In the winter of 1609 five hundred English colonists at Jamestown, Virginia sat inside a wooden fort beside a river full of fish and a forest full of deer and ate their horses, their dogs, their shoes, and then each other. Sixty were alive in May. They had come to find gold. Half of them were gentlemen who had never held a spade, and the colony's early years were a comedy of men bowling in the street while the planting season passed. John Smith had kept them alive by bullying them to work and by trading with the Powhatan for corn and venison. In 1609 a powder burn sent him home to England, the Powhatan closed the trade, and the colonists, who had never learned to hunt the country or fish the river in winter, barricaded themselves inside the palisade with what they had. What they had was almost nothing. A relief fleet had been wrecked on Bermuda. The garden had been eaten to the roots. The accounts, written by survivors, run through it in order: the horses, then the dogs and cats, then the rats and mice, then boots and belts boiled for the leather, then the dead dug up from the graves. One man killed his wife, salted her, and had eaten most of her before he was found and burned at the stake. In 2012 archaeologists found the skull of a fourteen-year-old girl in a cellar with the cut marks of a butcher's cleaver on it. When the Bermuda ships finally came up the river in May 1610 the men aboard found the fort's gates off their hinges, burned for firewood, and a handful of skeletons who begged to be taken home. Outside the walls the Powhatan had wintered as they always had, on venison and oysters and corn from the stores. The first English town in America starved to death in a larder, because the men who built it had come to dig, not to hunt, and would not learn from the people who knew how.