the Colony.[1] Culpeper, referring to his voyage to Virginia, declared that the fleet accompanying him was full of “death, scurvey, and calenture,” and it may be safely taken for granted that this was not exceptional.[2]
However great the amount of sickness in July, August, and September among those who had newly arrived, and however much they suffered, the persons who had passed through the period of seasoning found the climate of Virginia highly favorable to health if they were removed from the contagion of diseases introduced by ships from abroad. Governor Wyatt wrote as early as 1623 that the average length of life among the old residents was as great as in the most wholesome parts of England,[3] and the proportion of deaths was even smaller; in the families of ancient planters, the larger number of whose members had been born in the country, not one in twenty were cut off.[4] The same condition was observed by the early adventurers to exist among the Indian inhabitants; they were subject to few diseases, and in many instances attained to a great age, proving that the supposed unwholesomeness of the climate of Virginia, except in midsummer, was to be attributed not so much to any fault in the climate itself, except in the immediate vicinity of the marshes, as to the natural result of a change of air and alteration in diet on the part of the newly arrived colonists, not to men-
- ↑ Governor West to Lords Commissioners of Plantations, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. IX, No. 7; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1636, p. 150, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Letter of Culpeper to Secretary Coventry, May 2, 1680, McDonald Papers, vol. V, p. 353, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Governor and Council to London Company, British State Papers, Colonial, vol. III, No. 1; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1623, p. 175, Va. State Library; New Description of Virginia, p. 7, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. II.
- ↑ Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 565.
