Starvation, conflict, long winters and even longer wars. In these cases,
we may never know what really happened to the earliest Americans.
"A continent of vast untapped wealth. Starting with the most valuable resource of all…land."
The settlement of Jamestown, established by English colonists in the spring of 1607
in what is now the state of Virginia, was by the main metric a success: It lasted.
In fact, it would be the first permanent English settlement in the Americas and remains
a population center today. But the city was built on the blood and bodies of scores of settlers.
Out of the 500 Jamestown colonists who settled there by the year 1609,
only about 60 were still alive by the summer of 1610. In fact, life, and death, more accurately,
in Jamestown was by that point so bad that, according to PBS, on June 7th, 1610, the remaining
residents abandoned their colony. The protest was short-lived: By the very next day they were turned
back and ordered to remain there by the newly appointed governor of the colony, Thomas West.
The mystery of the so-called "Starving Time" at the Jamestown colony is that,
to this day, historians can’t quite determine why
a staggering 88% of the colonists there died in those early years.
Many factors likely contributed, including a horrible drought that ravaged crops,
diseases both endemic to the English and newly acquired in the Americas,
and attacks by the local Algonquian natives. However,
even these factors combined hardly explain why the attrition rate was so ghastly.
Perhaps today it's easier than ever to believe in UFOs or,
as they are more properly termed, UAP — unidentified aerial phenomena — given that
we're in an age of aeronautics and even space flight. But nearly 400 years ago?
It's difficult to imagine the terror that must have gripped three men from the Massachusetts
Bay Colony when, in early 1639, they were stupefied by some sort of glowing,
flying object. According to History, there has been no explanation for what they saw.
The colony's governor, John Winthrop, did not personally experience the happenings,
but did record the incident in his journal. Clearly,
he gave some credence to the witnesses who saw a glowing object in the sky saying,
"When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square;
when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine."
The mysterious, luminescent object apparently darted to and from in the sky,
moving at indescribable speeds. During the encounter, the three men who shared the
experience found their boat had traveled nearly a mile down the Muddy River,
a tributary of the tidal basin of the Charles River near Boston. And no, they weren't drunk:
Governor Winthrop took pains to describe the eyewitnesses to the UAP as sober and discreet.
"Peace has reigned throughout our world. Pass it on to others,
so that they, too, may be enlightened."
"Be kind, rewind!"
Today, the discovery of remains stuffed unceremoniously into the wall of a cellar
would lead to an investigation as to what happened. Then, likely a trial and a conviction
for the deliberate treatment of the remains, if not for the murder that led to the corpse
in the first place. But in the middle years of the 17th century in the English Colonies of America,
there was no such luck, or respect, for people of a certain ranking in society.
Take the very cold case of the remains of a teenage boy found in the cellar of
a house built in the 1660s near what is today the capital of Maryland,
the city of Annapolis. According to the Baltimore Sun, by the time archaeologists recovered the body
that had been hidden away in the walls of a home, it had likely been there for more than 300 years.
Archeologists with forensic experience are confident the young man,
who was likely an indentured servant of 16 years of age who stood about 5'5",
was not properly buried, but hastily interred and then literally left to rot.
This one mysterious body can serve to illustrate the harsh lives of all indentured servants
in Colonial America – about half of them would perish before earning their freedom.
It would come to be known by many as history's first recorded global manhunt,
and its subject was the feared and loathsome pirate Captain Henry Every.
Every's crime – or his most recent one, at any rate – was the particularly brazen September 7,
1695 attack on the ship Ganj-i-Sawai. Every led the attack from aboard his own vessel,
the Fancy, while his quarry was in the Red Sea. According to the Smithsonian Magazine,
the Ganj-i-Sawai was under sail on a return voyage from Mecca back to India,
and being as the vessel belonged to the emperor of India, it was understandably
laden with treasures. They were treasures which Every and his crew happily stole.
Captain Every escaped all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and is known to have made
landfall in the Bahamas after the attack. Despite being pursued across the globe by agents of the
Mughal regime of India, Every was never caught. His last known whereabouts are also a mystery.
"By all the…!"
"Let me stop you there. Bigger on the inside!"
The recent discovery in Rhode Island of a number of 17th century coins bearing
Arabic inscriptions has led scholars to believe Every made his way north
from the Caribbean Sea and up the east coast of America, quite possibly posing
or acting as a slave trader.
A few hundred years ago, a family called the Dudleys settled in an area of the
colony of Connecticut. What came to be known as Dudleytown would end up
considered a cursed site and well worthy of its final fate, which was abandonment.
"Dudleytown. Also known as, The Village of the Damned."
According to Damned Connecticut, Dudleytown was founded in 1747. The region seemed set
to flourish, with its fertile farmland and a growing iron production industry. However,
while nearby communities would prosper, Dudleytown was doomed.
According to local historians, many members of the Dudley family itself
succumbed to death at a young age, as did many others who tried to make a life in
the area. An inordinate number of these deaths have been attributed to suicide,
an act which, at the time, was often attributed to demonic possessions.
Within a few generations of the establishment of Dudleytown many farms were failing, iron
production was faltering, and more people were moving away than moving in. By the turn of the
20th century, the town had been abandoned. But to this day, many visitors to the region report the
uneasy feeling of paranormal presences, and there are even occasional sightings of ghosts reported.
Were it not for her violent end and mysterious death,
it's quite unlikely the world would still remember Jane McCrea at all.
Just what happened to her is something of a mystery,
in spite of the frequent depiction of her murder at the hands of native warriors in
an 1804 oil painting by John Vanderlyn. Jane McCrea was born in the English colony of New
Jersey in the year 1752 and killed in 1777, early on in the Revolutionary War.
A known Loyalist, she was captured by a group of natives and was slated to be brought to a group
of Continental soldiers in hopes of a reward. While being transported to the Americans, the
classic version of the story is that two groups of her native captors began to argue over who
was more deserving of the reward and, in the heat of the argument, McCrae was murdered and scalped.
Another possible story is that an American soldier accidentally shot and killed the young
woman as she was being chased during an escape attempt, and according to Plymouth Magazine,
this was the explanation given by several natives but it was disavowed at the time.
An examination of her body performed more than a century later did indeed
find evidence of gunshot wounds, so the traditional story may well be fabricated.
A few things about the Boston Massacre are clear, one being that its naming was more an
act of propaganda than of accurate documentation, given that only five people died in the event.
Another known fact is that Crispus Attucks, a man of African descent who had formerly been
enslaved and was then working to load and unload ships, was the first man killed. According to PBS,
that means he is widely considered the first casualty of the Revolutionary War.
What we don't know for sure is why things escalated so quickly
into violence that frigid night of March 5, 1770.
Some historians now believe it was on the occasion of being struck with a snowball
that British Private Hugh White called for reinforcements, an act that escalated
tensions between the Redcoat soldiers and the Bostonians who were out protesting.
As snowballs gave way to stones and clubs, several Brits opened fire,
five proto-Americans were killed, and more seeds of war were sown.
We don't know what prompted the Brits to fire during the Boston Massacre,
but we know it was Redcoats who did the shooting. When it comes to the first shot
fired of what would come to be known as Battles of Lexington and Concord,
the first combat of the American Revolution, we will likely never know.
According to History, on the morning of April 19,
1775, British troops reached the town of Lexington, New Hampshire,
determined to seize a stash of weapons stored in nearby Concord. Having been warned ahead of time,
several dozen Patriot soldiers were armed and ready when the Redcoats arrived.
A brief standoff ensued, and in fact the rebel militiamen were about to heed their commander's
order to disperse when a single shot rang out. At once fighting commenced and in the
ensuing battles, which took place in Lexington, near Concord, and then as rebels pursued the
British column back toward Boston, the British took some 250 casualties to the Patriots' 90.
But just who was responsible for "the shot heard round the world" remains a mystery.
In September of 1776, only a few short months following the Declaration of Independence,
the fledgling American war effort was in a bad way.
General George Washington was withdrawing his troops from New York as British
commander William Howe moved his soldiers into the area. During the withdrawal,
many counseled Washington to set fire to the bustling city, thereby denying its resources
to the Redcoat army. Washington is known to have rejected this idea, according to U.S. History,
but nonetheless, much of the city would soon burn.
On September 21st, a fire broke out in a tavern that would soon spread to consume
nearly 500 buildings. Although the fire did indeed deprive the Brits of much property,
it's still not known if it was arson used for this purpose,
was an accidental blaze, or if the fires were in fact started by British soldiers.
During the course of the harshly conducted inquiry into the cause of the fire,
one of those arrested was the Patriot spy Nathan Hale who famously, if perhaps falsely,
said before his hanging for treason:
"My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country."
We know who is buried in the mass graves near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in a general sense:
They are Americans killed during the Revolutionary War. But as for
who are the specific bodies among the 500 or so interred in the soil there, we will never know.
It's also something of a surprise that the site became so intertwined with
the war effort in the first place: According to the Washington Times,
the Moravian Protestants who had settled the area were staunch pacifists.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, though, and during the winter of 1776 to 1777,
the hospital of Bethlehem began to be inundated with wounded soldiers and
the Moravians began to help the cause in a manner in keeping with their peaceful
ways. That included making coffins for the war's dead and burying them.
Soon, there were simply too many corpses to properly inter, and mass burials began. The
remains were usually placed in long trenches and then covered without markers, a practice that to
this day leads to the occasional accidental unearthing of Revolutionary War casualties.