Surviving the Jamestown winter of 1609

Jamestown was the very first English colonial settlement in North America. It was established on May 4, 1607, as “James Fort” and acted as the colonial capital of the country between 1616 and 1699.

The first people to step foot on the ship to take them to the new world had no idea what they were in for, as they were to be the first European settlers to establish a permanent residence on the continent. After a three-month voyage, their ship finally landed on a shore that no European had ever seen, and they were tasked with not only building but staying alive in a settlement.

The local Native American tribe, the Paspahegh were initially peaceful and offered food and support to the colonists, something that saved their lives in the first year. After the relationship between the settlers and the natives quickly went bad, there was no more food, and the colonists were tasked with farming their own crops, something that none of them had any knowledge of.

Two years after their arrival and with no help from the natives, the colony ran into a very harsh winter. That year’s food gathering provided barely anything and the crops didn’t fare much better, with most people trying to grow cash crops like tobacco instead of stockpiling grain for the winter.

There was support from England but the problem was the voyage took between two and three months each way, depending on the weather and how kind the wind was being, so even if there was a ship already sitting at port, help would not come for at least four months.

Why was the Jamestown winter of 1609 so deadly?

There were around 500 colonists in Jamestown at the start of winter in 1609, but they barely had enough food to last them a week. They had no preservable food stored and hunting was being dominated by the local Indian tribes who didn’t want to share with the arrogant and hostile settlers, and so the long process of starvation began.

First, all of the actual food was eaten, any vegetables from the end of summer and a few corn cobs. After this people tried fishing nonstop in the river but the occasional small freshwater fish between 500 people didn’t go very far. People’s pets were eaten next, along with any rats or birds people could catch, but these tiny food sources held very low amounts of calories and fat and were quickly hunted to extinction within the settlement.

It isn’t known exactly what people did to survive the winter, but a study conducted in 2013 may have revealed evidence of cannibalism. A team of archaeologists was conducting a dig operation within the old boundaries of Jamestown and found the remains of what they believe to have been a girl around the age of 14.

Finding skeletons in a place such as Jamestown isn’t anything unusual, but this skeleton was placed in a pit with a load of animal bones and had what appeared to be butchering marks. Whoever this person was seems to have been cut up into portions of meat after she died, and apparently, the marks on the bones indicate that there were two people doing the butchering.

To think cannibalism happened in such a desperate situation is entirely reasonable, as there have been many cases of survivors eating each other over the years, and most people who haven’t eaten for a couple of weeks would probably give serious thought to cooking up the guy who just died from the cold.

Out of around 500 people who lived in Jamestown, only 60 made it to the other side of winter, and who knows how many of them did so through methods they’d like to forget. Unfortunately records about things such as the food people had and who ate who weren’t really kept, but it isn’t hard to imagine out of sheer desperation what a parent would do to feed their starving children. In the spring a supply ship arrived from England and the remaining settlers were saved, but the details of what happened during that winter were quickly swept under the carpet.