Ships plying the Atlantic at the beginning of the seventeenth century
were small and the voyage was lengthy. Four months passed before the
_Godspeed_, the _Discovery_, and the _Susan Constant_, carrying the
first permanent settlers to Jamestown, sighted the two capes at the
mouth of Chesapeake Bay in April, 1607.
Although these small ships carrying the first permanent settlers had a
stopover in the West Indies for rest and replenishment, there had been
debilitating months at sea and more than 100 emigrants to provide for
in addition to the crews. With limited cargo and passenger space, water
and food supplies could hardly satisfy the demand created by a hundred
persons at sea for hundreds of days. Several of the emigrants died on
the first voyage and the remainder disembarked poorly prepared for the
new tests their constitutions would soon endure.
The sea voyage of these first settlers probably exacted no heavier a
death toll and caused no more suffering because the ships went by way
of the Canaries and the West Indies instead of by the more northerly
route by-passing the islands. A contemporary described the advantages
thought to be had from the stopover in the West Indies (at the island
of Nevis):
We came to a bath standing in a valley betwixt two hills, where wee
bathed ourselves.... Finding this place to be so convenient for our
men to avoid diseases which will breed in so long a voyage, wee
incamped our selves on this ile sixe dayes, and spent none of our
ships victuall.
Anchoring off other West Indian islands the ships were able to
replenish their stores with fresh meat and fish and to replace the
evil-smelling and foul water in their casks with fresh. By these
measures the colonists demonstrated a concern not only for comfort but
also for hygienic precautions.
Later voyages during the century took anywhere from two to three
months. Despite the precautions taken by some, of a rest, in the West
Indies to bring about "restitution of our sick people into health by
the helpes of fresh ayre, diet and the baths," the trip aboard the
pestered ships continued to exact a heavy death toll and to discharge
disease and diseased persons. Benefits resulting from the stopover in
the Indies were countered by the considerable exposure to tropical
infections. One convoy carrying colonists to Virginia in 1609 and
running a southerly course through "fervent heat and loomes breezes"
had many of the crew and passengers fall ill from calenture (tropical
or yellow fever). Out of two ships so afflicted, thirty-two persons
died and were thrown overboard. Another of these ships reported the
plague raging in her.
Irritated by frequent references to the unhealthy climate of Virginia
and fearful that the bad publicity would increase the difficulties in
obtaining colonists, officials of the London Company took pains to
expose the part that the ocean voyage played in bringing about the
deaths of newcomers. Musty bread and stinking beer aboard the pestered
ships, according to a contemporary, worked as a chief cause of the
mortality attributed falsely to the Virginia climate and conditions at
Jamestown. In 1624 Governor Wyatt and his associates recommended to
commissioners from England that "care must be had that the ships come
not over pestered and that they may be well used at sea with that
plenty and goodness of dyet as is promised in England but seldom
performed." Others complained of the crowding of men in their own
"aires," uncleanliness of the ships, and the presence of fatal
"infexion."
Insomuch as seventeenth-century medical theory paid scant attention to
sanitation and hygiene in the study of the causes of disease, it is
surprising to find the early Virginian rightly recognizing the ships as
sources of sickness. On the other hand, observation could not help but
lead passengers to conclude that sickness, such as flux or dysentery,
with which they had to suffer aboard ship, might have a causal
relationship to the ship. To have related the transmission of the
plague from epidemic centers in England via infected shipboard rats,
and transmission of tropical fevers, as well, by the medium of
shipboard water buckets infected with mosquito larvae from the tropics,
was beyond the capacity of both medical theory and of first-hand
observation.
Physicians or surgeons did ship aboard the seventeenth-century
ocean-going vessels, but Doctor Wyndham B. Blanton, the chief authority
on seventeenth-century Virginia medicine, concludes that most of them
probably had poor educations and little more to recommend them than "a
smattering of drugs, a little practice in opening abscesses and a
liking for the sea." A seventeenth-century contemporary recommended
that a ship's surgeon--surgeons went to sea far more often than
physicians--be the possessor of a certificate from a barber-surgeon
guild and be freed from all ship's duties except the attending of the
sick and the cure of the wounded. The ship's surgeon, then, crossed the
professional line between surgeon and physician, a line that necessity
would soon force so many medical men to cross in America.
Throughout the century ship's surgeons abandoned their shipboard duties
to settle in the Virginia colony, and there seems little reason to
doubt that those remaining aboard ship took advantage of the
opportunity when in port to help meet the medical needs of the
colonists, thus supplementing the medical talent which had taken up
residence in Virginia.
The labors of the ship's surgeon at sea, no matter how valiant, could
not offset the miseries of the long sea voyage, and the sight of
Virginia's coast greatly cheered all hands. After the foul air, crowded
quarters, and inadequate provisions of the ship, many settlers must
have reacted to the Virginia land as Captain John Smith did: "heaven
and earth never agree better to frame a place for man's habitation." It
is not surprising then that the first permanent settlers were somewhat
less than careful when evaluating, against standards of health, the
possible sites for settlement.