The “tragicall historie”: cannibalism and abundance in colonial Jamestown

Abstract

In the winter of 1609–10, Jamestown colonists struggled through a period that came to be known as the Starving Time. Historians have generally accepted the validity of cannibalism stories that George Percy and John Smith wrote in the following decade and a half, despite other contemporary accounts arguing that cannibalism never took place. On the basis of the existing evidence, it is impossible to say whether early settlers ate corpses, Indians, or dead wives; a more answerable question is how people in Virginia and London made use of cannibalism rumors for their own purposes. In the 1610s and 1620s, Starving Time narratives were responsible for effecting new laws about food production and consumption. Writers crafted their tales to reassure colonial investors that the Virginia project was still solvent. Such publications changed the idea of abundance, creating a turning point that forced colonists to become industrious producers rather than lazy gatherers. This reassessment of the Starving Time examines abundance in early Virginia and how seventeenth-century transformations of that concept created one of America’s first founding myths: that of avoiding starvation in the New World.

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