The real Thanksgiving? Well, it went down this way. Jamestown, the second colony formed in the New World, was hit with the worst drought in 400 years. Two consecutive years of zero crops combined with no water resulted in hell on earth. They began by eating their own horses and ended up by eating each other. Their "deal" with the Indians had also broken down because neither group could grow anything or hunt anything. The Pilgrims had no knowledge of droughts and weather cycles, and there was not one among them who had ever farmed; a formula for disaster, and disaster happened. Why? Well, they just thought they had sinned somehow and were being visited by God's wrath.

"If the English had tried to find a worse time to launch their settlements in the New World, they could not have done so," said Dennis B. Blanton, director of the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research. "From 1587 to 1589, the most extreme drought in 800 years is implicated in the disappearance of the Lost Colony, and the Jamestown settlement was later plagued by the driest seven-year episode in 770 years.

More is known about the hardships at Jamestown, which was founded in 1607 but nearly failed during the period from 1609 to 1610 -- historically known as 'the starving time'-- when the colony suffered 'an appalling death rate.' According to historians, 43 percent of the 350 colonists alive in June of 1610 were dead by the end of that summer.

The Roanoke and Jamestown colonies have both been criticized for poor planning, poor support, and for a startling indifference to their own subsistence," concluded the writers in Science. "But the tree-ring reconstruction indicates that even the best planned and supported colony would have been supremely challenged by the climatic conditions of 1587-1589 and 1606-1612."

The Jamestown drought, for instance, decimated corn crops on which the colonists depended and aggravated tense relations with the native Powhatan Indians. Blanton speculated that when the Indians could not supply food to the colonists as promised, hard feelings followed and conflict erupted. The dates of at least two Anglo-Indian wars correlate perfectly with the droughts, he said.

Drought also affected the quality of the colony's critical water supply. "Poor water quality is another factor implicated in the ill health suffered at Jamestown, and water quality at Jamestown is poorest during drought," said the Science article. "The lower James River is a brackish estuary, and there are archival references to foul drinking water and associated illnesses among the settlers, particularly before 1613."

During the drought, many people starved, and some of the Jamestown colonists eventually resorted to cannibalism. Citing a staggering death toll that nearly forced abandonment of the colony, the Science article notes that "only 38 of the 104 original settlers were still alive after the first year at Jamestown, and 4,800 out of the 6,000 settlers sent to Jamestown between 1607 and 1625 died during this extraordinary period."

"The colonists were expected to live off the land and off trade and tribute from the Indians. But this subsistence system would have left the colonists extremely vulnerble to bad weather

A timeline for the desperate colony, the slaughter by the Indians, the diseases, and the failure of crops is detailed here. It is interesting to note that the "colony" was never in good shape until England sent 90 women over to marry the men there. The first Thanksgiving in 1621 coincided with the obvious end of the drought in 1618 so that for the first time the Pilgrims had an abundance of food. They had been accustomed to spend this time of the year fasting, praying for forgivness, and apologizing for sins. It was either in 1619 or 1621 that a farmer had an idea to celebrate their good fortune rather than mourn for the bad things that had been happening. So the feast, lasting four days and joined by the local Indians, became a festival of plenty. At last.......abundance to be thankful for.