This whole section is discussing the "starving time" that the members of the Jamestown Colony suffered through during the winter of 1609-1610. There were 500 colonists going into that winter and only 60 survived. No wonder its referred to as "The Harsh Reality of History." Just as Angela does in "Bones," a facial reproduction has been done based on the skull bones discovered by archaeologists. Notice that a huge section of this skull is missing. The interior of the skull shows interesting tool marks...
The Virginia Company of London sent these guys over to America in 1607 to establish a foothold and find gold. Yup, it was good ol' capitalism at work. Check this out:
Whereas our loving and weldisposed subjects ... and divers others of our loving subjects, have been humble sutors unto us that wee woulde vouchsafe unto them our licence to make habitacion, plantacion and to deduce a colonie of sondrie of our people into that parte of America commonly called Virginia, and other parts and territories in America either appartaining unto us or which are not nowe actuallie possessed by anie Christian prince or people, scituate, lying and being all along the sea coastes between fower and thirtie degrees of northerly latitude from the equinoctiall line and five and fortie degrees of the same latitude and in the maine lande betweene the same fower and thirtie and five and fourtie degrees, and the ilandes thereunto adjacente or within one hundred miles of the coaste thereof;
And you thought lawyers were a modern headache! This is the Charter that sent the first successful colonists to America. It goes on to say that if they don't find a way for the Virginia Company of London to profit financially they would be cut off from all funding. Even to these dudes, struggling to keep body and soul together, money was the alpha and omega - or so they thought.
The men spent all their time searching for gold and no time planting a vegetable garden or doing much of anything that might help them through the winter. Finally, in 1608, ol' John Smith, a soldier, explorer, and adventurer, had had enough. (Seems he was the only common sense man in the group!) Smith took charge and began to require that each colonist (man, woman or child) spend at least four hours a day farming. "Work or starve," he said. Hmmm, where have I heard something similar before? Oh yeah, it was told to the Corps of Discovery back at Fort Mandan: "If we eat you eat; if we starve, you starve " said the Mandan to the Corps. Only 38 of Virginia's colonists from the original 144 survived that year.
In 1609, John Smith suffered a very severe gunpowder burn and was shipped back to England. Then a re-supply ship (and by that I don't just mean material goods. They had to keep re-supplying people because so many were dying...) a re-supply ship sunk off the coast of Bermuda. That knocked their hat in the creek for sure (as a friend of ours in Texas would say!)
It was a harsh winter, and instead of relying on themselves, the colonists had relied on that ship to supply them. The price they paid was even greater than death, because the forensics show that they resorted to cannibalism to survive. Two colonists snuck into the community storehouse. Their punishment was to be tied to posts and left to publicly starve to death. Finally, with nothing left in the storehouse for anyone, one guy even ate his own wife! It is suspected that those who survived that winter did so off the bodies of others who had died. I suppose the concept of "body and soul" kicked in here. In their minds, once the soul left the body at death, what was left behind was no longer sacred? But if one starved to death, what would be left to eat? Eww, too gruesome for me! I'm movin' on...
However they accomplished it, some DID survive that winter (and wrote diaries throughout that winter which are still in print today!) Re-supply ships arrived with food and new colonists in 1610, and year after year more colonists came. Even though tobacco was introduced as a cash crop, financially Jamestown failed and the investors lost almost a quarter of a million pounds (English money.) If you ask me, the colonists paid a higher price: five out of every six died. The Virginia Company of London was declared bankrupt by the king in 1624, the colony became property of the Crown, and was therefore the first in America ruled by the Crown.
Here's a really good link if you want lots more detail:
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