About the same time that the two Indians were expressing their love and affection for the whites by hunting for them an Ensign Laxton took "sixty or eighty men" down river with the idea of living on oysters. Also, a Lieutenant Percy took twenty men on a fishing trip to Point Comfort. The Percy party was gone for six weeks but didn't do very well. In the entire time that they were gone they could not agree about casting out their net.
Doing his part, a Master West took a group of fellows up to the falls, seeking anything they could find that was edible. All they could come up with were a few acorns, which were shared with the group.
Wild herbs abound in the woods of Virginia, many familiar while others were new and strange to the whites until some kind Indian came along and showed them which ones were good and how to use them. They also gathered tuckahoe root, of which they "could gather as much in one day as would make bread a week."
Virginia's rivers were filled with sturgeon in the summer and covered with geese and ducks in the winter.
Captain John Smith writes that they "had more sturgeon than could be devoured by dog and man." They used it in a variety of ways. Some of it they dried then pounded into a powder and mixed it with caviar, which were the eggs found in the fish. Into this mix they also put a variety of herbs including sorrel.
The Jamestown folk
had pork to eat as well, although in the very beginning the porkers in resident may have had a consumption reprieve while the people waited for the swine to breed and multiply, which they did. Captain John Smith writes that "Of three sows in eighteen months increased sixty and odd pigs."
An occasional meal of chicken and dumplings may have been on the menu at times. The settlers brought some five hundred chickens "brought up themselves without having any meat given them" from England. Yes, for all you non-farmer types, chickens will eat meat, even the scraps of their fellow chickens.
Dining in Virginia continued.
