2. Food: ultimately this section is about food, or the lack of it. In describing the phenomenon, historians will use words like drought, disaster, hunger, and weakness, i.e., the causes and consequences of the lack of food. But those who experience it are more direct in their memoirs. George Percy tells us that men in Jamestown cried out in the night "we are starved, we are starved." Jesuits list, one by one, their desperate actions "in search of food in time of famine." "Either to find food or die" is the expressed goal of a Spaniard official in Hispaniola. "Through hindsight," writes historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "we can see that settlers and planners defeated themselves by inadequate preparation for the rigors of transplantation, but these lessons were learned very slowly and at great human and monetary cost."* How the settlers defeated themselves is poignantly clear in these five accounts of early settlers' hardships—disease, injury, war, mutiny, Indian attacks, severe weather, abandonment, power struggles, and the hardship they stress the most, no food.
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Image: Facial reconstruction of skull unearthed in Jamestown archaeological excavation, 1996. Reproduced by permission of APVA (Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) Preservation Virginia / Historic Jamestowne. *Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "North America and the Beginnings of European Colonization" (Washington: American Historical Association, 1992), ix. |