Eating Jane

Archeologists have unearthed the bones of a young lady from a trash dump outside of old Jamestown. The bones show chopping marks around the head and neck. The chops are crude and show, researchers say, signs of cannibalism. The 14 year old girls seems to have suffered the wounds after she had died.

This augments some tales of cannibalism from Jamestown's early years. A man is reputed to have eaten his wife to which John Smith replied:

"One amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was known, for which he was executed, as he well deserved," Smith wrote. "Now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado'd (barbecued), I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of."

Not sure I buy it. One set of bones does not a fact make and who knows why or how she was killed. The frontier was an insanely brutal place and the wilderness can be quite maddening to those unused to his indifference.

Read on!