Nor was the Starving Time the last time that the colonists would have to endure famine and privation. Although written to discredit the administration of Sir Thomas Smith as head of the Company during the years from 1607-19, an account of the hunger of these twelve years should be accepted as having some basis in fact. The account, written in 1624, reported as common occurrences the stealing of food by the starving and the cruel punishments meted out to them (one for "steelinge of 2 or 3 pints of oatemeal had a bodkinge thrust through his tounge and was tyed with a chaine to a tree untill he starved"); and the denial of an allowance of food to men who were too sick to work ("soe consequently perished").
The starving colonists during these twelve years, according to the report, often resorted to dogs, cats, rats, snakes, horsehides, and other extremes for nourishment. Many, in those hungry times, weary of life, dug holes in the earth and remained there hidden from the authorities until dead from starvation. Although the report maintained that these events occurred throughout the twelve-year period, it is likely that many were concentrated during the Starving Time.
Famished, disease-ridden, demoralized, with many mentally unbalanced, the settlement at Jamestown languished in a distressful condition after the winter of 1609-10. Jamestown, in May, 1610 appeared:
as the ruins of some auntient [for]tification then that any people living might now inhabit it: the pallisadoes... tourne downe, the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses (whose owners untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not hable, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood; and, it is true, the Indian as fast killing without as the famine and pestilence within.
The Indians, however, would not make a direct assault on the fort; they waited on disease and famine to destroy the remaining whites. How many of the graves now at Jamestown must have been dug during that terrible winter? The Starving Time has been characterized by historian Oliver Chitwood as "the most tragic experience endured by any group of pioneers who had a part in laying the foundations of the present United States."
By spring of 1610 the challenge of famine, pestilence, and disease had proven too great; the warfare of Europeans and savages, for which the settlers had made provisions in the selection of the Jamestown site, had not proven as great a threat as disease and famine. Under the command of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, who had only just arrived with plans for the future of the settlement, the small band of survivors boarded ship to abandon an abortive experiment in European colonization.
Before leaving, the survivors of the winter had had a consultation with Gates and Somers about future prospects for the colony. Chiefly fear of starvation determined the decision to abandon the settlement: the provisions brought by Gates and Somers would have lasted only sixteen days. The colonists could hold out no hope of obtaining food from the Indians. ("It soone then appeared most fitt, by general approbation, that to preserve and save all from starving, there could be no readier course thought on then to abandon the countrie.")
After embarking, the settlers, with Gates, Somers, and the new arrivals, had reached the mouth of the river when they met Lord De la Warr, the new governor of the colony, coming from England with fresh supplies and settlers. Heartened, the survivors of the Starving Time turned back to try the New World again.
In Lord De la Warr's company was Dr. Lawrence Bohun, a physician of good reputation, who subsequently distinguished himself serving the medical needs of the settlement. He could not, however, even in his capacity of personal physician, prevent Lord De la Warr from falling victim to the common ailments.
In 1610, Lord De la Warr wrote: "presently after my arrival in Jamestowne, I was welcomed by a hot and violent ague, which held mee a time, till by the advice of my physician, Doctor Lawrence Bohun I was recovered." Bohun, in the seventeenth-century tradition of treatment by clysters, vomitives, and phlebotomy, resorted to bloodletting. The letting, believed to free the body of fermented blood and malignant humors, probably gave the governor a psychological lift, if only a temporary one.