Fresh-water shell mounds of the St. John's River, Florida / by Jeffries Wyman.
- Jeffries Wyman
- Date:
- 1875
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Fresh-water shell mounds of the St. John's River, Florida / by Jeffries Wyman. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![If there were any eye-witnesses of cannibalism among the Europeans who explored Florida in the earliest days of its history, they have left no records of the fact. In later times Jonathan Dickenson, a Pennsylvania qnaker, who was wrecked on the coast near St. Lucia in 1699, in the narra- tive of his sufferings, calls the inhabitants cannibals, but nowhere saw human flesh eaten by them. The most direct statement he makes is as fol- * lows : at this town, about a twelve month before, a parcel of Dutch men were killed, who having been cast away on the Bohemia [Bahama] Shoals, they, in a flatt which they built, escaped hither and were devoured by these cannibals, as we understand by the Spaniards.”76 I am indebted to Dr. C. F. Winslow for a statement in the records of Nantucket that Capt. Christo- pher Hussey was cast away on the Florida coast and devoured by canni- bals.” This event was also in the latter part of the seventeenth century.77 The reasons derived from our own observations for believing that the an- cient inhabitants of the St. John’s were cannibals may be stated as follows : 1. The bones, an account of which we have given, were not deposited in the shell heap at an ordinary burial of a dead body. In this case after the decay of the flesh there would have remained a certain order in the position of the parts of the skeleton, especially in the pelvis, the long bones of the limbs, the vertebral column and the head. The bones would be entire as in other burials. In the cases here described, they were, on the contrary, scat- tered in a disorderly manner, broken into many fragments, and often some important portions were missing, as the head at one of the mounds near Blue Spring, the bones of an arm and leg at the other, and in other mounds a still larger number of bones. The fractures as well as the disorder in which the bones were found evidently existed at the time they were covered up, as is shown by the condition of the broken ends, which had the same discolor- ation as the natural surfaces. 2. The bones were broken as in the case of those of edible animals, as the deer, alligator, etc. This would be necessary to reduce the parts to a size corresponding with the vessels in which they were cooked, or suitable for roasting, or even for eating raw. 3. The breaking up of the bones had a certain amount of method; the heads of the humerus and femur were detached as if to avoid the trouble, or from ignorance as to the way, of disarticulating the joints. The shafts of these bones, as also those of the fore arm and leg, were regularly broken through the middle. The olecranon process of the ulna was in some cases detached in the same manner as the corresponding part in the deer. 4. There is no evidence that the bones were broken up while lying ex- posed upon the ground by wild animals, as the wolves and bears. If they were thus broken one might reasonably expect to find the marks of teeth, but after a careful examination of hundreds of pieces they have not been 76 God’s Protecting Providence, Man’s Direct Help and Defence, etc., p. 60, 8vo. London, 1700. 77 See doings of the Nantucket Historico-genealogical Society, in Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. Nov. 22, 1873.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22326881_0080.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
