17th-century remains of a young girl excavated from Jamestown, Virginia, show evidence of cannibalism in the colony.
Last week, the news broke that evidence of cannibalism had been found at the Jamestown colony in Virginia. Cut and sawing marks have been found on the skull and leg bones of a young woman, suggesting that her flesh was stripped and eaten after death. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. The cannibalism is thought to date from the “starving time” of 1609–1610. The findings were a confirmation of what had been recorded in various accounts of the “starving time, ” when only Only 61 of 500 colonists survived. Nevertheless, there was considerable disagreement among historians whether the accounts were accurate, or merely propaganda spread by various factions associated with the settlement. The physical evidence appears now to have largely settled the dispute.
Evidence of Cannibalism Found at Jamestown Colony
As pointed out by Richard Sugg writing in the Guardian – the Jamestown cannibalism should be no surprise; it is just part of human history. Cannibalism at sea, in dire emergencies, such as a ship wreck, was almost considered acceptable.
When the yacht Mignonette sank in the South Atlantic in 1884, the captain, two crew members and a cabin boy, named Richard Parker, were left drifting in a lifeboat. The cabin boy reportedly drank salt water to assuage his thirst and slipped into a coma. The practical, if literally, blood-thirsty captain decided that there was less chance of spoilage if they killed the boy before he died. So, they killed and ate the cabin boy. The three were rescued four days later by the German sailing barque Montezuma, named fittingly enough after the Aztec king who practiced ritual cannibalism.
When returned to shore, the captain gave a full and frank account of what happened in the lifeboat, believing that they were fully justified in killing and eating Richard Parker under the Customs of the Sea. The British court, however, disagreed. Their trial, R v Dudley and Stephens, established a legal precedent in common law around the world, that necessity is no defense to a charge of murder. The three men were found guilty, though their sentences were later commuted to six months hard labor.
If the name Richard Parker sounds familiar, if may be because Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, Life of Pi, the novel’s hero, Pi, is trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger, named Richard Parker.
Thanks to Alaric Bond and Phil Leon for contributing to the post.
“there is no cannibalism in the Royal Navy. . . Jenkins, put that leg down!”
sorry, couldn’t resist ^_^
Downright gruesome. Poor Parker.
The latest entry on the Shipping News, the blog of the MarineLives project, discusses evidence of cannibalism off the Maryland Coast in early 1650. (1) The article compares a previously unpublished petition in the High Court of Admiralty of London by the wives of two mariners on the Virginia Merchant, with the published account by Colonel Henry Norwood of that ship’s traumatic voyage from London to Jamestown in 1659. (2) A linked wiki article hosted on MarineLives-Tools offeres readers the opportunity to compare accounts and to annotate them with their further researcjes. (3)
The petition records the abandonment of twenty-three men and women of the Virginia merchant on Assateague Island. They were already severely malnourished:
“At the length the rage and violence of their famine soe much increasing and being not able to eate those leaves and longer they cast lotts which of them should be shott the next day to serve for food for the rest; which was miraculously prevented by the suddaine and unexpected fall of a great tree that night which killed 2 men and a woman of their Company: which the rest of the Company left alive were forced to eate and live upon untill such time as they were by Gods providence releived by the very heathen and by them in Canoes transported over the river to the other side and soe travelled to Virginia by land where divers of them dyed as soone as they came thense, and some dyed on that Island by famine.”
Colonel Norwood’s published account corroborates the eating of human flesh, but not the story of drawing lots. Norwood was one of the party abandoned on the island, and a vital force in keeping thirteen of the nineteen (by his account) alive.
He claims credit for the suggest that they eat the flesh of the newly dead, and suggests that there was a certain etiquette, with women and men each eating bodies of their own sex.
“Of the three weak women before-mentioned, one had the envied happiness to die about this time; and it was my advice to the survivors, who were following her apace, to endeavour their own preservation by converting, her dead carcase into food, as they did to good effect. The same counsel was embrac’d by those of our sex: the living fed upon the dead; four of our company having the happiness to end their miserable lives on Sunday night the _ day of January. Their chief distemper, ’tis true, was hunger; but it pleased God to hasten their exit by an immoderate access of cold, caused by a most terrible storm of hail and snow at north-west, on the Sunday aforesaid, which did not only dispatch those four to their long homes, but did sorely threaten all that remained alive, to perish by the same fate.” (4)
Sources:
(1) http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2013/05/18/cannibal-tales/, viewed 19/05/13
(2) TNA, HCA 15/5 f.99: http://marinelives-transcript.org/scripto/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=2961&scripto_doc_page_id=2912, viewed 19/05/13
(3) http://marinelives-tools.wikispot.org/Cannibal_tales
(4) Colonel Norwood, A Voyage to Virginia (1649), in Tracts and Other Paper Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, vol. 3 (Gloucester, MA, 1963), viewable at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=J1025.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1, viewed 19/05/13
Correction to the previous submission:
“The article compares a previously unpublished petition in the High Court of Admiralty of London by the wives of two mariners on the Virginia Merchant, with the published account by Colonel Henry Norwood of that ship’s traumatic voyage from London to Jamestown in 1649”
NOTE 1649, not 1659
Fascinating. Thanks.
Rick