Seven of the ships fitted out in the Thames, and sailed from Woolwich on May 15, 1609. Having been joined at Plymouth by two more, the fleet sailed thence on June 2, and from Falmouth on June 8. The expedition included “many unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill destinies,” with the proportion of women and children usual among emigrants, as well as horses, and probably other live stock. The navigation, to reach Western land in 37° N., appears to have been somewhat erratic:
“We ran a southerly course from the tropic of Cancer, where, having the sun within six or seven degrees right over our head in July, we bore away West; so that by the fervent heat and loomes breezes, many of our men fell sick of the calenture”—Noah Webster takes that to mean a spotted pestilential fever—“and out of two ships was thrown overboard thirty-two persons. The vice-admiral [the ‘Diamond’] was said to have the plague in her; but in the ‘Blessing’ we had not any sick, albeit we had twenty women and children.”
A storm came on, in which the ships were scattered, the admiral’s ship being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the storm “some lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their yards; the seas over-raking our ships, much of our provision was spoiled, our fleet separated, and our men sick, and many died; and in this miserable state we arrived at Virginia.” The ‘Blessing,’ on board which was Gabriel Archer, the principal narrator of events, seems to have fared better than the rest: “The ‘Unity’ was sore distressed when she came up with us; for, of seventy landmen [emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen were down, but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King’s River [James River] haply the 11th of August.” They found the colony “all in health (for the most part).” There were fourscore living 20 miles from the Fort, who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks’ space. “After our four ships had been in harbour a few days, came in the vice-admiral, having cut her mainmast overboard, and had many of her men very sick and weak.” This was the ship that was said to have the plague in her. The admiral and his ship’s company, wrecked on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the whole number of 150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only 60 remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the other ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but probably the most of it after landing; Jamestown “is in a marish ground, low, flat to the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town, but what we drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river oozing into it, from whence I verily believe the chief causes have proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues.” Lord De La Warre, one of the early governors, had a succession of illnesses—hot and violent ague, followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a month, “then the flux surprised me and kept me many days,” then the cramp, with strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy—which last, however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said to have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western Islands, and by the voyage thither[1156].
Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was really due to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates; but a great deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the “tainted air” of “foreign climes” was mere confusion of ideas. A more correct view of events was that of the Governor and Council of Virginia, in a letter of January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in London:
“The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four butts of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies and empty their purses[1157].”
The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down great numbers “since their last.” According to Purchas, the emigration to Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the years 1619, 1620 and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42 ships. Overcrowding, we may be sure, was the rule. We shall find particular evidence of it in speaking of West Indian colonization in the sequel; and for the present, it may suffice to quote a document of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers for New England per ‘Confidence’ of 200 tons.
If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by no means clear of it. The first voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620, carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614 and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in 1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the ‘Arbella,’ under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal:
“This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly and noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took order, and appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room clean for three days, and then four others should succeed them, and so forth on.”
Nothing more is said of the health on board the ‘Arbella.’ The ‘Mayflower’ and ‘Whale’ had their passengers all in health, but most of their cattle and horses dead. The ‘Success’ lost — goats, and many of her passengers were near starved. The ‘Talbot’ lost fourteen passengers. The colony had various experiences of sickness in due course. In 1633, smallpox proved fatal to whole settlements of Indians: “the English came daily and ministered to them; and yet few, only two families, took any infection by it[1160].” In 1646 an epidemic of influenza went among the Indians, English, French and Dutch, “not a family, nor but few persons, escaping it;” few died, not above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was appointed by the government of Connecticut, one reason among others being “the mortality which had been among the people of Massachusetts.” In 1655 there was another influenza, in 1658 “great sickness and mortality throughout New England,” in 1659 “cynanche trachealis,” croup perhaps, and in 1662 again general sickness, which, along with drought, called for a day of thanksgiving on their cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose to follow the epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the subject, the following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699, will suffice to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed long after the first voyages: “Arrived the ‘Britannia’ from Liverpool, which had been 13 weeks on her passage; she had 200 passengers on board,—had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly[1163].”