to have been typhus in 1585. Smallpox, mumps, typhus, diphtheria, and
whooping cough were brought by Europeans; and hookworm, dengue,
blackwater fever, yellow fever, elephantiasis, leprosy, and yaws by Africans.
Travelers in the Carolinas found whole towns abandoned and overgrown
with weeds. “Two and a half centuries after contact with the Spaniards, all
of Florida’s original Indian people were gone.” Farther north, shortly after
the English established themselves on Roanoke, large numbers of their
Indian neighbors sickened and died. A Catholic priest in Louisiana specu-
lated that because the pores of the skin were more open in Indians than in
whites, diseases could more easily enter Indians’ bodies; but knowing noth-
ing of immunities, both whites and Indians ascribed the devastation to
some divine force. As Thomas Hariot reported in 1587, within a few days
of the departure of the English from any Indian village,
the people began to die very fast, and many in short space, in some
Townes about twentie, in some fourtie, and in one sixe score.... The
disease also was so strange, that they neither knewe what it was, nor how
to cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the Countrey never hap-
pened before, time out of minde.... They were perswaded that it was
the worke of our God through our meanes, and that we by him might kill
and slay whom we would without weapons, and not come neere them.In Massachusetts, the Pilgrims agreed that devastation of the Indians
was the work of God. As Governor William Bradford recorded in 1634, “it
pleased God to visit the Indians with a great sickness, and such a mortality
that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died.” For many,
death was horrible. Bradford wrote:
Indians that lived about their trading house there fell sick of the small
pox and died most miserably; for a sorer disease cannot befall them, they
fear it more than the plague. For usually they that have this disease have
them in abundance, and for want of bedding and linen and other helps
they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the
pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin
cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a190 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA