During this winter the colonists—in addition to suffering from want of food—had to endure a "pestilent fever" of epidemic proportions matched only by the seasoning of 1607. About 500 persons died in the course of the winter.
The origin of the winter's epidemic, according to contemporaries, lay in the infectious conditions of numbers of the immigrants who had been poisoned during the ocean voyage "with stinking beer" supplied to the ships by Mr. Dupper of London. It is more likely that the pestilent fever of the winter was a respiratory disease rather than a disorder resulting from "stinking beer." Another commentator on the winter called attention to the continued "wadinge and wettinge" the colonists had to endure, bringing them cold upon cold until "they leave to live."
Whether continual wadings and wettings brought on respiratory diseases, or bad beer dietary, is debatable, but the critics of the Company used the dreadful winter of 1622-23 to discredit its administration. They pointed out that the Company had sent large numbers of immigrants to Virginia without proper provisions, and to a colony without adequate means of providing food and shelter for them. Many of these persons had subsequently died during the winter of 1622-23.
The Company, embarrassed by failures in Virginia—many of which resulted directly from unhappy combinations of famine and disease—and plagued by political dissension and economic difficulties, had its charter annulled in May, 1624. One of the most adversely critical—and somewhat prejudiced—tracts written against the Company summed up conditions in the colony after fifteen years under its direction:
There havinge been as it is thought not fewer than tenn thousand soules transported thither ther are not through the aforenamed abuses and neglects above two thousand of them at the present to be found alive, many of them alsoe in a sickly and desperate estate. Soe that itt may undoubtedly [be expected that unless the defects of administration be remedied] that in steed of a plantacion it will shortly gett the name of a slaughterhouse....
The Company did not live on after 1624 to acquire such a name, but during its short—and unhealthy—existence the effects of disease on history were manifest. Company instructions gave attention to health requirements; ocean sailings depended upon health conditions; famine and disease almost caused the early abandonment of the colony; strong administrators left, for reasons of health, a Virginia sorely in need of leadership; poor health conditions resulting in lowered morale undermined local leaders; and the over-all economic welfare of the colony suffered from the long-term and short-term effects of famine and disease. The intimate or personal hardships endured by the individual settlers because of disease and famine cannot be enumerated, but the persistent influence that the summation of all the individual suffering had on the general spirit and ethics of early Virginia cannot be overlooked.
Disease and famine did not cease to influence Virginia history in 1624, but their great importance during the first two decades has been emphasized because they were then a factor exerting a major influence, perhaps the predominant one.
CHAPTER THREE
Prevalent Ills and Common Treatments