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
- Joan Peirce
- Joan’s young daughter, Jane Peirce
- Thomasine Causey
- 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.