ommon 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
colonizati