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….