[GlenTheMachine]

From the article:

‘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]

You are still strengthening the claim beyond the paper, is my point. The paper, specifically, has several other explanations beyond "they didn't know how to care for nets."

For example:

    The colonists’ performance in fishing in
    the first years, in common with all other activities,
    must also have been severely hampered by their
    generally poor health, malnutrition and subse-
    quent lack of energy. For a period of five months
    there are said to have been only five men healthy
    enough to man the bulwarks of the fort against
    hostile Virginia Indians. During such difficult
    times it is likely that fishing would have been
    restricted and perhaps would have been halted
    altogether.

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]

Like most disasters, there were many causes for this one. The general unpreparedness of the Jamestown settlers is, however, an important one, and probably the primary causative one (although see edit #2 for a strong contrary argument).

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:

   The colonists’ performance in fishing in the first years, in common with all other activities, must also have been severely hampered by their generally poor health, malnutrition and subsequent lack of energy.

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":

    Although they did some farming, few of the original settlers were accustomed to manual labor or were familiar with farming. Hunting on the island was poor, and they quickly exhausted the supply of small game. The colonists were largely dependent upon trade with the Native Americans and periodic supply ships from England for their food.

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.

   Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be.

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-...

[taeric]

My main lack of trust for this is the over leaning on "incompetence" as the explanation. I'm fully ok with the idea that they made mistakes and were not ready for the vastly different climate. I'm even comfortable with the idea that they may have thought to get more in trade than they were able to get.

That said, I think this vastly overstates how much people got their food from trade. Spices and some goods were, of course, big in trade. Mainline food? Not so much. Most people were not able to stockpile large quantities of food. Some cities maybe could. But it would have been grains/seeds or actual live stock. Not meats or anything that needed refrigeration. For... well, obvious reasons. Even cured meats typically have a very short timeline. So, fishing and hunting and basic gardening would have remained something that people had to do. Pretty much everywhere.

And indeed, this is inline with your edited in article. What were they trying to trade for? Corn. Why did they need to get it by trade, because their crop was bad. Why was the trade not working well? Because nobody had excess corn to trade. Long term stockpiles just couldn't exist to the scale that we think of today. And a lack of rain meant everyone was having a bad crop.

Finally, I want to be clear that I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that I'm just flat out wrong here. I've just grown super doubtful of a lot of the "these morons were able to sail across the atlantic, but were too stupid to do anything that would have resembled living off the land." Despite most living at the time looking like what we would call that.

[GlenTheMachine]

Two things… one, they didn’t sail across the Atlantic. They hired ships and professional sailors to sail them across. They were passengers. That crossing wasn’t necessarily an easy one, but it was much more like what happens today with wealthy people who pay sherpas to help them climb Everest. The climbers have to have some knowledge and experience, but they aren’t the experts, and without the sherpas they'd be pretty lost.

Second, the point of this whole thread is that even at home, these were not people who were living off the land. They were wealthy Londoners. They lived in the city. They weren’t even raising their own kitchen gardens, they had people for that.

Wealthy Londoners bought their food just like you and I do. They had food markets. They used currency to buy grain, vegetables, and meat.

FYI, salted meat and fish will last for years and, if stored in a reasonably cool place like a root cellar, for decades. I personally have had Virginia hams that were over ten years old. Dried corn will last for centuries if stored properly.

The reason the settlers made so many diplomatic mistakes with the natives was because their leadership was primarily former military, and they saw the natives as a military problem. This made some sense because when they set out, they thought their primary challenge was going to be fending off military attacks from the Spanish. But that assumption turned out to be tragically wrong.

I'm not saying these people were all incompetent buffoons. Some of them were trained military officers. Some were craftsmen — there’s ample evidence of metal work and glassmaking at Jamestown. They were all experienced horsemen, and they were comfortable with firearms and bladed weapons. But what they weren’t was outdoorsmen, or even farmers, and in hindsight that’s what they needed to be. Once they got actual farmers on site, their immediate problems started to clear up.

[taeric]

On this, I would have to see much stronger proof.

I can grant that very dense cities such as London had food markets necessary to supply the city. With the huge caveat that those markets had to have fairly rapid turnover for all of their offerings. Don't forget that most city dwellers had maybe a single shared room with others that they could call home. Such that they likely consumed the food on purchase, with nowhere else to really take it. Even "wealthy" dwellers that did have a place to take food likely couldn't take much. Where do you think they would be able to store it?

And passenger ships in the 1600s were very very different than any sort of passenger ship today. Sure, they were not responsible for ship duties. But they were likely on their own for basic survival on the ship.

Salted meat and fish can last for years if stored in modern containment techniques, sure. With what they would have had in the 1600s, I have serious doubts that you'd get such results. Especially without the resources of a full city at your disposal.

Again, I'm comfortable that I can be wrong on all of this. I would have to see much stronger proof, though. Most of what we call "living off the land" today was largely "typical rural life" for a long long time.