https://gizmodo.com/native-americans-voyaged-to-polynesia-lo...
From a backbarrier island to a barrier island (towards the sea)
This was interesting to read and it seems kind of definitive, and my impression is it's consistent with other things I've read. But if I recall correctly, there's also evidence from other sites that some from the colony also went elsewhere.
It seems reasonable to me to think that if things were breaking down, there might be differences of thought or preference about where to go, and that they might have also assumed they weren't totally cutting off contact from one another, being in the same area.
Were there other settlements ?
Working in one of the colonies for some rich guy prioritizing tobacco to pay dividends over food wasn’t a fun time.
No other British settlements in the hemisphere, though. Failed expeditions did end up in other nations colonies, but this was never pleasant for either side. But they would have had to go hundreds of kilometers by sea to find other Europeans, without a proper ship and on meager supplies. Joining the natives was the best way to survive… but which natives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manteo_(Native_American_leader...
Which is to say the facts are fit equally well by saying "The natives saw blacksmiths work in the colonists. So when aliens took the colonists way in a spaceship after they collected the iron which remained and learned to forge them into useful tools for themselves". Ridiculous of course, but it fits the facts just as well.
You could use a blowpipe of some sort. But better, a bellows. Was there any evidence of either?
Although the South and Central Americans worked bronze, the North Americans did not. I doubt a leap directly from nothing to iron smithing could occur.
I agree that blowing is not ideal - but it would work. A flat board as a fan, or even bellows are options. The larger point is none of these would leave evidence behind.
Simple forging of small enough pieces within a large enough coal bed might not even require forced air to reach a workable temp.
> "We have one little snippet of historical evidence from the 1700s, which describes people with blue or gray eyes who could remember people who used to be able to read from books,"
This seems like a massive assumption to make. Sub Saharan Africa has tons of iron ore and it’s still debated whether or not they developed iron working on their own. Your point relies on (an approximation of) blank slatism which seems highly highly unlikely given the natural variation in all other areas of life.
Maybe if you're working with bronze or copper, but iron forging requires much higher temperatures than a campfire can provide. That's why the iron age took place after the bronze age, forges capable of making iron workable were not yet invented. It wasn't a trivial invention.
Would be fascinating for someone with knowledge of this to weigh in!
duxup•4d ago
codingdave•4d ago
I mean sure, colonists from hundreds of years ago are different than young adults of today.... but the tenuous nature, in general, of people out exploring the world for a new home is unsurprising.
duxup•4d ago
dentemple•1d ago
lazystar•1d ago
rpcope1•1d ago
PaulDavisThe1st•1d ago
But nobody in my family had any gas-powered motors for anything at all.
I'm 61 now, and a volunteer firefighter. We have lots of gas powered chainsaws, circular saws, ventilation fans, and more.
I'm still extremely uncomfortable with starting these engines.
floren•1d ago
jf22•1d ago
pizzafeelsright•1d ago
You cannot live this way. I can walk you through anything related to home care.
lazystar•1d ago
pizzafeelsright•1d ago
lazystar•10h ago
amanaplanacanal•1d ago
cafard•1d ago
mikestew•1d ago
xnyan•1d ago
I don't have any data but I'd assume it's vastly safer to mow the lawn than drive a car.
everforward•18h ago
I would guess lawn mowers are higher risk per time or distance, but lower prevalence in injuries per year. I would guess the injuries are mostly a) hit rocks, b) did something dumb with the mower, or c) general outdoors risks like slipping or being bit by snake, etc.
heavyset_go•1d ago
yawgmoth•1d ago
Put gas in it. If there's a soft rubber thing near the gas, hit it twice to provide some fuel but no more as you risk "flooding" the engine.
Hold down any handle at the top of the mower, often the thing will require you to manually hold it down during start and all operations.
Look for the starter pull. It's often on the right, on the motor or mower handles. It's a piece of plastic attached to a cable. Give it a yank with a full follow through. It doesn't have to be maximum effort but too gentle won't work either.
timnetworks•1d ago
anon84873628•1d ago
Though personally I'm a fan of "kill your lawn" efforts. You can smother it with cardboard (or burn it, or till it, etc) and replace with native meadow.
ddingus•16h ago
(Has cleared overgrowth consisting of both vines and grasses roughly a meter high give or take some)
What you do is tip the mower up, holding the handle near the ground and push it right into the mess. Then lower it down, essentially taking a "bite", which will cut many folded over plants.
Pull back, then tip and advance repeatedly, cutting more each time.
I cleared a quarter acre this way. Took one hard afternoon and a couple tanks of gas.
lazystar•10h ago
GlenTheMachine•1d ago
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
CGMthrowaway•1d ago
John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.
Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
elevation•1d ago
The Jamestown colonists didn't even attempt to plant crops for several years after their arrival. Their first ship brought jewelers and smiths to work the gold they assumed they'd find, but didn't have a real plan for agriculture. The majority died of starvation and disease, but the survivors were sustained by meager leftover travel supplies from newly arriving ships, and by raiding neighboring natives for their corn.
Less than a decade later, separatist Pilgrims landed in New England, and by contrast, grew crops immediately, and cultivated diplomatic relations with their neighbors. The Pilgrims settled in a higher latitude with a shorter growing season, but during their first drought they had already stored enough supplies to share with local natives.
Jamestown could have been on a similar footing if they'd prioritized survival and diplomacy over finding treasure for the crown, the chartering company, and themselves.
bsder•1d ago
And, as I understand it, settled into areas which had previously been cleared and cultivated by the natives but had been relatively recently abandoned.
https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Pilgrims-and-the... "The Pilgrims decided to establish their colony in an area that had been cleared and abandoned by the Patuxet Indians. One colonist remarked, “Thousands of men have lived here, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same."
That's one amazing head start. And, had they not had it, the Pilgrims probably would have died, too.
CGMthrowaway•1d ago
Source? I'm pretty sure they planted corn and wheat as soon as they could, in the first month of arrival. "The 15th June we had finished our fort... we had also sown most of our corn on two mountains. It sprang a man's height from the ground." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Maria_Wingfield
By the third year (1609) they had cleared and planted at least 40 acres https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hh/2/hh2b2.htm
WalterBright•1d ago
So did the Pilgrims for their first year. They starved, too.
heavyset_go•1d ago
msgodel•1d ago
fakedang•23h ago
WalterBright•23h ago
And they did. After it utterly failed, they moved away from it to individual ownership of farms.
SideQuark•18h ago
Conflating them in the same sentence, then doubling down on that, is either intellectual dishonesty or ignorance.
WalterBright•11h ago
Quoted from your reference:
"Communism is ... a stateless, classless society where resources are owned communally" which, if you read about Jamestown, was the situation with their agriculture.
heavyset_go•7h ago
WalterBright•5h ago
This information is all easily found online.
taeric•23h ago
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
GlenTheMachine•13h ago
‘They suffered fourteen nets (which was all they had) to rot and spoil, which by orderly drying and mending might have been preserved. But being lost, all help of fishing perished.’ (25)
(25) Strachey, W. 1998b [1610], ‘A True Reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony then, and after under the government of the Lord La Warre’, in Haile 1998, p. 441
I originally learned this by talking with a Jamestown National Historical Park docent. I said that, having grown up in Virginia in the 20th century and knowing what tidewater Virginia was like in the 17th century, it would have been very hard to starve to death. American chestnut was still the dominant forest tree, and provided literally tons of nuts per tree. Black walnut and acorn were also plentiful and make good survival foods if you know how to prepare them. The Chesapeake Bay had enormous oyster beds, with oysters being described as "the size of dinner plates", and John Smith said that he thought he could have walked across it on the backs of fish, and if you know how to dry or salt fish it doesn't matter that the sturgeon and rockfish are seasonal. Mussels and crab, likewise, would have been plentiful, and unlike fish, accessible year round. Deer, turkey, rabbit, groundhog, squirrel, opossum and raccoon were plentiful, and passenger pigeon were also around, not having suffered the overhunting they did in the early 20th century.
She indicated that the majority of the English settlers weren't farmers or fishermen and didn't have the hands-on experience to make use of the resources at their disposal. I went home and did a bit of internet research on that statement, and it seemed fairly accurate.
I do not claim to be a trained historian of colonial Virginia; I just grew up there.
taeric•12h ago
For example:
That is, it isn't just that they were not "professional fisherman." Something that probably didn't even exist in the modern sense of the word. They were in a much harsher environment than was anticipated.The low stock of salt and not having the same dry season that they were used to from the other side of the Atlantic almost certainly played much more heavily, as well. (And to be clear, that paper covers these as heavy influences.)
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be. Our food supply is supernaturally clean, nowadays.
At any rate, my main gripe here is the mental image of "second sons that didn't know how to do anything" that you conjured. Certainly possible, but feels far overstated, to me. They had managed to survive a ship across the ocean. Something that was not a passive cruise journey.
GlenTheMachine•5h ago
We know for a fact that the proportion of wealthy nobles to manual laborers was really, really high compared to the population of England at the time, and there werent' enough of the latter to keep the colony afloat (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-... and https://www.jyfmuseums.org/visit/jamestown-settlement/histor...). These were largely second sons of wealthy families (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Families_of_Virginia). Most of the rest were the gentlemen's manservants, e.g. they were also urbanites (source: https://bandbwilliamsburg.com/jamestown-settlement/#:~:text=...
Regarding the quote from the paper:
Obviously, once you're in the throes of malnutrition and illness, your ability to fish and forage is going to be significantly reduced. But the disaster is already in progress at that point. Why were they already malnourished? In large part because they weren't very good at fishing or farming, and didn't actually plan to survive by farming at all, instead intending to rely on trade with the natives. But they mismanaged diplomatic relations with the natives to the extent that not only was trade non-existent towards the second year, but they were actually being shot on sight. They exhausted their supply of small game on the Jamestown peninsula, and couldn't voyage farther than that due to danger from the native Americans, again due to their own mismanagement of relations.Note that a primary reason for the poor relationship with the native Americans was that the settlers didn't have their own food sources, and resorted to theft and assault to get native's food supplies -- which, as a result of the drought, weren't all that great (source: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...)
They also didn't have the skills necessary to (for instance) prepare acorns or harvest pine bark cambium. Survival foods would have been foods that noble Englishmen hadn't ever even eaten, much less prepared themselves.
From the Wikipedia article on "The Starving Time":
And in point of fact, they actually ended up hiring native Americans to fish and harvest shellfish for them, because they didn't know how to do it on their own. (source: https://virginiahistory.org/learn/oysters-virginia#).As a consequence of the deteriorating relationship with the natives, the Jamestown colonists' ability to do any land-based (as opposed to water-based) subsistence activities was severely curtailed, and, one assumes, their ability to hire natives to fish for them also eroded. But they did have one major advantage, an actual oceangoing ship that they could have sailed into the Bay and used to fish. The natives had only canoes and could not possibly have constituted a major threat on the waters of the Bay. But that only works if you know how to fish, which they didn't. Once the nets rotted due to the colonists not understanding the importance of drying them, that advantage was also neutralized, and starving was inevitable in the absence of relief supplies from England or the Caribbean.
Everyone in the colonial period was parasitized to some extent, including the natives. However, the plant-based survival foods I mentions above (chestnuts, acorns, black walnuts, etc.) are not known for harboring parasites. The animal game certainly would have, but almost certainly not more so than the same game in England would have.The colonists were ill primarily because they didn't practice good hygiene wrt situating their toilet facilities away from their drinking water and ended up with dysentery, a problem that the native Americans managed to avoid (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-...).
Summary: the original contingent of Jamestown settlers had bad luck (drought, several supply ships being wrecked or otherwise not showing up on time) but their primary problem was that they didn't intend to live off the land at all, either by fishing and farming or by foraging. They didn't have the right supplies to do so, and mostly didn't have the knowledge needed to do it as a backup plan when the original plan of trading with the native Americans failed (due to poor diplomatic skills and poor diplomatic decision making.)
EDIT: to head off argument on this score, the poor relationship with the native Americans wasn't inevitable. The Roanoke Colony settlers, when their food ran low, joined the local tribe and the evidence indicates that they were adopted as members, intermarried, and survived there. (source: https://www.whro.org/arts-culture/2025-01-20/new-artifacts-o... and https://nypost.com/2025/06/07/us-news/researchers-discover-e...)
EDIT: Here's the best contrary argument, that it was primarily the drought that was to blame and not the incompetence of the English settlers: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rethinking-jamestown-...
potato3732842•1d ago
Old world politics at the time explain most of this. Some of the english colonies were, ugh, rushed and less well funded than they would have been under ideal situations.
This is basically the same reason they didn't look too hard to see what happened to the Roanoke colony.
CGMthrowaway•1d ago
For example, the Amadas-Barlowe Expedition (1584) described Roanoke Island as "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and wholesome of all the world," with fertile soil, abundant wildlife, and friendly natives