tlers 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 dr