Savages

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Gawker ‏@Gawker 13m
Teen girl's smashed open skull is proof that Jamestown's ill-suited colonists ate their own people. http://gaw.kr/ucM4Mvt



____ Jamestown was a gruesomely failed start to the English colonization of America. The people were malnourished and disease-ridden and too dumb to eat the bountiful fish and fruits all around them. Most of the settlers were dead within the first year, and in the second hungry winter of 1609-10, the starving survivors chopped open the skull of a newly dead 14-year-old girl and feasted upon her brains.

These are the delightfully terrible findings of Smithsonian anthropologists who discovered the girl's remains at the site of the failed colony. The fragments of her skull and bones were found in long-buried rubbish along with picked-over skeletons of horses and squirrels and dogs—all evidence of the hungry colonists eating whatever didn't run away . . .

The Old Testament-style accounts of the miserable colony's founding and decline mention several episodes of cannibalism, but the discovery of the girl's shattered skull is the first physical proof that Jamestown's ill-suited adventurers ate their own people.

There were about 130 residents of Jamestown during that harsh winter, and by spring only 60 were still alive. The girl, variously described by anthropologists as a maidservant and a "high born" child because she apparently was well-fed back in England, would have been among the 70 corpses littering the awful encampment as the spring thaw began.


read: http://gawker.com/teen-girls-smashed-skull-proves-jamestown-creeps-were-486231895?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

At Port Cotage in our Voyage up the River,
we saw a Savage Boy about the age of ten years,
who had a head of hair of a perfect yellow and a
reasonable white skin, which is a Miracle among
all Savages . . .
The four and twentieth day we set up a Cross
at the head of this River, naming it Kings River,
where we proclaimed James King of England to
have the most right to it. When we had finished
and set up our Cross, we shipped our men and
made for James Fort. By the way, we came to
Pohatan’s Towre, where the Captain went
on shore suffering none to go with him. He
presented the Commander of this place, with a
Hatchet which he took joyfully, and was well
pleased.
But yet the Savages murmured at our planting
in the Country, whereupon this Werowance
made answer again very wisely of a Savage,
Why should you be offended with them as long
as they hurt you not, nor take any thing away by
force. They take but a little waste ground, which
does you nor any of us any good.
I saw Bread made by their women, which do
all their drudgery. The men take their pleasure in hunting and
their wars,
which they
are in
continually,
one
Kingdom
against
another. . . .

JAMESTOWN: 1607, THE FIRST MONTHS
Observations Gathered out of a
Discourse of the Plantation of the
Southern Colony in Virginia
by the English, 1606.
Written by that honorable Gentleman,
Master George Percy.
*London: 1608

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=32&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjABOB4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnationalhumanitiescenter.org%2Fpds%2Famerbegin%2Fsettlement%2Ftext1%2FJamestownPercyObservations.pdf&ei=X1WBUb-CObXK4AP8tYHIAw&usg=AFQjCNEHOYzMFqPHhSMxAhYJoy6hdD-AsQ&bvm=bv.45921128,d.dmg

[Drale]

1. Not savages

When you are starving 3000 miles from any civilization that you know, and in hostile lands you are going to do what you have to to survive. Its not very likely they killed the girl to eat her, she probably died then they decided to do what they had to.

[bigtree]

2. you missed the irony

. . . I don't think the settlers were 'savages' either. Bigots, maybe, but not savages; certainly not in trying to survive.