Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley

Author:Benjamin Woolley [Benjamin Woolley ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007404971
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

After the departure of the injured Smith in October, and Powhatan’s execution of Ratcliffe, an already dire situation had deteriorated rapidly. The abandonment of the settlements at the falls and Nandsamund overwhelmed Jamestown, and the scant supplies remaining in the store were soon consumed. ‘To eat, many of our men this starving time did run away unto the savages, whom we never heard of after,’ Percy noted. The rest turned inwards, and began to devour the very body of the company. The horses transported from England were the first to go, then the pigs, then the chickens, then the dogs, the cats, the rats, the mice, then snakes and other ‘vermin’, then toadstools and fungi such as ‘Jew’s Ear, or what else we found growing upon the ground that would fill either mouth or belly’, then anything made of leather, including shoes, then the ‘flesh and excrements of man’, including the corpse of a recently slain Indian, dug up from his makeshift grave and ‘boiled and stewed with roots and herbs’. Some lapped up the blood ‘from their weak fellows’ as they bled to death.9

With famine came madness. Hugh Price, ‘being pinched with extreme famine, in a furious distracted mood’, had rushed into the central marketplace jabbering blasphemies, and cried out that no virtuous God would suffer his creatures to endure such ‘miseries’. That afternoon, he went off into the woods with a ‘butcher, a corpulent fat man’, in a search for sustenance. Both men were picked off by Indian snipers, and Percy noted that, while the body of the fat butcher was later found untouched except for ‘the savages’ arrows whereby he received his death’, Price’s ‘lean, spare’ body ‘was rent in pieces with wolves or other wild beasts, and his bowels torn out of his body’ – divine retribution, in Percy’s estimation, for his crisis of faith.

A gentleman called Henry Collins had killed his pregnant wife. He ripped the foetus from her womb, and threw it into the river. He carefully jointed and salted the rest of her remains, and secreted them round his house. When she was reported missing, his quarters were searched, and ‘parts of her mangled body were discovered’. Percy, succumbing to the brutalizing conditions, ordered that Collins be strung up from the branch of a tree by his thumbs, his feet weighted down. Once he had confessed to his crime, he was ‘burned for his horrible villainy’.10

Percy’s efforts to alleviate the crisis with supplies from the Indians came to nothing. The neighbouring Paspaheghans were laying siege to the fort, picking off any who ventured beyond the blockhouse that guarded the island’s causeway. The only hope was to make contact with groups beyond Powhatan’s domains, in the northern reaches of the Chesapeake, or the southern realms of Chowanoke. However, the settlers no longer had the shipping to embark on such an expedition. Captain Francis West and thirty-seven of his men had disappeared with one of the company’s pinnaces, apparently returning to England. The Virginia was at Point Comfort, and the Discovery had gone adrift, floating 4 miles downstream.

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