Parenting & Family Quote by George Percy

A sentence like this lands less as confession than as administrative procedure: “We put the Children to death...” opens with the clean grammar of authority, as if the moral catastrophe is already settled policy. Percy’s phrasing is doing a particular kind of colonial work. It doesn’t argue; it records. The ellipsis functions like a swallowed rationale - an omitted “because” that readers are expected to supply (scarcity, fear of revolt, discipline, “necessity”). That gap is the subtext: violence presented as self-explanatory once you accept the expedition’s premise that some lives are expendable to secure the project.

The brutality is also strangely practical. “Throwing them overboard” and “shooting out their brains in the water” are not just details; they’re a demonstration of control in a liminal space where law is improvised. The water matters: it’s disposal, erasure, and spectacle at once - an execution staged to keep the ship’s social order intact and to keep evidence literally floating away. Children, named as “Children,” sharpen the message. If even they are killable, then everyone aboard understands the new hierarchy: survival and authority trump kinship, pity, or Christian scruple.

Contextually, Percy sits at the dawn of English settler colonialism in Virginia, when starvation, disease, and conflict made “expediency” a ready excuse for atrocity. The sentence’s real intent is to normalize the unthinkable inside a narrative of exploration. It’s not only what happened; it’s how empire trains people to speak about what they do.