Dining in Colonial Virginia

That the early Jamestown era Virginians had corn is certain. In the first few years of settlement their means of obtaining corn usually came from bartering it from the Indians. If this wasn't possible they simply helped themselves.

In 1611, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived in Jamestown to become the new governor, he found nothing planted except for a few vegetables growing in one or two private gardens. What most of the folks in Jamestown were doing when he arrived had nothing to do with food production. These ambitious immigrants to the New World were bowling in the streets.

It was really a bad situation. The Indians could have wiped these playful white folks out anytime they took a mind too simply by either refusing to trade them corn or by moving away from them. That would have meant that there would have been no Indian corn for the whites to obtain either by trade or by stealing it. The Indians knew this and something else as well.

The whites could attack the Indians and wipe them out by force and with superior arms. But if the whites did this they would either have starved because there would not have been any Indians to plant corn, or else the white would have had to trade in their bowling balls for hoes and plant their own corn.

Of course there were innumerable wild beast they could hunt, unless they could get some friendly Indian to do their hunting for them. Such was the case with two native fellows, Kemps and Tassore, who the Jamestown people held prisoner for a time. It seems that these two Indians, in spite of their fetters, grew to so love the white folks that after they were released for lack of food to feed them, for sixteen days they went hunting and brought in their kill to their new white friends. They supplied the starving Jamestown people with some one hundred squirrels, turkeys, deer, and other animals a day.

Dining in Virginia continued.

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