Education
In the desperate winter of 1610, mass starvation reduced the settler population of colonial Jamestown from 500 to 60. This paper uses the specter of starvation at Jamestown to explore a larger and ongoing relationship between suffering and violence, hazard and horror at the site of colonial settlement. Connecting the misery of “Starving Time” to the viciousness of the first Anglo-Powhatan war, the paper will trace how, as structures of meaning crumbled in Jamestown, the colonial arena became a theater of atrocity wherein settlers did (in the words of one) “things which seame incredible.” And because the place called “Jamestown” was always also the place called “Paspahegh,” the extremities committed there left behind a harrowing history for natives and settlers alike.