Jamestown

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In late April 1607, three ships carrying a hundred men and boys arrived in Chesapeake Bay, having set sail from London four months earlier. They travelled up a river and created what became the first English settlement in North America. Benjamin Woolley tells Don about the many struggles that the people of Jamestown would face in the years to come.

Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It is the summer of 2012 in historic Jamestown, Virginia.
0:06.0	Archaeologists have just discovered human remains.
0:09.0	Among them, a 400-year-old skull of a teenage girl that proves something only written about in historical
0:16.2	accounts and until now thought of as myth by many.
0:19.8	The marks on the skull convince forensic anthropologists that the girl was dismembered and eaten by other people.
0:27.0	Cannibalism had definitely occurred in the Jamestown colony during what was called the starving time, in the winter of 1609-1610.
0:36.0	Colonists had first arrived there two years prior, creating the first English settlement in North America.
0:42.0	By the autumn of 1609, they were under siege from Native Americans and didn't have enough food to last the winter.
0:48.0	First, they ate their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, mice, and snakes.
0:55.0	Some ate the leather of their shoes.
0:57.0	How many of the growing numbers of dead were cannibalized is unknown,
1:01.0	but the girl was almost certainly not the only victim.
1:04.0	By the time relief arrived, after six months of siege and starvation, the colony was almost wiped out.
1:11.0	Only 60 of the original 300 settlers had survived. Hello, thanks for tuning us in. I'm Don Wildman and welcome to American History Hit.
1:29.0	In 1607, just over a hundred English men and boys arrived in the new world having set sail from Blackwall London in three ships and made their successful crossing of the Atlantic in about four months. With first landfall on April 26, 1607, they went on to explore
1:47.1	a wide outlet of the Chesapeake Bay, a river they named in honor of their reigning sovereign
1:52.0	back home, James I.
1:53.8	A few weeks later, on May 14th, they chose the site of their settlement on a swampy remote
1:59.6	peninsula of land 40 miles upriver, where they would build a fort and call it Jamestown.
2:06.0	Four centuries ago, Jamestown was carved out of Virginia wilderness.
2:10.3	Maybe hacked out is the better term for it. This was two years before Henry Hudson journeyed up the river one day named for him.
2:17.0	Some 20 years before the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod and 75 years before William Penn strode onto the shores of a future
	...

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