecked
Speaker 1: in Bermuda, which you can hear about in our previous episode,
Speaker 1: The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown. The remainder of the ship's
Speaker 1: kind of hobbled into Jamestown to bring what they had
Speaker 1: After the storms, many of the people who arrived aboard
Speaker 1: this fleet were sick or injured or or dying, and
Speaker 1: there wasn't anywhere to house them in the forts, so
Speaker 1: they were sent out to bivouac in the corn fields,
Speaker 1: and they allegedly ate their way through all the corn
Speaker 1: that had been planted within a few days um and
Speaker 1: this is really a running theme. Every time ships show
Speaker 1: up at Jamestown, they bring more supplies, but they also
Speaker 1: bring more mouths defeat and maybe also rats which infested
Speaker 1: the corn that had been stored and ate all of it.
Speaker 1: And this actually caused john Smith to at one point
Speaker 1: sends some of the colonists elsewhere to try to live
Speaker 1: on fish and oysters because the corn was gone. It
Speaker 1: had either spoiled or been ruined by rats. But what
Speaker 1: really happened is they all just fought a lot and
Speaker 1: we're slaughtered by the Native Americans. So while john Smith
Speaker 1: did seem to hold the colony better than the previous
Speaker 1: committee had, as we said before, that committee was really
Speaker 1: a lot about in fighting and not about leading things,
Speaker 1: he had his share of jealousy and and detractors from
Speaker 1: the rest of the colony's leadership, And in October of
Speaker 1: sixteen o nine, john Smith actually had to return to
Speaker 1: England after being severely burned by an exploding bag of gunpowder.
Speaker 1: And the circumstances around that are pretty mysterious. We don't
Speaker 1: really know the scoop uh. He was though at this
Speaker 1: point on his way out as president of the colony. Anyway,
Speaker 1: new orders had arrived from England that Sir Thomas Gates,
Speaker 1: who was at that point sitting shipwrecked shipwrecked off of Bermuda,
Speaker 1: was going to be the man in charge. After Smith left,
Speaker 1: war broke out between the settlers and the Powatan Indians.
Speaker 1: These were a collection of tribes who were all tied
Speaker 1: to Chief Powhatan and Chief Power to Powetan's goal was
Speaker 1: to get rid of all the English settlers. He was
Speaker 1: done with them and one of them gone, so they
Speaker 1: lay siege to James Fort and stopped trading with settlers elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Um The tribes killed livestock along with any settlers who
Speaker 1: left the protection of the fort's palisade, and the winter
Speaker 1: that followed has become sort of famously known as the
Speaker 1: Starving Time. Only about sixty of the settlers, who initially
Speaker 1: numbered between two five hundred depending on the source that
Speaker 1: you see, survived. This was a really harsh winter. They
Speaker 1: ran completely out of food and because of the siege,
Speaker 1: they couldn't go for help. Help couldn't really come to
Speaker 1: them from elsewhere, and they were all packed inside this fort.
Speaker 1: The fort was basically just a triangular palisade that surrounded
Speaker 1: a few wattle and daubed thatch roofed buildings. So on
Speaker 1: top of there being no food and this constant threat
Speaker 1: of attack from the Native American population, they were horribly overcrowded,
Speaker 1: so illness was rampant, and it's also possible that their
Speaker 1: drinking water was contaminated with arsenic and human waste. So
Speaker 1: at that point, Acting Governor George Percy had sent fifty
Speaker 1: men to try to trade with the Powatin Indians, and
Speaker 1: only sixteen of those fifty returned. Then he sent sent
Speaker 1: a ship up the Potomac River to try to trade
Speaker 1: with a tribe there. They did manage to secure some corn,
Speaker 1: but when they heard reports of cannibalism at the fort,
Speaker 1: they decided a better idea than to go back there
Speaker 1: was to go home to England, and that's what they did.
Speaker 1: So uh completely out of food because they did not
Speaker 1: get that corn, the colonists were forced to eat rats, dogs, cats, horses,
Speaker 1: and even shoe leather. Apart from the other reports of
Speaker 1: cannibalism there was also a report of a man who
Speaker 1: had killed his pregnant wife, butchered her and salted her
Speaker 1: body to preserve the meat. Governor Percy had him hanged
Speaker 1: by his thumbs with his feet weighted until he confessed
Speaker 1: to the crime, and then as a punishment, he was
Speaker 1: burned alive. So I think this sort of speaks to
Speaker 1: what the mental state of the colony was at this point,
Speaker 1: that they had burned this man alive for uh, for
Speaker 1: killing and salting his pregnant wife. And Percy himself, sixteen
Speaker 1: years later wrote about people digging up bodies to eat
Speaker 1: them or licking up the blood from their quote their
Speaker 1: weak fellows. Uh. So it was an extremely desperate situation.
Speaker 1: I think it would be hard for most people to
Speaker 1: really imagine living through something like that, right, And so
Speaker 1: the news reports that started making their way around in
Speaker 1: this ring of weren't really about a new theory about
Speaker 1: how the colonists made it through that winter. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: more about actual forensic proof of what people already suspected
Speaker 1: or maybe just took for granted. And the proof actually
Speaker 1: came from work that was being done at the Smithsonian.
Speaker 1: So Preservation of Virginia found the skeleton and forensic anthropologist
Speaker 1: Douglas Ousley analyzed the remains, and the study was a
Speaker 1: joint effort among the Smithsonian, Colonial Williamsburg and Preservation Virginia,
Speaker 1: which is a nonprofit that is dedicated to historic preservation.
Speaker 1: The bones are a tibia, which is a leg bone,
Speaker 1: and part of a human skull, and they were found
Speaker 1: in a seventeenth century pile of refuse in July of
Speaker 1: The scarbage pile was inside a seller inside of James Fort,
Speaker 1: which was being excavated for an archaeological study. The feller
Speaker 1: was filled in hundreds of years ago, probably during the
Speaker 1: efforts to clean up and rebuild the colony, which were
Speaker 1: started by a new governor, Thomas West in sixteen ten
Speaker 1: after the starving time was over. And also in the
Speaker 1: pile were the bones of butchered animals. Uh they found
Speaker 1: other partial human remains in the same area, but these
Speaker 1: particular remains that we're talking about had obvious damage that
Speaker 1: called for a closer investigation. They were also in the
Speaker 1: cellar under a layer of newer artifacts, so you can
Speaker 1: kind of imagine that there was the seller people had
Speaker 1: been throwing butchered animals into it at some point the
Speaker 1: structure above it had broken down and collapsed, and it
Speaker 1: became sort of a convenient place for people to just
Speaker 1: throw their trash. So there are whole layers of more
Speaker 1: recent artifacts over these bones strata in there UH. And
Speaker 1: the bones in question are a girl's bones, estimated to
Speaker 1: be about age fourteen, and they can tell this from
Speaker 1: both the bones themselves and the condition of her teeth.
Speaker 1: So she had wisdom teeth and partially developed roots for them,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't yet broken through. The growth plates in
Speaker 1: her tibia had started to close, which happens around in
Speaker 1: your early teen years. UH. And they determined her sex
Speaker 1: by the shape of her skull. The team has named
Speaker 1: her Jane, and they've taken DNA samples, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: unlikely that they'll be able to link her up to
Speaker 1: modern relatives. The damage to the skull that they investigated
Speaker 1: included four shallow cuts with an attempt to break into
Speaker 1: the skull to get to the brain UH, the shattering
Speaker 1: of the skull to get to the brain, and marks
Speaker 1: from two fine bladed knives that were used to remove
Speaker 1: the face and the tongue. They are also cuts along
Speaker 1: her tibia and the marks when they look at them
Speaker 1: under heavy magnification, are consistent with known cannibalism from other cultures.
Speaker 1: So by comparing these cuts two other times when we
Speaker 1: know cannibalism was taking place, they look pretty similar. And
Speaker 1: if we also compare them to um, the cuts on
Speaker 1: the Jane skull too cuts on animal skull alls. Normally,
Speaker 1: the butchering that you would see on animal skulls is
Speaker 1: much deeper. It's the uh cuts are more forceful, but
Speaker 1: with Jane, they're not like that. They're hesitant and kind
Speaker 1: of tentative. So the overall analysis is that these cuts
Speaker 1: were made by people who were really desperate for food. UM.
Speaker 1: On top of not being used to butchering animals. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there's the obvious taboo element of what's going on,
Speaker 1: and that probably is one of the things that led
Speaker 1: to the fact that these cuts seemed to be hesitant
Speaker 1: and unsure. The combination of not really being familiar with
Speaker 1: butchering and the just massive cultural taboo going along with
Speaker 1: with what's happening and the cuts also suggests that the
Speaker 1: brain and tongue were removed, which, uh, it sounds really
Speaker 1: grizzly to the modern ear, I think, but they were
Speaker 1: both very common pieces that would be used in recipes
Speaker 1: at the time they get for an animal, it would
Speaker 1: be the same things that they would be taking right So,
Speaker 1: based on other evidence in the layer of the dig
Speaker 1: where she was found, as well as some scientific study
Speaker 1: of her bones, they think that she arrived in Jamestown
Speaker 1: in August of sixteen o nine, probably along with the
Speaker 1: damaged fleet that had been scattered by the hurricane, and
Speaker 1: researchers used isotopic testing to determine where she came from
Speaker 1: and when, and based on the isotopes in her bones,
Speaker 1: they determined that she had been eating a European wheat
Speaker 1: based diet, whereas the American diet at the time was
Speaker 1: based primarily on corn. And based on this evidence, uh
Speaker 1: they've determined that she was probably middle to upper class
Speaker 1: a young woman born in the coastal plains of southern England,
Speaker 1: or she also could have been employed with a middle
Speaker 1: to upper class family and consequently was eating the same
Speaker 1: food that they would have been eating. The team used
Speaker 1: CT scans of all the pieces of her skull to
Speaker 1: make a model of what the whole skull would have
Speaker 1: looked like before it was damaged. Then a forensic sculptor
Speaker 1: created a reconstruction of what she actually would have looked like.
Speaker 1: What's not known in all of this is how she
Speaker 1: actually died. Accounts from the time described colonists living on
Speaker 1: the people who died first rather than just killing them
Speaker 1: to eat them, apart from that case of the man
Speaker 1: who killed his wife. So uh, presumably Jane died of
Speaker 1: some other of some natural cause. We hope she wasn't
Speaker 1: killed for me, right right. It does not appear that
Speaker 1: there's no evidence at this point to suggest that she
Speaker 1: was murdered and then eaten, but that she died in
Speaker 1: some other way and then was eaten. So this was
Speaker 1: all over the news when it came out. In addition
Speaker 1: to it being all over the news, there's a whole
Speaker 1: section of the Historic Jamestown site dedicated to her remains
Speaker 1: into her story, along with a book and a video
Speaker 1: on DVD and Blu ray ready for purchase, and an
Speaker 1: exhibit historic Jamestown. So this right out of the gate,
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff to explore about Jane Jane and
Speaker 1: her story. Well, because I think you could pretty easily
Speaker 1: predict that people would be fascinated and really engaged by
Speaker 1: this information based on our our mail, yeah, we and
Speaker 1: our Facebook and Twitter and all that after after it
Speaker 1: came out, yet people really really interested in it. Um.
Speaker 1: The excavation that this came from is an excavation of
Speaker 1: the Jamestown Fort site that has been ongoing since Before
Speaker 1: that point, people thought that the original fort had washed
Speaker 1: into the river like that. It was considered to be
Speaker 1: a lost site, and it was discovered in and since
Speaker 1: that time archaeologists have discovered the palisade lines, bowl works
Speaker 1: for the Cannons, Fellers, Wells burial sites, and more than
Speaker 1: a million other artifacts. So analysis will probably still be
Speaker 1: ongoing for quite some time, and we may get more
Speaker 1: new revelations about Jamestown, yes, and more confirmation of things
Speaker 1: people already suspected are new. Uh So, yeah, that is
Speaker 1: the story of Jane and the story of this uh
Speaker 1: the starving time. In addition to it being bad enough
Speaker 1: that people were resorted to cannibalism, it was bad enough
Speaker 1: that when the winter was over, the colonists were on
Speaker 1: the verge of abandoning the site. And they only didn't
Speaker 1: when new bosses showed up and we're like, no, we're
Speaker 1: staying here. Here's somewhere, here's somewhere, equipment and more miles. Defee,
Speaker 1: that's a lot. That's a lot to go through for
Speaker 1: a human, so so yes, and if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: you also have listener mail. I have to listener mails.
Speaker 1: These are both about our recent episode, The Princess who
Speaker 1: Swallowed the Glass Piano. The first is from Laurie. Laurie says,
Speaker 1: I listened to your podcast about the lady who thought
Speaker 1: she swallowed a glass piano and thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 1: I was wondering about one thing. You said that the
Speaker 1: delusions occurred in people from the Middle Ages to the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century and people just stopped getting this particular delusion
Speaker 1: for some read and can a kind of mental illness
Speaker 1: just die off or do doctors call it something else? Today?
Speaker 1: I really enjoy your podcast and we'll continue to work
Speaker 1: my way through the archive, So thank you, Laurie. The
Speaker 1: answer to this question is that the around the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: uh psychologists and psychiatrists started changing the way that they
Speaker 1: classified mental disorders. We weren't quite to the point of
Speaker 1: the diagnostic manuals that exist today, but the the way
Speaker 1: that they looked at mental illnesses was a little different,
Speaker 1: and so there's no longer a broad category of like
Speaker 1: glass delusions, but there are things that people believe that
Speaker 1: are not true that are kind of group in under
Speaker 1: mental illnesses, under other mental illnesses. So uh, people can
Speaker 1: still have glass collusions, they're just categorized differently. Yes, there
Speaker 1: there are certainly people still who believe that they're breakable
Speaker 1: in one way or another, but that's usually lumped into
Speaker 1: some greater diagnosis than just a glass dellusion. Um. The
Speaker 1: other that we got is from Molly, and Molly says,
Speaker 1: thank you for the research you do and you're wonderfully
Speaker 1: insightful podcasts. Upon hearing your Glass Piano episode, I was
Speaker 1: reminded of a character from one of my favorite films, Emily.
Speaker 1: The character is nicknamed the glass Man. I had never
Speaker 1: questioned his history, but your story shed light on his
Speaker 1: reclusiveness and his relationship with Emily, a woman who received
Speaker 1: no physical affection in her childhood. After feeling that I
Speaker 1: had exhausted the secrets and stories of these characters, you
Speaker 1: renewed my interest in them. Thank you for teaching me
Speaker 1: and helping me make this connection and many others. First
Speaker 1: of all, thank you, Molly. I love that movie it's
Speaker 1: one of my big favorite at our house. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite movies ever. And I have always
Speaker 1: viewed him as having a real condition that does exist
Speaker 1: called FOP, which is a disease where your bones don't
Speaker 1: solidify correctly. Um, and so your bones are really fragile
Speaker 1: and breakable. And it's the same thing that Samuel L.
Speaker 1: Jackson's character as an unbreakable uh. And so I've always
Speaker 1: thought of that as a real thing, but reading it
Speaker 1: as maybe something that's all in his head, I kind
Speaker 1: of adds a fun layer to that. I need to
Speaker 1: go rewatch it now and think of it that way
Speaker 1: instead of thinking it as like a real, actual condition
Speaker 1: that he is affected by. So thank you very much, Molly,
Speaker 1: and thank you also, Laurie. If you would like to
Speaker 1: write to us about this or anything else, you can.
Speaker 1: We are at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
Speaker 1: also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class Stuff,
Speaker 1: and on Twitter at mt in History. You can find
Speaker 1: our tumbler at MSSON history dot tumbler dot com. Plus
Speaker 1: we are on Pinterest. If you would like to learn
Speaker 1: more about the grizzly subject matter of today's episode, you
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Speaker 1: You can do all that and a whole lot more
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