Disease,” Discover, October 1992, 64-73; Dobyns, Their Number Become
Thinned, 42; Jennings, Invasion of America, 16-30; Simpson, Invisible
Armies; David Stannard, American Holocaust (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 11-24; and Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and
Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1987) and “The Native American Holocaust,” Winds of Change 4, no. 4
(Autumn 1989): 23-28. For a review of the population literature, see Melissa
Meyer and Russell Thornton, “Indians and the Numbers Game,” in Colin
Calloway, ed., New Directions in American Indian History (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), Ch. 1.
45 A paragraph in The American Pageant does tell of the 90 percent toll
throughout the hemisphere but leaves out any mention of the plague at
Plymouth.
46 Quoted in Ziner, Squanto, 147.
47 J. W. Barber, Interesting Events in the History of the United States (New
Haven: Barber, 1829), 30. Barber does not cite the authority he quotes.
48 Even though “Virginia” then included most of New Jersey, the Mayflower
nonetheless landed hundreds of miles northeast. Historians who support the
“on purpose” theory include George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New
York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945); Lincoln Kinnicutt, “The Settlement at
Plymouth Contemplated Before 1620,” Publications of the American
Historical Association (1920): 211-21; and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and
Providence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109, 270. Leon Clark
Hills, History and Genealogy of the Mayflower Planters (Baltimore:
Genealogical Publ. Co., 1975), and Francis R. Stoddard, The Truth about the
Pilgrims (New York: Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1952), 19-20,
support the “Dutch bribe” theory, based on primary source material by
Nathanial Morton. Historians at Plimoth Plantation support the theories of pilot
error or storm.
49 Ziner, Squanto, 147; Kinnicutt, “The Settlement at Plymouth Contemplated
Before 1620”; Almon W. Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the
Present Limits of the United States (Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1970
[1913]), 156- 59; Stoddard, The Truth about the Pilgrims, 16.
50 The Mayflower sailed south for half a day, until encountering “dangerous
shoals,” according to several of our textbooks. Then the captain and the