Archaeologists occasionally find things the rest of us would rather not know about. The early Jamestown colony has been romanticized in our histories, not as much as The Lost Colony at Roanoke, but pretty widely just the same. The Pilgrims at Plymouth got more ink, but the Virginians and their plight were also covered in the texts I had in school. None of those texts mentioned that during the “starving time” of 1609 – 1610 there was a likelihood that some of the colonists resorted to cannibalism to try to stay alive. This despite contemporaneous evidence in letters from one of the Presidents of the colony, George Percy:

And now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them. And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.

An anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in Washington has determined that the skull of a young girl from the Jamestown site shows signs of her flesh and brain being removed after death.

It’s terribly sad, but it’s not surprising. Desperation drives humans to do things they would normally never do.