Note 235 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

The mysterious pestilence, which in the years 1616 and 1617 swept away the New England Indians from the Penobscot to Narragansett Bay, is mentioned by all the earlier writers, and its character has recently been somewhat discussed. There can be no doubt that it practically destroyed the tribes, especially the Massachusetts and the Pokanokets, among which it raged. The former were reduced from a powerful people, able, it is said, to muster three thousand warriors, to a mere remnant a few hundred strong. The Pokanokets were in some localities, notably at Plymouth, actually exterminated, and the country left devoid of inhabitants (I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 148; Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 183). Winslow gave a description of the desolation created by this pestilence, and of the number of the unburied dead, very like that in the text (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 183, 206). On this subject, see also, Bradford, pp. 102, 325; Johnson, p. 16; Wood’s Prospect, p. 72; III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 57.

No definite conclusion as to the nature of this pestilence has been reached by medical men. It has been suggested that it was the yellow-fever (Palfrey, vol. i. p. 99, n). As, however, it raged equally in the depth of the severest winter as in summer, this could not have been the case (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 57; Bradford, p. 325). Other modern medical authorities have inclined to the opinion that it was a visitation of small-pox (Dr. Holmes in Mass. Hist. Soc., Low. Inst. Lect., 1869, p. 261; Dr. Green’s Centennial Address before the Mass. Med. Soc., June 7, 1881, p. 12). In support of this hypothesis Captain Thomas Dermer is quoted, who, sailing along the coast in 1619-20, wrote “we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die” (Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1778). On the other hand, none of the contemporaneous writers who speak of the disease ever call it the small-pox, though all of them were perfectly familiar with small-pox, and a very large portion of them probably bore its marks. Dermer speaks of it as “the plague.” Bradford, when the same pestilence raged on the Connecticut, described it as “an infectious fever.” Dr. Fuller, the first New England physician, then died of it (Bradford, p. 314). He could not but have been familiar with the small-pox and its symptoms; and it would seem most improbable that he should have died of that disease among his dying neighbors, and not have known what was killing him. Moreover, in 1633-4 the small-pox did rage among the Indians, and Bradford, in giving a fearfully graphic account of its ravages, adds, “they [the Indians] fear it more than the plague.” Josselyn also draws the same distinction, saying (Two Voyages, p. 123): “Not long before the English came into the country, happened a great mortality amongst [the Indians]; especially where the English afterwards planted, the East and Northern parts were sore smitten by the contagion; first by the plague, afterwards, when the English came, by the small-pox.”

It would seem, therefore, that the pestilence of 1616-7 was clearly not the small-pox. More probably it was, as Bradford says, “an infectious fever,” or some form of malignant typhus, due to the wretched sanitary condition of the Indian villages, which had become over-crowded, owing to that prosperous condition of the tribes which Smith describes as existing at the time of his visit to the coast in 1614 (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 109).