Proponents of the Christian origins and destiny of America have recently survived some slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, namely David Barton’s discredited studies. But their crusade continues, hence the continued success of Peter Marshall and David Manuel’s immensely influential The Light and the Glory: Did God Have a Plan for America.
The answer to the question in the subtitle, to cut to the chase, is an emphatic yes, the evidence being all those cities on a hill being built by the faithful in Puritan New England.
Studies of this ilk have never quite known what to do with early Virginia, a horror show of disease, death, and destruction that must have made hell seem like a more attractive locale. Worse, English settlement of Jamestown predates Plymouth Rock and Boston.
Recent archaeological studies aren’t helping matters any. As it turns out, what many historians have long assumed to be true, based on evidence from documents, has confirmation in bio-archaeological findings—namely, that starving Jamestown residents gnawed on human flesh:
Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.
The remains were excavated by archaeologists led by William Kelso of Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group, and analyzed by Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The skull bears tentative cuts to the forehead, followed by four strikes to the back of the head, one of which split the skull open, according to an article in Smithsonian magazine, where the find was reported Wednesday.
It is unclear how the girl died, but she was almost certainly dead and buried before her remains were butchered. According to a letter written in 1625 by George Percy, president of Jamestown during the starvation period, the famine was so intense “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.” Five other historical accounts refer to cannibalism during the Jamestown siege.
The harsh realities of colonial life hardly ended with the demographic disaster of early Jamestown. As renowned Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn has recently described, the founding years of the seventeenth century were “the barbarous years,” less the playing out of Christian destiny than a brutal struggle for survival amongst diverse groups of Indians, settlers, and Africans making their way in an incredibly strange new world full of violence, disorder, and chaos.
