Secrets of the Dead: "Jamestown's Dark Winter" (Mentorn Barraclough Carey, Discovery Channel, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Secrets of the Dead episode which followed, “Jamestown’s Dark Winter,” was a considerably grimmer story that for once was in line with this show’s original mission of literally telling the secrets of the dead before it branched out into more general scientific and technological aspects. It was based on incidents that took place in 1609, six years after the initial founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia that was the earliest settlement of British people in America that survived. (An earlier expedition in 1594 led by Sir Walter Raleigh ended with the death and disappearance of all the colonists.) At the time Britain was in an existential struggle for survival against the threat of the Spanish Empire, and though the Spanish Armada had been decisively defeated in 1588 Britain was still anxious about the Spanish and Portuguese presence in South America and the British government under King James I, Elizabeth I’s successor and the king for whom Jamestown was named, sent out expeditions to create colonies in North America to counter the Spanish presence in the South. The original Jamestown settlers had the misfortune of landing on a marshy island that proved nearly impossible for them to farm effectively, with the result that in the early years the colony teetered on the edge of continual starvation. Apparently there weren’t Native Americans around willing to bail them out the way the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in Massachusetts had, a kindness they repaid by launching a genocidal campaign against them that continued throughout the U.S. for centuries. (I’m still fond of quoting Adolf Hitler’s comment in an interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1940: “I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”)

In 1609 Britain sent out nine ships to bail out the original Jamestown colonists and bolster the colony with more people and supplies, but though six of the original nine ships actually made it across the Atlantic, storms along the sea route ruined all the food and other materials the colonists were depending on to survive. The show featured a lot of interviewees from an organization called “Historic Jamestowne” (https://historicjamestowne.org) as well as three researchers, Dr. Stephen Rouse, Douglas Owsley and Scott Whittaker, from the Smithsonian Institution. While excavating the original fort at Jamestown the Historic Jamestowne crew, led by Dr. William Kelso and including James Horn, Jamie May and Bly Straube (the latter two being women), discovered the skeleton of a 14-year-old girl. They named her “Jane” even though there’s no historical record of what her actual name was, and based on the surviving fragments of her skull they concluded that her fellow settlers had literally eaten her, including slicing open her head to extract her brain. (Apparently brain meat was considered especially nutritious then, and a number of recipes back in England included animal brains.) The crew from the Smithsonian hired a forensic artist named Ivan Schwartz to do a facial reconstruction of “Jane” from the surviving skull bones. They only had one side of her skull to work from, so they did a mirror image of it to create a digital model of her whole head. “Jane” has found her final resting place in the Jamestown historical museum, thanks to Ivan Schwartz’s sculpture and the surviving bones, and as narrator Ken Chowder (an unfortunate name given that the show is about cannibalism) pointed out, this paints a different and considerably darker picture of Anglo-America’s origins than the usual one we get of individuals struggling against adverse conditions and surviving with grit, determination and an unstoppable instinct. The truth is our forebears literally had to eat each other to hold on and keep their communities together!