very_ and the _Goodspeed_ fare better. In the summer of 1608, the
sickness reappeared and once more wrought havoc among the unhappy
settlers. Captain Smith, who probably saved his own life by his frequent
exploring expeditions, on his return to Jamestown in July, "found the
Last Supply al sicke".[55] In 1609, when the fleet of Summers and
Newport reached Virginia, the newcomers, many of whom were already in
ill health, fell easy victims to malaria and dysentery. Smith declared
that before the end of 1610 "not past sixtie men, women and children"
were left of several hundred that but a few months before had sailed
away from Plymouth.[56] During the short stay of Governor De la Warr one
hundred and fifty, or more than half the settlers lost their lives.[57]

Various visitors to Virginia during the early years of the seventeenth
century bear testimony to the ravages of this scourge. A Spaniard named
Molina, writing in 1613, declared that one hundred and fifty out of
every three hundred colonists died before being in Virginia twelve
months.[58] DeVries, a Dutch trader to the colony, wrote, "During the
months of June, July and August it is very unhealthy, then people that
have lately arrived from England, die, during these months, like cats
and dogs, whence they call it the sickly season."[59] This testimony is
corroborated by Governor William Berkeley, who reported in 1671, "There
is not now oft seasoned hands (as we term them) that die now, whereas
heretofore not one of five escaped the first year."[60]

In 1623 a certain Nathaniel Butler, in an attack upon the London
Company, called "The Unmasked Face of our Colony in Virginia", drew a
vivid, though perhaps an exaggerated picture of the unhealthfulness of
the climate. "I found the plantations," he said, "generally seated upon
meer salt marshes, full of infectious bogs and muddy creeks and lakes,
and thereby subjected to all those inconveniences and diseases which are
so commonly found in the most unsound and most unhealthy parts of
England, whereof every country and climate hath some." It was by no
means uncommon, he declared, to see immigrants from England "Dying under
hedges and in the woods", and unless something were done at once to
arrest the frightful mortality Virginia would shortly get the name of a
slaughter house.[61]

The climate of eastern Virginia, unhealthful as it undoubtedly was in
the places where the first settlements were made, cannot be blamed for
al