In the autumn of 1609, God apparently looked down at Jamestown and accidentally flipped the script of this dark comedy to its most ruthless page.
John Smith—the convict-turned-leader who had dragged everyone back from the brink of the grave through sheer rogue grit—was dealt the most absurd, “precision strike” of his life.
On a tranquil afternoon, while Smith was fast asleep on a small boat, the pouch of black gunpowder hanging from his waist exploded with a sudden, violent boom.
The blast left the skin and flesh around his groin looking like a shredded, bloody nightmare.
While Smith’s personal journal remained suspiciously vague about the cause, anyone with eyes knew the score: it was almost certainly a stray spark quietly delivered by one of the aristocratic rivals who loathed him to his bones.
After all, in a lawless wilderness where civil rules had dissolved, rendering a hated dictator “crotch-blown” was always the most efficient way to retire him.
Overjoyed by this stroke of luck, the gentlemen immediately hoisted Smith onto a homebound merchant ship under the touching pretext of “caring for his lower body back in London.” Lying on the stretcher and wincing in agony, Smith glared down at the smug aristocrats surrounding him and delivered the single most accurate, venomous prophecy of his career: “Enjoy it while you can.
Without me, you fools won’t even live long enough to warm up your own leather shoes!” The nobles spat toward the ship’s stern, adjusted their lace collars, and broke into radiant smiles.
In their eyes, the greatest threat in this wilderness—that crude, low-born thug—was finally gone.
The elegant age of “English Gentlemen” had triumphantly returned.
However, reality was about to teach them a brutal lesson in uncontrolled existential disaster.
The moment Smith’s ship disappeared over the horizon, the gentlemen kicked off an absolute festival of reckless stupidity.
They promptly repealed Smith’s iron law of “He that will not work shall not eat,” hauled out their little wooden chairs, and sat in the shade conversing on ethics and philosophy.
To flex the “iron majesty of the British Empire,” a few nobles even marched into neighboring native villages, confiscated hard-earned dried corn, and casually shot several native children dead during the ensuing quarrel.
Inside his longhouse, Paramount Chief Powhatan nearly burst out laughing when scouts brought him the news.
The old chief had calculated the odds perfectly: Smith—the cunning mercenary who understood the game, knew how to act, and fought like a madman—was gone.
The remaining idiots couldn’t even catch a rabbit in a forest.
Wasting arrows in direct battle with them was a fool’s errand; it was time for something far more sophisticated: a textbook siege.
Powhatan issued an absolute blockade: avoid all open confrontation and lock Jamestown down tight.
If any white man dared step outside the wooden gates to chop firewood, hunt, or gather wild berries, a dozen poison-tipped stone arrows would rain down from the thick brush, pinning him to a tree trunk like a museum specimen.
In an instant, Jamestown was transformed from a colonial stronghold into a high-pressure pressure cooker roasting human flesh.
Making matters fatal, the fort was now crammed with 500 people—fresh stock newly delivered across the ocean by nine English ships.
Five hundred mouths, a bone-dry storehouse, and every exit sealed tight.
The most terrifying and absurd era in colonial history—The Starving Time—officially pulled back its curtain.
Throughout the freezing winter from late 1609 to early 1610, these high-born English gentlemen staged a deeply hardcore “Evolutionary History of Wilderness Cuisine” with their very lives.
Phase One: The “Pet Banquet” Under the Twilight of Civilization In the early days of the blockade, the gentlemen still attempted to maintain a shred of dignity.
When the storehouse hit rock bottom, everyone set their sights on the draft horses used for transport.
One by one, the majestic horses were led out and slaughtered, their entrails scavenged down to the last scrap.
Once the horses were gone, eyes quietly turned toward the camp’s domestic dogs and cats.
Lapdogs once cradled in London salons were skinned and boiled into watery broths.
Later, even dead rats wandering the muddy tracks became the most fashionable high-end delicacy in camp—anyone who snagged a plump black rat from the rubble became the undisputed star of Jamestown for the night.
Phase Two: The Heavy-Industrial Leather Cuisines When every living creature—including birds and lizards—had been picked clean down to the marrow, the survivors initiated a cross-industry fusion of leathercraft and gastronomy.
People began scavenging anything made of animal leather.
Boots, belts, saddles, leather gloves, and even leather book covers were tossed indiscriminately into iron cauldrons.
Gentlemen gathered around campfires, boiling their own boot soles like herbal medicine.
Once cooked to a rubbery semi-softness, they sliced the leather thin, sprinkled a dash of salt, and chewed away with gusto.
According to contemporary diaries, these aristocrats even invented “Three Ways to Serve a Boot”: boiled sole soup, grilled belt jerky, and high-fiber hardtack made of shredded parchment mixed with tree bark.
Phase Three: The Abyss of Hell and the “Salted Wife” Incident By January 1610, with howling winds like blades, even the leather boots were completely gone.
Starvation acted like a dull saw, hacking away the last remnants of human dignity and moral restraint.
In the dead of night, men began sneaking into the burial grounds, digging through frozen soil with stiff fingers to unearth comrades buried days prior, butchering them on the spot to boil at home.
It was during this dark nadir that the most grotesque, darkly comedic incident in North American history took place: The Collins Incident.
A man named Collins was driven so mad by hunger that his eyes burned green.
On a night of howling snow, he looked down at his sleeping wife, swallowed hard, and let the inner demon take total control.
He struck his wife dead with a heavy object and proceeded to execute her with meticulous “culinary prep”: he disemboweled her, packed her flesh with coarse salt deep inside a wooden barrel, and secretly boiled and ate her piece by piece every night.
A few days later, neighbors caught the scent of a long-forgotten, mouth-watering roast wafting from Collins’s dilapidated cabin.
In a season where even rats were nonexistent, that rich aroma was more lethal than demonic temptation.
Sensing something horribly wrong, the men kicked the door down and caught him red-handed.
Collins was sitting there, having already consumed over half his wife, holding a freshly boiled bowl of broth in his hands… Even in this lawless hellscape, his actions shattered the absolute bottom line.
The crowd tackled Collins into the snow.
Given that even the hanging ropes had been boiled and eaten long ago, they skipped formal execution rituals, lit a bonfire, and burned North America’s first “cannibal gentleman” alive at the stake.
In May 1610, winter yielded to spring.
When the new governor, Lord De La Warr, sailed into Chesapeake Bay with a fleet brimming with supplies, he expected to behold a flourishing new outpost of the British Empire.
Yet, the moment he stepped onto Jamestown soil, the scene before him caused the seasoned noble to vomit on the spot: The fort gates swung wide open, choked with weeds.
What was once a thriving colony of 500 people was now reduced to 60 foul-smelling, sunken-eyed, skin-and-bone figures crawling through the mud like ghosts.
These 60 survivors had descended into total madness—holding torches, cackling hysterically, and setting fire to the wooden cabins they had built with their own hands.
“What in God’s name are you doing?!” the Governor bellowed in fury.
A survivor turned around, revealing a mouth of rotten teeth and a smile far uglier than weeping: “We’re burning the fort!
We’re burning this godforsaken pit to ash!
Captain, we beg you, take us home!
This isn’t a New World—this is a meat grinder run by God and the Devil himself!” The remaining 60 wrecks wept hysterically as they scrambled onto the ship, refusing to stay a second longer.
They surrendered completely; they wanted back to England, where even a prison cell was better than eating leather shoes and human corpses!
However, fate’s most cruel joke always arrives the second after you think you’ve escaped.
The ship carrying the 60 survivors had barely cleared the mouth of the James River when it ran straight into Lord De La Warr’s massive main fleet.
The fleet bristled with fully armed English soldiers and cold-hearted corporate agents.
Lord De La Warr drew his longsword, coldly intercepting the fleeing ghosts, and delivered an order that plunged them into absolute despair: “Turn every ship around!
Set sail back to the fort!” “But… but that place is Hell!” the survivors dropped to their knees, sobbing.
The Governor let out a cold laugh, his eyes devoid of warmth: “Hell?
The British Empire’s investors put serious capital into this venture.
Even if it is Hell, you will die inside it until you bleed out our profit!” And so, held at cannon-point by the British navy, these sixty survivors who had just broken free from a nightmare were marched straight back into the stench and bones of the Jamestown mud pit.
They had escaped Hell.
Unfortunately, Hell had a return ticket.