The London Company's instructions to the first permanent settlers to avoid low-lying, marshy land, if followed, might have saved the colonists from some of the sicknesses they were to endure, but other considerations dictated the choice of the Jamestown site; the peninsular, about thirty miles upstream, provided natural protection and a good view up and down the river. The danger from the ships of other European peoples seemed more immediate and formidable than those from the mosquito, with its breeding place in the nearby swamp, and from the foul and brackish drinking water.
As the century progressed, the settlers pushed inland from Jamestown and the low-lying coastal region, up onto the drier land. The danger from typhoid, dysentery, and malaria grew steadily less. In choosing home sites—once the confines of the peninsula were left behind and the fear of attack from Indian or European was less—the early planters took into consideration the dangers of the fetid swamp and muggy lowland.
That the promotion of health did play a part in the selection of sites for settlement is borne out by the re-location of the seat of government from the languishing village of Jamestown to Middle Plantation or Williamsburg. After an accidental fire destroyed a large part of Jamestown at the end of the century, the people indicated a desire to move away from an environment, recognized as unhealthful, to Middle Plantation, known for its temperate, healthy climate as well as for its wholesome springs. The inhabitants had contemplated a move earlier in the century for health reasons but authorities in England and governors in Virginia acted to prevent the abandonment of the only community even approaching the status of a town.
The move away from Jamestown would probably appear a wise measure even to the twentieth-century physician; to the seventeenth-century physician, who often saw a close relationship between climatic conditions and disease, the move seemed imperative. A man well-versed in science and medicine, living in Jamestown a decade or so before the town was abandoned, exemplified this medical theory when he wrote that an area was unhealthy according to its nearness to salt water. He had observed that salt air, especially when stagnant, had "fatal effects" on human bodies. In contrast, clear air (such as would be enjoyed at Middle Plantation) had beneficial effects.
Considerations of health and the effects of disease not only influenced the settlers in their choice of living sites but also in many of their other activities. Political, economic, and social history in seventeenth-century Virginia was determined in part by health and disease.
Disease as a Determining Factor in the Early Years of the Colony
Death from disease and incapacitation from disease are challenges to which every civilization—and human community—must successfully respond in order to survive. Historian Arnold J. Toynbee has emphasized the vital character of the challenge and response relationship in the history of all communities. A particular challenge to which early Jamestown almost succumbed was disease. The actions—or inactions—of the settlers under the London Company, 1607-1624, demonstrated especially well the influence of the challenge of disease upon the early history of Virginia.
During the first year of the settlement at Jamestown, disease worked as an important factor in the realm of politics. In this connection, Edward Maria Wingfield, chosen first president of the governing council in Virginia, found himself removed from office, imprisoned, and sent home by the spring of 1608, all as a result of charges brought against him that for the most part were petty and contradictory. Pettiness and contradictions, in this instance, were rooted in the miserable conditions which the colonists had to endure their first summer: famine and sickness not only demoralized the colonists but were killing them faster than they could be buried.
Wingfield left office as president of the council after the first summer spent in Jamestown. The sickness that caused much tension during his tenure was probably the malady loosely described by early Virginians as the "seasoning." The complex of symptoms ascribed to the seasoning bothered the settlers throughout the seventeenth century. Even as late as 1723 a recent arrival in Virginia wrote that "all that come to this country have ordinarily sickness at first which they call a seasoning of which I shall assure you I had a most severe one." During the first two summers, 1607 and 1608, however, this seasoning inflicted the most distress, judging by the seriousness with which contemporaries described it.
One of these contemporary accounts, written by George Percy who sailed to Virginia with the first settlers in 1606-07, described the distress caused by seasoning and famine during the summer of 1607. The awfulness of that summer is made more dramatic by the manner in which Percy introduced the subject. Having described the voyage over, which was relatively pleasant with the stopover in the beautiful West Indian islands, and having entertained the reader with startling accounts of the habits of the savages in Virginia ("making many devillish gestures with a hellish noise, foming at the mouth, staring with their eyes, wagging their heads and hands in such a fashion and deformitie as it was monstrous to behold"), Percy abruptly began listing the names of the dead as his narrative moved into the late summer months: