17th Century

—  66  Earle, Carville V. “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” Chapter 3

—  66  Grob. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. 2002, p. 52.

–>52  PBS. “Death at Jamestown,” Secrets of the Dead, 2016.[1]

 

Narrative Information

 

Earle (drawing upon Percy): “….When Captain Newport departed on June 22, he left 104 healthy colonists. But soon the colony took on a somber attitude. On July 6 George Percy’s journal mentioned John Asbie’s death by ‘bloudie Flixe.’ Three days later George Flowre died of the ‘swelling.’ In the space of a month 21 colonists died, causing Percy to lament that ‘our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly but for the most part they died of mere famine.’[2] By the end of September, 46 were dead, and in January, when the first supply ship arrived in Virginia, just 38 of 104 colonists were barely alive.[3]

 

“The abundance of death demanded an explanation. But Percy’s speculation that ‘meere famine’ was the cause of death is unconvincing. In support of his thesis we can say that the colonists’ daily ration consisted of just half a pint of wheat and another of barley, mixed in a gruel that yielded roughly half the caloric intake required for an active man of the colonists’ stature.[4] But we should not hastily accept Percy’s ‘meere famine,’….Captain John Smith…made little of the shortage of provisions, stating matter-of-factly on several occasions that the colony still had many weeks of supplies remaining. He knew that the annual sturgeon run would provide a supplementary source of food. Thousands of these fish entered the James estuary in April and May, and their run to freshwater spawning grounds continued through the summer, when the big fish came in. ‘From the later end of May till the end of June,’ wrote Smith, ‘are taken few, but young Sturgeons of 2 foot or a yard long. From thence till the midst of September, them of 2 or three yards long and fewe others. And in 4 or 5 houres with one nette were ordinarily taken 7 or 8: often more.’[5]….the Atlantic sturgeon averages over one hundred pounds….

 

“The food supply during Jamestown’s first summer, though unappealing, provided sufficient nourishment to ward off starvation and vitamin deficiency diseases….

 

“Although Percy blamed famine, his list of clinical symptoms brings us closer to the actual causes of death — typhoid, dysentery, and perhaps salt poisoning. Medical historians generally agree that Percy’s ‘flixes’ or ‘bloudie Flixes’ describe dysentery, and ‘Burning Fevers’ are symptomatic of typhoid fever.[6] The ‘Swellings,’ though perhaps associated with dysentery, could also result from salt intoxication from the salty river water.[7] These three diseases are also indicated by the incidence and rapidity of death, as chronicled by Percy. Typhoid fever progresses rapidly after infection by the bacterium Salmonella typhosa. The first week may be symptomless, as the organisms spread through the bowel wall and into the lymphatic glands. In the second week the organism enters the bloodstream, causing a rapid rise in body temperature, recognized by colonists as the ‘Burning Fever.’….Before the use of antibiotics, it is estimated that 15 to 20 percent of infected persons died. Dysentery, caused by amoebic parasites, produced the ‘bloudie Flixe.’….Dysentery is often fatal, especially when populations are weakened by other illnesses or undernourishment. Pre-antibiotic mortality rates of 12 to 25 percent have been recorded. Like typhoid, dysentery can act quickly….

 

“An epidemic of typhoid fever and dysentery is consonant with Percy’s description of death and sickness at Jamestown. Percy first noted disease-related deaths on July 6, and sickness and death continued ‘for the space of sixe weekes’ — a time span in keeping with the progression of typhoid fever and dysentery. Furthermore, 50 of the 104 colonists had perished by mid-September….” [pp. 96-101]

 

(Earle, Carville V. “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” Chapter 3 (pp. 96-125) in Thad W. Tate and David Ammerman (Eds.). The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society. Williamsburg, VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979.)

 

Grob: “In December 1606 three vessels and 144 individuals left England. Before reaching American shores the group stopped in the West Indies, where they rested, ate fresh fruits and meat, and replenished their supply of water….At the end of April the expedition reached the Chesapeake Bay, and on May 13 settled on a site for the colony at Jamestown, located some fifty miles from the mouth of the James River. When the vessels departed for England in late June, 104 healthy persons remained behind at the first permanent English settlement in North American. The seemingly happy state of affairs proved short-lived. Within weeks [July-Aug?] nearly 20 percent of the colonists died. George Percy, one of the founders of the colony, provided a graphic description of events that fateful summer. ‘Our men,’ he lamented,

 

Were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning fevers, and by Warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of mere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia…our men night and day groaning in every corner of the Fort most pittifull to heare, if there were any conscience in men, it would make their harts to bleed to heare the pittifull murmurings & outcries of our sick men without reliefe every night and day for the space of sixe weekes, some departing out of the World, many times three of foure in a night, in the mornings their bodies trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges to be buried: in this sort did I see the mortalitie of divers of our people.

 

“John Smith observed that ‘God plagued us with such famin and sicknes, that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.’ By the end  of September nearly half of the group had perished. Ehen the first supply ship arrived in January 1608, only 38 of the 104 original settlers remained alive.”[8] (Grob. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. 2002, pp. 51-52 and 287.)

 

PBS: “As they set sail from London to the distant shores of America in December 1606, the men and boys onboard the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery surely expected the best from their adventure. They’d establish a British settlement, find gold and silver, a passage to the Orient, and perhaps, the lost colony of Roanoke. The explorers, funded by a group of London entrepreneurs called the Virginia Company, could not have anticipated the fate that actually awaited most of them: drought, hunger, illness, and death.

 

“Their journey started off as badly as it ended. The three ships were stranded for weeks off the British coast, and food supplies dwindled. Over the course of the voyage, dozens died. But 104 colonists — many gentlemen of privilege, but also artisans, craftsmen, and laborers — survived to reach the shores of Virginia. On May 13, 1607, they decided to make landfall on the swampy ground of what was then a peninsula (and now an island) along the James River, some 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Within a month the settlers had constructed a triangle-shaped wooden for, for protection against the Spanish, who did not want the British to establish any kind of foothold in the New World.

 

“The settlers of the new colony — names Jamestown — were immediately besieged by attacks from Algonquian natives, rampant disease, and internal political strife. In their first winter, more than half of the colonists perished from famine and illness.” (PBS. “Death at Jamestown,” Secrets of the Dead, 2016.)

 

Source

 

Earle, Carville V. “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” Chapter 3 (pp. 96-125) in Thad W. Tate and David Ammerman (Eds.). The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society. Williamsburg, VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1979. Accessed 1-5-2018 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=MYBRT-pd_j0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Grob, Gerald N. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2002. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=U1H5rq3IQUAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

PBS. “Death at Jamestown,” Secrets of the Dead, 2016. Accessed 1-5-2018 at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/death-jamestown-background/1428/

 

 

 

[1] PBS does not note the number of deaths in this overview of the show — note that “more than half of the colonists perished from famine and illness.” Earlier note that 104 colonists had arrived to create Jamestown.

[2] Earle footnote 2: “Observations by Percy,” Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 20-21. “The Proceedings of the English Colony” (1607) claims 105 colonists. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia, and Admiral of New England, 1580-1631 (Edinburgh, 1910), 1, 94.

[3] Earle footnote 3. Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 1, lxxvi, 9, 95; Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America, An Account of the Origin of This Nation, Written from the Records Then (1624) Concealed by the Council, Rather than from the Histories Then Licensed by the Crown (Boston and New York, 1898, 55.

[4] Earle footnote 4: Herbert Renardo Cederberg, Jr., “An Economic Analysis of English Settlement in North America, 1583-1635” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1968), 144; Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, II, 391-392.

[5] Earle footnote 6: “A Discourse of Virginia per: Ed: Ma: Wingfield,” in Arber and Bradley eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, 8-9, 51.

[6] Earle footnote 10: Very useful are John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, La., 1953); Wyndham B. Blanton, Medicine in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, Va., 1930), 3-77; Thomas P. Hughes, Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699, Jamestown 350^th Anniversary Historical Booklets, no. 21 (Williamsburg, Va., 1957); and Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1660-1860 (New York, 1960), 82-116.

[7] Earle footnote 11: Hans G. Keitel, The Pathophysiology and Treatment of Body Fluid Disturbances (New York, 1962), 162-164; John Hardesty Bland, “Clinical Physiology and Four Avenues of Loss and Gain,” in Bland, ed., Clinical Metabolism of Body Water and Electrolytes (Philadelphia, 1963), 133-164.

[8] Grob footnote 6 cites: George Percy, “Discourse,” in The Genesis of the United States, ed. Alexander Brown, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), I: 167-168; Earle, “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia,” p. 367; Dana P. Arneman, “Mortality in the Early Colonies of Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay Colony: A New Interpretation” (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1990), pp. 9-10.