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Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
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And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
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And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
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That's right. Hey hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
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And along the way we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
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News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of
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murder, espionage and witchcraft.
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Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
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All this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're telling the stories of Britain's encounters with and presence in America in the run up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which was signed on the 4th of July 1776. In the last two episodes we've discussed how Elizabethan explorers journeyed westward in search of land, influence and advantage, followed by the creation of the Virginia Company and the founding of Jamestown. Today we arrive at the winter of 1609-10, when the settlers of Jamestown starved. According to some accounts, colonists ate horses, rats and dogs, boiled shoe leather to make it soft enough to chew, and even consumed human flesh. In fact, it was not long after that the Spanish ambassador, Don Alonso de Valesco, wrote to the King of Spain, Philip iii, telling him that the Crown should send a few ships finish what might be left. As the vast majority of English colonists had died from sheer misery and hunger. Valesco detailed how the survivors were driven to eating dogs, cat skins and other vile things, specifically the flesh of the dead. If ever the time was right for a Spanish attack to repel what was regarded as an illegal intrusion on territory they claimed as theirs, it was now. What had started as a colony of around 500 settlers in had been reduced to fewer than 60 people within months. This brutal winter came to be known as the starving time, a phrase first
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published in accounts written by leaders of the colony, Captain John Smith and Governor George Percy, and published in the 1620s. Since this time, the stories of this episode have occupied a dark corner of England's colonial past, a cautionary tale of desperation at the edge of survival. How do we explain what happened? What evidence is there to support that human flesh and other taboo foods were indeed eaten? How did contemporaries react to the stories emerging from Jamestown? And how did the colony develop from that darkest of times? And what if we'd been asking the wrong questions? My guest today argues that the Jamestown
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famine was the result of complex environmental,
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political, economic and cultural causes, and that both written and archaeological evidence supports incidents of cannibalism. She posits, however, that to understand the
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starving time, our question should not be
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did cannibalism take place? But rather, how do we explain it?
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And she challenges us to move beyond disgust or horror at eating the inedible.
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Why?
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Well, put simply, the early modern settlers ideas about food, medicine and survival were different from our own. Animals and foodstuffs we might recoil from today, and from which they too might have recoiled, could, in times of need, be understood as medicinal and restorative. On top of this, there were significant political currents that shaped the accounts we rely on today about colonist cannibalism. That is not to say we shouldn't trust them, but we need to read them with respect to the tides of the time, where contempt could be replaced with with compassion. So prepare to be fascinated with a dissection of archaeological evidence and contemporary accounts. Today, we will hear that eating the inedible, the disgusting or horrific, be that cat skin or human flesh, was something far more culturally complex and historically contingent than we might have considered until now. Welcome Dr. Rachel Winchcombe, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb. And this is not just the tutors from history hit.
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Doctor Winchcombe, it's lovely to have you on the podcast.
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Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
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So we're going to be talking today
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about events in Jamestown, an English settlement in Virginia in North America. Can you tell us a bit about this place, when the colony was established, by whom and why?
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G
So I guess the official history of the Jamestown colony begins in 1606, when the Virginia Company receives its royal charter. So this is when the English Crown give the Virginia Company the right to explore and settle in the region of North America, along the North American coast in particular. And they set sail at the end of 1606, and they arrive in the Chesapeake Bay in April 1607. Now they go into Virginia in the first place to seek their fortunes. This is a profit driven enterprise. So the Virginia Company is a joint stock company. It's made up of several investors who have poured their resources. And if the colony turns a profit, that profit will be shared amongst the investors. So this is a way of financing extremely expensive overseas projects without having to foot the bill with just a few investors. So they set sail in 1606, they arrive in April 1607 in the Chesapeake Bay, and they find a place to establish their colony on what becomes known as Jamestown Island. And it's a really awful place for a colony, is probably the worst place they could have chosen. So the thing to remember about the Virginia project is that there's two things that are motivating the expedition. The first is the profit for the Virginia Company. But the second is that the Crown wants a military presence in North America to make sure the English have a presence in North America, that they're able to establish their own territories there so that they can compete on the international stage with sports, Spain with Portugal, with France, who have all already established colonies in the region. And I think it's important to think of it as a military outpost because that helps explain why they choose Jamestown Island. Because it's an island, it's easy to defend. But apart from that, it's a terrible place for a settlement. And that's because there's no fresh water supply the water that's in the river is extremely brackish, so it's a mixture of river water and seawater. So. So when the colonists drink it, they get incredibly dehydrated. They're not refreshed at all. The land of the Jamestown island is marshy. It's riddled with mosquitoes. It's got very poor drainage. So any of the sewerage from the colony seeps up into the land. And the land itself is not agricultural land. That's why the Powhatan, the local indigenous group, has not settled there, because it doesn't. You can't establish agriculture there. So they're already at a huge disadvantage in terms of where they've located the colony. There's no fresh water, they can't grow anything particularly well, and disease is rife.
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That sounds pretty awful. Can you give a picture of those early days of its settlement?
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G
I mean, if you imagine when they arrived, there was nothing there. There's no infrastructure. You know, this is the first presence in this area. There are indigenous groups surrounding Jamestown Island. So this is the era of the Powhatan Confederacy. It's headed by Wahasenacar, who is the Mamano Toik. He's the paramount chief, and he presides over a group of around 30 indigenous tribes who pay tribute to him. So the English arrive in this area, Senecomachar. It's a very politically complex location. They arrive in this place, but there is no infrastructure. They have to build houses.
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They.
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They try and erect a church that they erect a cross when they get there, but there's nothing there and there's no food. So they have to rely on the food that they've brought with them, which is obviously in low supply. And very quickly, they become incredibly reliant on the Powhatan for supplies of food. So the good grace of Wahasanaka to gift food to the English. And in fact, only a few months after they arrive, a colonist later writes that they were on the brink of starvation already in 1607, just a few months after arrival, because their supplies are already dwindling. And in the Virginia Company's instructions to the first colonists, they even say, you know, make sure you treat the indigenous population well, because you will probably need to rely on them for food in the first instance. You will need to trade with them for food until you can get agriculture set up. So it's very precarious immediately in terms of food.
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A
And what do we know about the relationship between the indigenous people and the colonists in the years leading up to 16 and 9 to 10.
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So it's very changeable. To begin with, it's fairly positive. And that's because Waha Senaka allows it to be so. If you can imagine it from his perspective, this is a small group of strangers who have arrived in his territory. They've chosen a location that is not desirable for his settlement. So it's indigenous hunting lands, but it's not prime fertile Powhatan land. So he's happy for them to establish a settlement there. He sees them as kind of potentially useful in that he hopes that they will ally with him so that he can maintain his authority in the region. It would just be another sort of tributary of his wider power. So to begin with, relationships are fairly positive. Wahasenaca is happy to gift food to the English. Part of that is a projection of his authority in the region. But I think it's also to do with indigenous codes of hospitality, of obligation. They are happy to share food because food is considered a communal resource. It's not something that you should hoard. It's not something that you should keep for yourself. It's something that should be shared amongst the community. And in this instance, it includes the English because he sees how desperately hungry they are and in need. The English, however, have a very kind of different understanding of that relationship. So from the Powhatan side, it's almost like food aid. Almost immediately, they see that the English are starving. They provide them food to alleviate their suffering. For the English, they try and reconceptualize this as mutually beneficial trade and exchange. So they freely admit in their writings that they're in receipt of huge quantities of indigenous food, whether that be maize or venison or all sorts of things that the indigenous population are gifting to them. But they say they give things in return, things that the indigenous population are interested in. So beads, glass beads, pieces of copper, things that have real prestige within the Powhatan cultural world. But quickly those kinds of mutually beneficial reciprocal exchanges begin to disappear, and the English become a lot more belligerent in their encounters with Wahasenaca and the other chiefs of the Powhatan confederacy. And John Smith is really the orchestrator of this. So you mentioned John Smith. He is the one time governor of Jamestown. He's also one of the people that has given us the most prolific amounts of writing on the early colony. And he is very suspicious of Wahasanuka and his motivations. So he thinks that the English should not be following the Virginia Company's instructions of making friends with the Indigenous population. He thinks that they should be much firmer, much harsher in their dealings. And this is the kind of approach that he takes in the run up to the starving time. You know, there's accounts, and he writes of this himself. This is not people writing about John Smith. He says, you know, I held a pistol to an indigenous chief's head and told him, either you trade with us, either you give us food, or, you know, your people will leave here as corpses. And of course, in that instance, the indigenous population give them food. What else can they do? The English have guns, and there's not much else they can do but say, okay, here is the food. And then, you know, John Smith will throw some beads at the feet of feet of the chief to say, and here is what we give you in return. So John Smith is much more belligerent and increasingly violent in his interactions. And so it becomes less an exchange of gifts or even less of a trade of goods, and it becomes more a theft of food or a coerced trade of food are the best.
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A
So let's talk then about this winter of 6:09-10. You write of the people of Jamestown experiencing a harrowing and desperate time. Can you outline what happened and how the settlers responded? And obviously, we should probably warn listeners that some of what we're going to say is going to be rather unsettling.
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G
Yeah. So there's a few things that happen in the run up to that winter that lead to the events that we'll discuss. Because I guess the question is, why does it happen in 1609? Why does it not happen in the first winter? Why does it not happen in 1608? So there's a few things that happen that make that winter in particular devastating. So the first important thing is that a supply ship from England doesn't arrive. So up until this point, the English have been relying on shipments coming from England to replenish provisions as well as the indigenous gifts, which I'll talk about more in a minute. And this ship doesn't arrive. This sect ship doesn't arrive because it actually gets shipwrecked in Bermuda. And it takes them 10 months while they're in Bermuda to repair their ships to become seaworthy again so that they can then travel to Virginia. So that's a real blow to the colonists. They don't have that resupply, they don't have those provisions, and they're already low on food as it is. So that's the first thing. The second thing is in relation to that more kind of hostile interaction with Powhatan groups is that West Seneca increasingly retracts gifts of food. He tells his people, don't give the English any more food. They can't be trusted. They don't keep their word. They're violent. They say they're our friends, but then their actions tell a very different story. So that's the second really important thing that happens, is that the English can no longer rely on those really extensive gifts of food from the Powhatam. And I think the other thing that's behind that lack of gifting is the climactic conditions that North America is experiencing in this time. So some of this is down to the colonists behavior, but some of it really is outside of their control. So this is the period of the Little Ice Age, and this is a global phenomenon in the 17th century. It's a period of climatic cooling. And in North America it's led to a period of severe drought and excessive cold. So for the Powhatan, they probably also don't have a surplus of food either. So they're even less likely to give food to the English. And that's also another reason why it's so hard for the English to get agricultural projects underway, because they just really don't understand the climate of Virginia, especially in this moment of climactic change. So we've got the kind of environmental conditions, we've got the lack of the supply ship arriving and the retraction of indigenous gift foods. All this come together in the winter of 1609. And essentially what happens is the English begin to starve to death. They can't leave the fort because Waha Seneca has all but besieged. James 4 if the colonists leave to try and hunt, try and find food, they're met with indigenous bow and arrow, essentially. So it's increasingly dangerous for them to leave the fort. They don't have any food remaining. And then that's why we get this pivot towards eating anything that they can get their hands on. And in the written accounts we have a very clear sort of hierarchy of food that the colonists make their way through. So they eat all the supplies of any grain that they have, any wild food that they can capture, and then they have to turn their attention to foods that wouldn't normally be part of an English diet. So they talk about eating snakes, rats, horse meat, and we can talk more if you want, about why horse meat is particularly problematic for the English. Then when that kind of food has all been eaten, they get increasingly desperate. So they eat leather goods, anything that kind of would have any sort of nutritional value. And then when things get really desperate, they turn to not only their fellow colonists, but any indigenous people that have died, have been killed by the colonists. They become meat, essentially, because they are so desperate there is no food left. There is no hope of any provision coming from England. It's been months. And since they expected that resupply ship, and all they are left with are the starved, emaciated bodies of their fellow colonists.
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A
Goodness me. So you've given us an idea of some of the foods that would have been considered taboo before the starving time. And you mentioned horse meat in particular. Can you go through those a little bit? Because, I mean, I want us to sort of contend with the essential idea in your work, which is that disgust is historically flexible.
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G
And I think the idea of taboo as well is that I wouldn't say any of those foods are taboo in the sense that there are situations when all of those foods are deemed absolutely acceptable to eat. So the idea of disgust is it is a lot more flexible in this period because moments of famine, moments of need, moments of death are just more commonplace for more people in this period. So if you take something like horse meat, it's not something that is a desirable form of meat, and there's a few different reasons for that. Probably the most important reason is that your horse is something that helps you in your everyday life, is a work animal, and you don't want to eat your work animal. So horse meat doesn't become part of the English diet. The other thing is that is not seen as particularly healthy in the health regimens of the period. So if you eat horse, it's not going to give you the correct kind of nourishment that you're after. It's too hard to digest. It's probably because, again, this is probably tied to the fact that it is a work animal and therefore you don't want to be eating it in the first place. So these kind of medical ideas about it grow up alongside that. So it's not that people think it's a disgusting thing to eat or they think it's sinful to eat in some way. It's that there are a lot more desirable foods that in a normally functioning society you would eat instead. And that's the same if we think about things like rats or dogs or cats. So in this period, they're all considered vermin. So dogs have not become sort of like pets by this period. So they're considered kind of akin to vermin. And again, this is something that you wouldn't want to eat on a regular basis. Because in the early modern imagination, vermin is linked with infection, it's linked with disease, because they eat like, you know, scraps of food from the household, from waste products that have been left in the street. So again, it's because they're not seen as healthy, they're seen as dirty in some ways, infectious in other ways. So again, it's not that if you ate those things, it was seen as a real taboo. It's that you would always eat other things first. But even in the early modern period in Europe, we have lots of accounts of things like sieges and battles where people are forced to eat these things. And it wouldn't have been entirely unusual to read accounts like that of people eating vermin, of people eating horse meat when they needed to, when there was nothing else available.
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A
Yes, I mean, similar stories come out of the accounts of the siege of Sancerre in the 1570s, don't they? So what then about cannibalism? I'd like to talk about the possibility that this took place during that awful winter. Tell me about the archaeological discoveries and the contemporary written accounts and how they work together.
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G
Okay, so if we start with the written accounts, because basically all of them mention cannibalism, some of the accounts say it didn't happen. So there are some accounts that say that winter was not as bad as everybody says. But I think the problem with those reports is that they are very much written to promote the Virginia colony. So of course they're going to downplay any suggestion of cannibalism, any suggestion of this being a place that doesn't support human life. The most important written accounts of the starving time come from John Smith and from George Percy, as you mentioned. So John Smith actually didn't experience the starving time. He returned to England just prior to that winter. So he had an accident, basically, where his gunpowder bag exposed, exploded, and he went back to England to receive treatment for that injury. So he is not in Virginia during that winter. And his account is very critical of George Percy's governorship. So he's governor during the starving time. And John Smith basically lays the blame for that winter at the feet of George Percy. So that's one of the accounts. And then George Percy's account is written in response to Smith. So basically, to say what John Smith has said about my leadership is unfair. These are the circumstances of that winter, and this is why these terrible things happen. So in each of those accounts, they talk about cannibalism and they talk about cannibalism. In different ways. So we have accounts, for example, of colonists drinking the blood of other colonists that had died to survive. We have accounts of colonists eating the flesh of an indigenous man who doesn't seem like they killed him, died in some other way and they ate his body. And then we have one other account of cannibalism, which is a colonist who is said to have murdered his wife, eaten her and preserved her flesh for consumption later. So they're kind of three different stories of cannibalism and they do different work. And the archaeological evidence for those different forms of cannibalism is patchy. So archaeologists at Jamestown have found evidence of survival cannibalism at Jamestown for that period. So they found a deposit that can be dated to that winter and that is associated with food preparation. So in that deposit they have lots of other faunal remains, the remains of animals that have been process for food. And within that deposit they found the bones of a 14 year old girl. So they did sort of isotopic analysis on the bones and on her teeth to work out how old she would have been. So she was around 14. And on her bones, on the leg bone and on the skull, they found evidence of butchery. So these are things that are done to the body post mortem, so they're not the cause of her death. You know, she wasn't, she wasn't stabbed, she wasn't killed with a sword or anything like that. These look like butchery, Mars. It looks like the flesh has been carefully removed from the bones. So archaeologists at Jamestown are convinced that this is evidence of cannibalism taking place during that winter. So these are not just stories that are meant to either vilified the leadership of George Percy, according to John Smith, or to defend Percy's leadership by showing how absolutely awful the conditions in the colony were that winter. This is something that archaeologists have found evidence for alongside evidence of eating those other foods that those accounts mention. So the vermin, the horse meat, things like that.
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A
So it seems indisputable really that it happened. But can we talk about the attitudes that we see in the accounts? Because it seems that some of the written accounts make the colonists actions look like justifiable cannibalism. No moral judgment, no disgust. But on the other hand, that instance you mentioned of a man allegedly murdering and eating his wife is widely reviled. So can you talk about the sort of discrepancies in reaction here to the idea of cannibalism?
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G
Yeah, so I think when we say cannibalism, it can mean lots of different things. And I think that's true now as well. So if we think about cannibalism, we usually think of the consumption of a human body, but that can look, that can be viewed in very different ways. So if we think of something like a blood transfusion today, that is the taking in of a substance from one human body into another human body, we don't consider that cannibalism because it's medically necessary, it's therapeutic. And I think it's also because it's not consumed as food. So we don't see that as cannibalism. And those same kinds of nuances apply in the early modern period. So those behaviors that we see are not all considered what we might think of as cannibalism. Some of them are seen as medically appropriate, medically acceptable, and others are seen as sinful and morally repugnant. And there's reasons behind all of that. So if we go back to one of the examples that I mentioned, and that was the colonists drinking the blood of other colonists. Now that might seem like a really shocking thing to our eyes today. The idea of people, you know, sucking the blood from a fellow human being, vampiric resonances to it. But in that period, I don't think that would have been shocking at all. Because human blood is seen as this really medically important substance. They're kind of amazed by the properties of human blood. We've got accounts of people taking cups, for example, to public executions to try and catch the blood of executed criminals so that they can then drink it and impart some of that kind of vitality and health giving properties from that blood. You know, we've got people like Robert Boyle, the father of modern science, making experiments on human blood, trying to distill it to its very essence so that it can be used as a medical treatment. So the idea of consuming human blood as a form of medicine was not all that shocking in the early modern period. So I think when people read those accounts, they would have had a great deal of sympathy for those colonists and they would have recognized that they were trying to use a well known medical remedy for if you're starving, okay, the blood would nourish the body, it would provide you with health giving properties that would restore your energy, that would restore your vitality. So I think in an early modern sense, that's not that unusual. Now if we go back to Jane. So the name of the girl that was discovered by the archaeologist was given the name Jane. If we go back to her and where a lot of these marks are found, again, I think we can unpick some of that nuance about what is considered appropriate consumption of a human body and what is inappropriate. So a lot of the markings are on her skull, so that seems to be where most of the flesh is taken from. Although it is important to say that they haven't found her entire skeleton. So we don't know if other parts of the body were also cannibalized. Now the human skull is again something that has really important medical properties in the early modern period. And you can go to recipe collections in early modern England. So recipe books belonging to gentlewomen to really established families. And in those recipe books you will find medicinal recipes that use powdered human skull in them. You know, it's seen as a really important ingredient for really sort of terrifying diseases of the period. And again, it's something that you could buy in your apothecary now, whether it was really ground human skull is another question. But it's something that people were happy to write down in their recipe books as being part of these recipes. And again, it's to do with the vitality of the human body and where that resides at death. So again, it's the schools of executed criminals that are most highly sought after because they have a sudden death when they're executed. All that vitality, all that life force remains in the brain and is therefore imparted into the skull. So I think that's probably why we see those markings on Jane's skull, because this is a recognized, again, medical use of the human body. So it's the colonists way, I think of saying, okay, we're in desperate situation. We have to make this choice. How do we do it in the most medically appropriate way? We start with blood. This is something that's used therapeutically in Europe, and we start with the skull. So they're very much. Those are parts of the human body that are very much embedded in European medical ideas of the period. They're not that unusual.
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A
And is there a distinction here about intention as well? Is the story of the man murdering his wife to eat her problematic as opposed to someone who has died and therefore it's a survival cannibalism?
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G
Yeah, definitely, because we have people like Francis Bacon, for example, who in his Natural History, he writes about cannibalism. And he says what makes cannibalism sinful is the fact that you murder somebody in order to eat their body. So he also talks about the therapeutic power of human blood and how soldiers have used it, you know, to survive on the battlefield by, you know, sucking the blood out of the vein of their fallen compatriots. But he says the distinguishing feature what makes some forms of cannibalism sinful is that it involves murder. And this is what we see with that colonist. So he murders his wife, he chooses to do that in order to consume her body. So he's committed a grave sin, murder. There's no escaping that. There's the other thing that he purportedly does, is preserve her flesh for consumption later. So it's not just a momentary act of desperation, it's something that he intends to do again. And this, in the minds of English readers, would have conjured images of Native American cannibals that had peppered accounts of Spanish colonization in South America. This idea that some people eat human flesh because they enjoy it. Of course, this is all part of the, you know, Spanish colonial imagination, but that would have conjured those same images, I think, for English readers. This idea that he's not just doing it out of desperation. He wanted to murder his wife, and then he's chosen to preserve her flesh so that he can eat it again later. So there's an element of pleasure taken in that form of cannibalism. And that's what makes that so sinful. And that's why George Percy, in his account, is very clear that he has that man executed immediately. Because that is a sin that's not deemed acceptable in any sort of English dietary regime.
- [36:19]
A
Do we know anything about the reaction of people back home in England, not least the Virginia Company and the King, to the stories that were coming out
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G
of Jamestown in terms of the reactions? We don't have any written accounts of English reactions. All we can do, really, is piece together what happened and what the response might have been. I think the fact that they're writing this down at all suggests that they don't expect readers to react in horror, because otherwise, why write about it in the first place? Why say it happened if you think people are going to react badly to it?
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A
That's fascinating. So one might have argued the opposite, that there's something politicized about writing it and denigrating these colonists. But you're arguing that the presence of cannibalism in the records speaks to a lack of horror.
- [37:13]
G
I think so, because the people that are writing about it are people that were part of this venture. George Percy is there at the time. He suffered through this winter. He doesn't gain anything, I don't think, by saying that cannibalism took place if it didn't. I think he expects a level of sympathy, and that's why he writes in the way that he does. He wants to expose for his readers how absolutely awful that winter was. And what could be more awful than having to consume the flesh of your fellow colonists? And I think that's why the other story is included, the story of the colonist murdering his wife, because it shows that there is a line, there is a red line that cannot be crossed. So it shows that even though a lot of what we might consider normative social behavior breaks down in that winter in Jamestown, it doesn't break down completely. And Percy makes sure that it doesn't break down by having him executed. So I think the fact that they include these stories and they include these kind of different stories of cannibalism is really important. I think if they thought people were going to react in disgust, they wouldn't have included the accounts of the poor colonists sucking the blood or those ones that they thought would elicit sympathy. And even in John Smith's telling, he says, you know, he has incredible sympathy with. For those at the bottom of the social spectrum, he says they've been incredibly let down by the colonial leadership and this is all that they could do to survive. So his reaction is sympathetic and I think he expects his reader's reaction to be sympathetic as well. And he almost makes a joke about the colonists who murdered his wife. I think he doesn't necessarily believe that story took place. So even in the written accounts, you see these very different reactions to different forms of what we might consider cannibalistic behaviour. And I think the fact that they're included tells us that the writers of these accounts don't expect to elicit disgust in the readers of these accounts.
- [39:27]
A
Now, although there's no evidence of cannibalism after the starving time, as I understand it, food does continue to be a contentious issue in Jamestown. Can you tell us about the breakfast table massacre of 1622 and the poisoned sack wine event of 1623?
- [39:47]
G
Okay, so they nearly all starve to death. A lot of people die in that winter. But they're saved in the nick of time, basically by that shipwrecked ship in the Bermudas. That supply, supply mission finally arrives in Virginia just as the final colonists are about to expire. And they bring enough food, but they are planning to desert the colony even after that. And then another expedition arrives from England and they're forced to turn around and go right back to Jamestown and resettle. So the colony is really nearly abandoned after the starving time. That's how bad things have gotten. The survivors do not wish to stay there. They're incredibly weak. They're obviously traumatized by what they've experienced. But the colony does survive, just. And the colony's fortunes begin to turn a little bit with the introduction of tobacco cultivation. So in 1612, John Rolfe introduces a new strain of tobacco to the colony, which is sweeter, which is more palatable for European consumers. And this is kind of where the English then put their attention, and they put their attention on tobacco at the expense of producing food. Now, you think, you'd think they would have learned their lesson from the starving time, but I guess this is a new group of settlers, those with the memory of the starving time. They're few and far between now. Most of them perish during that winter. So we've got this kind of exclusive focus on tobacco cultivation, which means that food Supplies remain incredibly precarious. In 1614, John Rolfe marries Pocahontas, who is the daughter of Wahasanaka. You know, there's a big story there about how she is kidnapped by the English, how she's coerced into converting to Christianity. She's married to John Rolfe. She becomes like this bargaining chip for the English. They know she's the favourite daughter of Wahasenacar. They know he won't attack while she's in the settlement. So she marries John Rolfe. And we get kind of an uneasy peace between the Powhatan Confederacy and the English colonists. And with that peace, trade in food is established again. So for a few years, the colony is ticking along fairly competently. They're exporting tobacco, they're able to import food. They're able to start growing maize for themselves using indigenous techniques. They're still being gifted supplies of food from the Powhatan during this kind of era of, I say peace. It's a very uneasy piece, though I wouldn't say it's friendly relations. It's definitely not how it was in the first few months of English settlement. And that is the case up until Wahasenacar dies. Now, after he dies, his brother Oponkankanu inherits the chiefdom. He becomes the Mamanatowic. And he is much more negative towards the English colonists than his brother. You know, he doesn't see them as a group of people that the English can coexist with, especially because as tobacco cultivation grows and grows, the English seize ever more Powhatan lands. And these are incredibly fertile Powhatan lands that have been worked for generations by indigenous women to make them extremely productive in terms of food supplies. And so a lot of that gets taken and is given over to tobacco cultivation, which exhausts the soil, which makes it extremely unproductive for any other forms of agriculture. So that's the context of what happens in 1622. So this has been something that's been brewing over a number of years as indigenous lands are taken, as indigenous ecological stewardship of that region is undermined by the English presence, Oppen Kankanu decides that he needs to push the English back to the vicinity of Jamestown. That's where they had their settlement to begin with. That's why his brother allowed them to settle. And that's where they should be staying. They shouldn't be expanding outwards to expand their tobacco cultivation. So in 1622, he launches an attack on the colonists, and it completely catches the English colonists off guard. So up until this Point, indigenous peoples had been into English homes. They'd shared food, this key act of hospitality both for indigenous communities and in English society. This idea of common salty, that before you trade for goods, you might share a meal before you do so. So the indigenous peoples who are visiting the colonists start that day in March 1622, like they did any other day. They come into the colonists home. This is according to English accounts. The colonists put down their weapons, they begin to eat, and then quite suddenly, the Powhatan launched their attack. And it's indiscriminate. Hundreds of colonists are killed in that one day. And just like with the starving time, the population of the Virginia colony is decimated. And again, it's all around food. And I think it's really telling that Oppen Kankanu decided to launch this attack at the breakfast table, at the dining table of the English colonists. He knew that this would have struck a chord with them. He recognized that they too understood common salty as something that was necessary for strong social bonds. That was the case for the English. It was the case for the Powhatan as well. So by launching that attack there, he was very clear in saying to the English colonists, you have undermined this relationship through years and years of taking and taking and not reciprocating the goodwill the first his brother gave them. And then he continued for a short time. So it was really shocking for the colonists. And again, it exposed their dependency, it exposed their weakness because they have no way of defending themselves because they had let them into the settlements, they'd let them in with their weapons. And the result was devastating. Devastating. In.
- [46:11]
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- [47:41]
A
And the following year, we have the Poison Sack Wine event. And I suppose the context here is that we're in another famine in 1622-23, killing hundreds. So perhaps we should ought to talk about that first. What are people's emotional responses to food? Are they different from what had happened in the starving time? How should we understand this event?
- [48:08]
G
So the same thing happens after the 1622 attack in that the English don't have enough food supplies to support themselves. And again, they're now in a period of open warfare with the Powhatan Confederacy. And what the English do in response to that attack is brutal. So this is the very end of any form of coexistence between the Powhatan and the English. In response to that attack, the English colonists are out for revenge. So they burn down indigenous settlements, they destroy indigenous harvest, they steal food where they can because they haven't got any for themselves. And again, that would have been really shocking for indigenous groups, this kind of indiscriminate destruction of their food supplies. It would have been seen as incredibly wasteful to destroy that food rather than just take it. So they burnt their fields to the ground. So after that, you've got no kind of coexistence. The indigenous population are not going to be gifting food to the English any longer after that. And then of course, we get a period again of hunger. And this is exacerbated by the fact that the Virginia Company continue to send new settlers to the colony. So they keep sending people over, and the colonists who are already in Virginia keep saying to the Virginia Company, you need to send people who are better prepared because they just become extra mounds to feed. So we've got really clear lists of what food colonists in Virginia say newcomers should bring with them. They should bring enough food to be self sufficient for the first 18 months. That's how long they think it will take for them to establish their own plot of maize, to establish any sort of farming for themselves. But that doesn't happen. People keep turning up with very little provisions. And in that situation, what happens is that the colonists who are already in Virginia just steal the food from the newcomers who arrive. And then you've got not only the breakdown of social relations between the colonists and the indigenous population, but you've also got the breakdown of relationships within the colony itself. You have people stealing food. You have people eating what they can. They don't want to share food. There are bodies lying dead in the streets, unburied, because people are too weak. People are too apathetic.
- [50:34]
A
People are too.
- [50:35]
G
Because they're so hungry, they have nothing to eat. And we've got these really devastating letters written home that the Virginia Company preserve as kind of proof of the mismanagement of the colony to be used against people later. So that's why we have these records. The Virginia Company decides what to keep and what to destroy. So it's a partial record of this period, for sure. But we have the letters of, for example, Richard Fraythorne, who is a young indentured servant. He arrives in Virginia just after the attack of 1622. And he's about 12 years old at the time, so really young. And he writes home begging his parents to redeem his indenture, basically to pay for him to come home. Because he says it's, you know, it's absolutely horrendous in Virginia. There's no food. He's scared. He's scared of the indigenous population and what they might do. He's situated at a settlement called Martin's Hundred, which is quite a distance from Jamestown. So he feels very vulnerable, very isolated. He says there's nothing to eat but loblolly, which is kind of a water gruel. He also talks about how, you know, he was promised things like venison and foul. He was told those things were abundant in Virginia. And he's not seen any of that since his arrival. He talks about how when he arrived, the other colonists who were already there stole his provisions, stole his clothes, so he has nothing left. And he's writing home begging and begging for his parents to, if they can't redeem his indenture, if they can't bring him home, at least send him a little cheese, a little butter, a little bit of beef. So these comforting food from home that he hopes will get him through this absolutely horrendous time. But Richard doesn't return home. He doesn't receive any of those food supplies. And he's in a list of the dead just a couple of years later. So he doesn't survive very long at all. And his letters are a real stark reminder of what it must have been like for a newcomer arriving in the wake of that attack. No food, no compassion from any of the colonists who were there, because everybody is experiencing a really, really awful time.
- [52:42]
A
That's a very upsetting story. You know, this is a boy by our standards and even by theirs. And here he is, starving to death. To begin to draw our discussion to a close, should we regard the starving time, the stories of cannibalism, the events of the 1620s, as evidence that the colonial experiment seemed to be doomed?
- [53:08]
G
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of remarkable that it doesn't collapse. And I think the important thing to remember, and I think about this a lot when I'm researching this, is that I think part of the reason why they carry on is because there's no consistent memory of these events because so many people die. So if we think about the colonial population in Virginia, although it might not fluctuate that much across this period, it's because they're sending so many new people. So it's not that from the 100 people that arrive in 1607, all of those people are still living in the 1620s. That's not the case at all. Most of them have died. So it's almost like the Virginia Company are sending a conveyor belt of people to this colony just to keep it going, just so that they can hang on until their tobacco crop becomes profitable. And so these people become kind of expendable to the Virginia Company. And other people have written about the fact that a lot of people that are sent to Virginia early on are compelled to do so. So poor Richard Fra Thorne, he doesn't choose to go to America. He's likely sent by his parish. He's a poor child of a parish in London, and he's probably sent there so that he can work for a master. They will be responsible for his care, and he has no choice in the matter. And that's the case for many people that went to Virginia. So I think that's part of the reason why it doesn't collapse completely, because they just keep sending new people. And there's none of that. I mean, we do get the memory of these events. So people, of course, write about the starving time again in the 1620s when this renewed famine is emerging, because they say, oh, we've been through this before. Remember when this happened before? But even when they're writing about it, it's often for point scoring within the Virginia Company, within the colony's governance, it's a way of denigrating the leadership of one particular faction, of promoting the leadership of somebody else. So those colonists that are on the kind of front line of those experiences, those who are really suffering, they're kind of forgotten in these narratives. They're not important. And I think that's the reason why they keep going is because there's none of that memory. And then when tobacco is cultivated, they think, if we can hang on long enough, this is going to make us enough profit and that will secure the future of the colony. And I think that, coupled with the fact that the colony becomes a royal colony in 1624 in response to the attack of 1620, 1622, that's why it survives, but only by the skin of its teeth. The fact that it's not abandoned after the starving time is remarkable. And that's because they're forced to go back. Essentially, the colonists are told, we're not going to take you back to England, we're going to go back and we're going to try again. So I don't think it's because people wanted to stay there and keep trying. I think the Virginia Company made that happen and they made that happen by sending new people and by just hoping that eventually the profits from tobacco would make it a desirable enough place for people to go willingly. And that's really what happens from the kind of after the 1620s onwards. People think, you know, this is a place where I might be able to own my own land, where I might be able to make a small fortune with tobacco cultivation. So people do come willingly as well.
- [56:31]
A
But.
- [56:32]
G
But is after at least a couple of decades of real deprivation.
- [56:38]
A
You are not an American, but you obviously are a historian of this period, and so I wonder what your relationship is to Thanksgiving.
- [56:51]
G
I mean, Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday and I think, you know, it's one that is fraught. And it's fraught because it tells a very clean, simple narrative of those early decades of colonisation. And Thanksgiving tends to be focused around New England and not Jamestown, probably because of these kinds of stories emerging from Jamestown. It's a much darker initial history in the written record. And Thanksgiving is problematic because it tells a story of uncomplicated relationships between colonists and indigenous people. And it kind of implies that the colonists were always thankful for the help that indigenous peoples gave them and for the food that they were given. And as we've seen with John Smith, with their response to, you know, the. The goodwill of indigenous people, they weren't thankful a lot of the time. They expected these things. They thought that they were trading fairly with it. They. I don't think they thought they were trading fairly with indigenous groups, but they portrayed those trades as a fair trade. So I think Thanksgiving is incredibly problematic. It's problematic because it suggests that although life was a little bit difficult to begin with, it Very quickly got back on track for colonists. That's not true. We've seen that with Jamestown. And it's also problematic because it makes the relationship between indigenous communities and English colonists seem like that it's not fraught with difficulties, and it obviously was. And that's true in New England as it is in Virginia. And I think indigenous scholars have done a lot of to say what the problems are with Thanksgiving and why it's a really painful story for them as well. Because, you know, in the wake of these events, in the wake of the first Thanksgiving at New England, their lives were transformed by English colonization. Their food ways were transformed by English colonization. Their ability to live off their land was completely shifted by tobacco cultivation in Virginia. They no longer had access to the same kinds of resources that they did prior to the English arrival. And I think Thanksgiving is a reminder of that.
- [59:02]
A
Finally, then, Rachel, why is the study of food such a powerful way to understand people in the past? What does it give us that other histories cannot?
- [59:13]
G
It's a necessity, isn't it? You can't live without food. And so in that sense, it's something that is shared by everybody. Maybe we don't know what it's like to experience hunger to the same degree that people would have experienced it then, but we can at least imagine what it would be like to not have anything to eat, or what it would be like to not have the foods that you're used to, or what it would be like to have to wait for food to arrive. So I think it's really important because you can't live without it. And for a lot of very early colonial history, that is exactly what the colonists are kind of forced to do. They're forced to live without regular supplies of food. They're forced to change their diets to the point where they don't really match what they would have been used to eating. You know, they were fed this line that if you go to America, you're going to have a vast diet of really luxurious foods that you could never imagine eating back in England. And none of that transpires. So food is this really powerful cultural object, is powerful today as it was then. And I think that's why it's such a really interesting avenue to think through, because we all eat food, and we can imagine what it would be like not to have that. So I think it kind of shrinks the distance between us and people in the past, because eating is an experience that we all engage in, hopefully on a daily basis. And so we can imagine what it would be like not to have food or to have certain kinds of food. It can tell very positive stories as well. It's not all negative, but I think it's because eating is a universal. It's a universal experience, and it's a cultural phenomenon that crosses geographies, chronologies, cultures.
- [61:00]
A
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Rachel Winscombe, for coming on to talk so insightfully and powerfully about this period of the starving time. It's been revelatory.
- [61:12]
F
Thank you.
- [61:12]
G
Thank you for having me.
- [61:15]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [61:53]
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