attacked by fever, and in a few months one hundred and fifty had died. Delaware himself was stricken with the ague almost as soon as he reached Jamestown, and only saved his life by withdrawing for a long sea voyage but for the food and medicine brought over in the ships, the remainder of the Colony would have been destroyed by disease.[1] One of the charges which Butler advanced against Virginia was, that owing to the presence of a countless number of bogs, swamps, and marshes, it was subject to all the forms of sickness found in those parts of England that continued undrained.[2] Robert Evelyn, in the New Albion, declares that agues were more prevalent in Virginia than in the English counties of Essex and Kent, and that this was not surprising when it was recalled that the water used in drinking was brackish, and that the valleys were full of marshes and the forests of ponds. He asserted that during the first thirty years of the Colony, five of every six persons imported had died.[3] Molina stated in 1613, that one hundred and fifty in every three hundred perished in the course of the first year following their arrival in Virginia.[4] In 1624 Governor Wyatt, in a letter to the authorities in England, mentions that all the settlers who had recently arrived were in a low state of health on account of the change of climate.[5] In some instances whole bands of immigrants
- ↑ Letter of Governor and Council of Virginia to the London Company, 1610, Neill’s Virginia Company of London, p. 48.
- ↑ Unmasking of Virginia, Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. II, p. 171.
- ↑ New Albion, p. 5, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. II. Evelyn declares that during the first thirty years, one hundred thousand persons died while in the course of seasoning.
- ↑ Molina to Velasco, Spanish Archives, Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 648.
- ↑ British State Papers, Colonial, vol. III, No. 4; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1624, p. 197, Va. State Library. See also Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 421. Governor Wyatt advised the English authorities to appoint the governors in Virginia for long terms, because, for the first year at least, “they are for the most part in ill disposition of health through the change the climate.” British State Papers, Colonial, vol. III, No. 5; Winder Papers, vol. I, p. 31, Va. State Library. For a later period, see Archives of Maryland, Proceedings of Council, 1667-1687, p. 192.
