Today in 1607, the first permanent English colony in North America is founded in Virginia. It’s named Jamestown and founded with 100 colonists
On landing, they have a thanksgiving ceremony to thank God for a safe crossing and delivering them to this new land. Building starts with a palisade triangular fort with a church, warehouse and houses that double as a tavern, school and trade shops. Although there was a tavern, think of it more as just a meeting hall place rather than a pub. The site is a small firm island in a salt marsh that would prove to be a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
The Colonists enjoy a mixed relationship with the local Native American tribe, the Powhatan whose hunting and fishing grounds they have now set up on.
Although established, the settlers began to die due to illness, infighting and crop failure. Many of the English plants that had been brought across couldn’t grow or those that did had very low yields. Fishing was possible but not enough to sustain the entire population. The river water wasn’t clean enough and had a swampy slime quality to it, even boiled and rudimentary filtration it wasn’t good.
The Powhatan did send food aid to the settlers (not be be confused with Thanksgiving) to assist the settlers but their demands and more hostile attitudes ended this assistance.
By 1609-1610, the era known as the “Starving Time” the population fell by 80% and became so bad that the survivors took to eating cats, dogs, rats, leather belts & boots and eventually the ultimate sin- cannibalism. From what archaeologists have found, they began to eat the flesh of the recently deceased, a near intact skull of a 14 year old girl (pic 2) was discovered in a bone pile and shows the knife marks (pic 3) where her skin was peeled from her bones and a cracking of the cranium to access the brain. Tests have show that she was (thankfully) dead before this happened but the rest of her body is lost to time so we don’t know if she died naturally or was murdered.
Her face has been reconstructed and along with her skull can be seen at the Jamestown Museum, she is named Jane as in Jane Doe, the go to name for unknown women in the US.
The colony itself was nearly abandoned and the survivors had accepted their fate when in June 1610
as they walked the river towards the sea, they saw a resupply convoy approaching and salvation. An earlier resupply convoy had been lost in a hurricane near Bermuda in 1609.