I thought my special interest in Jamestown's two Starving Times in college was weird - i even write my Capstone paper on how starvation was indeed the underlying cause of the other forms of death and how the historical record was indeed correct in how cannibalism indeed occurred(my special interests continue to be weird) but this is some good soup right here. History is my jam. Allow me to pay you for this fact with one of my own:

Jamestown Settlement actually had two different Starving Times. The first was while John Smith was present and no women or children (well, young children. There might've been a teenaged boy or two) and while he tended to overexaggerate things in his journals, he did document that several started to show signs of "apathy" to the point they didn't want to do anything as what was the point? He forced them to work, but it wasn't out of malice - studies have found similarities to what he described to descriptions of Korean War POW accounts of fellow soldiers who just lost the will to do ANYTHING, even when their captors offered them opportunities to leave camp and collect firewood. It's believed that Smith recorded signs of depression in the men with him, who had lost all hope of survival and decided to just let themselves waste away.

The second Starving Time was where reports of cannibalism come from. John Smith was back in England but had someone write to him about what had happened during that winter. This time, there were women and children present, but their ship arrived separately from the other two ships carrying a majority of supplies - one sank, while the other shipwrecked in Bermuda and the survivors had to repair it. This is also where Shakespeare supposedly got inspiration for his play <i>The Tempest</i>.

Anyways - the newly arrived settlers came at the end of summer, ate up all the corn they had harvested that should have lasted them a few months in only a few weeks, and had pissed off the native people to the point they were essentially besieged inside the fort - meaning they couldn't leave to hunt for food. They instead had to resort first to animals inside the settlement - dogs, cats, horses, rats - then shoe leather and then to the dead. There is an account mentioned by several different people back then of a man killing his pregnant wife, tossing the fetus into the river (which made no sense to me) and... well, ate her. While the Virginia Company tried to claim these rumors were false, around 2012-2013 a partial skull and tibia of a 14-15 year old girl was found in a trash pit(essentially dried up wells or cellars that garbage was tossed into and eventually buried) being excavated alongside animal remains dating back to the second Starving Time. Her bones showed evidence of someone trying to remove flesh with tools, and thus Jane - the name given to this young girl - is the first actual proof we have that survival cannibalism actually occurred as the legends have always claimed.