When the first English settlers in the New World, founded the colony of Jamestown, they fished gigantic monster sturgeon from the James River. But then remained of the fish – and the settlers were cannibals.
“We have more sturgeon, can consume as humans and dogs,” said John Smith wrote at the beginning of 1609. The co-founder of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, apparently was not exaggerating: Evidence of excessive interference consumption archaeologists found now in a basement kitchen of the settlement.
Störe sind Knochenfische: urtümliche Wesen, deren Körper nicht mit Schuppen, sondern mit buckeligen Knochenplatten geschützt sind. Heute gehört der Stör im James River, an dem die Siedler sich damals niederließen, zu den gefährdeten Arten. Die letzten Exemplare sind vergleichsweise zierlich: Sie bringen im Schnitt etwa 150 Kilogramm auf die Waage. Dagegen waren die Störe des beginnenden 17. Jahrhunderts wahre Giganten. Bis zu 400 Kilogramm schwer müssen die Riesenfische angesichts der Größe ihrer Knochen gewesen sein.
Matt Balazik von der Virginia Commonwealth University studiert die Störe des James River schon seit zehn Jahren. Doch was er jetzt in den Küchenabfällen der Siedlung gefunden hat, übersteigt alles, was ihm je untergekommen ist: “So etwas habe ich noch nie gesehen.” Eine Knochenplatte aus der jüngsten Grabung bezeichnete er in einem Artikel in der Lokalzeitung “Daily Press” als “freakhaft groß”. Die Störe von Jamestown könnten weit über drei Meter lang gewesen sein, vermutet Balazik.
First English Settlers Nort America:Sturgeon meat with the bread
The kitchen pit in which the interfering bones were found, use the settlers in the years 1609 and 1610. The L-shaped room was about one and a half meters deep dug into the ground and lay in about 20 meters from the banks of the James River. It must have been a corresponding effort to take the monster fish from the nets and hineinzuwuchten there. Eventually, the entire kitchen floor was covered with bones spoilers. “We have practically an entire layer, consisting only of the remains of sturgeon,” said Daniel Schmidt excavator “In between were still half a dozen turtle shell. We assume that the turtles were also eaten.”
To the kitchen included two dome-shaped ovens, as they were typically used for baking bread. From the sturgeon “make the industrious by drying and grinding, by mixing with caviar, sorrel and other herbs good bread and good meat,” John Smith wrote in his notes on the fish. “The great thing about this quote is that Smith describes how the settlers sturgeon meat mixed with the bread,” said Schmidt. “The Störreste lay in a layer of ash, which is exactly with this bread ovens.”
The settlers must have seemed the heavenly Störreichtum. In their homeland England these fish were much smaller – and so rare that they were consumed only at court. Every day sturgeon on the table – because the settlers must have felt like royalty.
English Settlers North America:Then began the great famine
The harder the settlers arrived, what happened in winter 1609. When the snow came, went to the sturgeon. The fish leave only in spring and autumn the ocean to spawn in the rivers. In addition, the 14 networks of the settlers were at the time already rotten. None of them had been before his arrival in the New World Fishing – nobody knew that you must dry and mending nets to get them.
Schmidt believed that the now excavated sturgeon was caught in the fall of 1609. Thereafter, the famine began. There were no inventories. Hostilities of the Powhatan Indians made it almost impossible for the settlers to look around for food. Only 60 of 214 men should survive the winter.
In desperation, they finally killed an approximately 14-year-old girl. In the spring of this year, the archaeologists had found her bones – with clear traces of her skull and the tibia. With sharp tools she had been scraped the flesh from the bones. The remains of the child threw the settlers in the same cellar pit in which they had been slaughtered in the sturgeon. As the kitchen, she was already no longer in use at the time.
“We have found evidence that the walls collapsed, killing at least one of the furnaces has been damaged,” said Smith. Probably it was due to damage to the roof, which were not repaired properly. “So you decided the settlers simply to fill the pit with waste.”
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