Starving Time
Dire disaster finally struck the colony. Food supplies were exhausted. Starvation became a reality. A general drought blanketed eastern Virginia. The Indians too were on short rations. Smith, the provider, who had been injured by an explosion of gunpowder, had returned to England. It was one of the most cruel experiences ever endured by a group of men. The climax came during the winter of 1609-10.
A few quotations from the records of that period paint the picture in its most terrible colors. Lord De La Warr who arrived in 1610 just in time to save the colony from abandonment reported to the London Company:
Our people, together with the Indians (not to friend), had the last winter destroyed and kild up all our hoggs, insomuch as of five or six hundred (as it is supposed), there was not above one sow, that we can heare of, left alive; not a henn nor a chick in the forte (and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first).
Indians boiling maple sap below and planting corn above.
Picture by Lafitau, 1724.
And Reverend William Simmonds states in regard to this same starving time of the winter of 1609-10:
as for our hogs, hens, goats, sheepe, horse, or what lived; our commanders and officers did daily consume them: some small proportions (sometimes) we tasted, till all was devoured.
Thus after three years they had nothing of a material nature to show for their efforts. Their most valuable achievement had been their acquired knowledge of the Indians' methods of farming. To make a bad situation worse the Indians began to make trouble. Lord De La Warr speaks of their "late injuries and murthering of our men." It was not until 1611 that real farming got under way at Jamestown. Then corn planting and fence building began in earnest.