With emails coming in regarding the skeleton of young “Jane,” I’ll try to answer some of the questions here over the next few weeks.

Do you think we will ever know “Jane’s” real name?

 No, not unless something happens genetically where the DNA is somehow matched with a particular family’s DNA. I’d imagine it to be a great longshot.

The reason is that according to the Spanish, a hundred women were on the 1609 expedition. (For purposes of this blog entry, I’ll treat it as exactly 100 women, although of course, it may have been slightly fewer or more.) Of these one hundred, the vast majority have never been identified. This is a tragic consequence of the loss or destruction of so many Virginia Company documents dating from 1607 to 1619. The documents that survive are helpful, but conspicuously missing are the lists of settlers on most ships except for the earliest ships of 1607 and 1608.

Ten of the one hundred women were shipwrecked in Bermuda following a hurricane.

Of the ninety remaining women, we can only positively identify a handful:

Mistress Collines (Collins), murdered by her husband during the Starving Time

1. Joan Peirce
2. Joan’s young daughter, Jane Peirce
3. Thomasine Causey
4. Temperance Flowerdew Barrow Yeardley

Another woman and child who survived the Starving Time are Anne Burruss Laydon (who arrived in 1608) and her daughter Virginia, born about Christmas 1609. Obviously, neither of these were part of the 1609 expedition.

We know four of the names (Peirce, Peirce, Causey, and Yeardley) because they are the few who survived long term and had their names and arrival years accounted for in later records. We know Mistress Collines’s name because Captain John Smith and Governor George Percy each documented her murder and the execution of her husband for it.

Other women survived and may have been present for the Starving Time, but documentation of their arrival is lacking. These include Mistress Joan Wright the midwife (arrived by 1610), Joan Salford and Sara Salford (arrived by 1611), and Rachel Davis (arrived by 1613).

“Jane,” the fourteen-year-old whose skeleton was found, would be among the roughly 90 women and children who arrived in the summer of 1609 and found themselves thrust into the Starving Time. Since we can only positively five of the 90 arriving women, 85 remain faceless and nameless.

Of about 550 settlers to begin that brutal winter, only 60 (about 11%) were still living when help arrived in late May 1610. This means that only about one of every ten men, women, and children survived. And then, some of these survivors were in such bad shape that they later died, according to the leaders’ reports—meaning the death toll climbed even higher than 89%.

If we apply that death rate (89%) to the 90 women and children, that means that perhaps only 10 survived the winter. We know who 4 of those estimated 10 survivors are, as stated above.

The skeleton identified as JR156 may have been Mistress Forrest of the 1608 supply ship Mary & Margaret; she may have died prior to the Starving Time. “Jane,” then, would stand alone as the face of the many nameless women and children who entered the winter of 1609 with ever diminishing hope and who never saw the spring in Virginia.

When I first learned that the skeleton of a young girl, called Jane, had been found at Jamestown, I rejoiced. Although Jane had been cannibalized during the Starving Time, She had given us another face of the women and children at early Jamestown. To date, we know what only two other women and children looked like: the female skeleton (possibly Mistress Forrest) and Pocahontas, whose visage we know from her English portrait.

Then I began to read the articles, and the inaccuracies stunned me—particularly the articles further afield from the primary articles. I’ve spent fifteen years researching and writing about the women and children of Jamestown. In March, I presented my first academic paper about these women and children at the Virginia Forum. I was able to present an honor roll, a list I have compiled of up to 50 women of the 65 surviving women and children in 1616.

But then I read the comments. Comments so crass and cruel about the death of a child—a child who, although she lived 400 years ago—had the same dreams, fears, and feelings as any young girl would have today. Comments that did nothing but make fun of the cannibalism of this child. It made me feel ill. Have we fallen that far that we do not care? That a death becomes a moment to ridicule someone with opposing views in the present day or to push a political agenda?

I understand the experience of Jane’s fleet as well as anyone. That was the primary focus of my research for Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky. I tell you that I know of no one in the present day that would not buckle and despair if he or she endured what these colonists did.

The men, the fathers, were mostly soldiers, home from fighting Spain in the Low Countries. Virginia had so much promise. Five hundred people signed on—one hundred of them women and children (according to Spanish intelligence).

These settlers lived aboard ship in the ’tween deck for months.  They were not passengers, they were cargo. This vessel was the size of a school bus with the windows blackened out—dark, dank, sickly, and smelly.

They were not allowed up on the deck. Their food came to them in a bucket with the only guaranteed rations being moldy, wormy sea biscuits. Had nothing else happened, they would have arrived in Virginia weakened. But the worst wasn’t over for this voyage yet—a hurricane at sea and the Jamestown Starving time awaited the weary travelers….