ried away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea't is said Nineteen
of Twenty) among them so that the Woods were almost cleared of those
pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth."

What this pestilence was has been much discussed. It is variously
mentioned by different early writers as "the plague," "a great and
grievous plague," "a sore consumption," as attended with spots which left
unhealed places on those who recovered, as making the "whole surface
yellow as with a garment." Perhaps no disease answers all these
conditions so well as smallpox. We know from different sources what
frightful havoc it made among the Indians in after years,--in 1631, for
instance, when it swept away the aboriginal inhabitants of "whole towns,"
and in 1633. We have seen a whole tribe, the Mandans, extirpated by it
in our own day. The word "plague" was used very vaguely, as in the
description of the "great sickness" found among the Indians by the
expedition of 1622. This same great sickness could hardly have been
yellow fever, as it occurred in the month of November. I cannot think,
therefore, that either the scourge of the East or our Southern malarial
pestilence was the disease that wasted the Indians. As for the
yellowness like a garment, that is too familiar to the eyes of all who
have ever looked on the hideous mask of confluent variola.

Without the presence or the fear of these exotic maladies, the forlorn
voyagers of the Mayflower had sickness enough to contend with. At their
first landing at Cape Cod, gaunt and hungry and longing for fresh food,
they found upon the sandy shore "great mussel's, and very fat and full of
sea-pearl." Sailors and passengers indulged in the treacherous delicacy;
which seems to have been the sea-clam; and found that these mollusks,
like the shell the poet tells of, remembered their august abode, and
treated the way-worn adventurers to a gastric reminiscence of the heaving
billows. In the mean time it blew and snowed and froze. The water turned
to ice on their clothes, and made them many times like coats of iron.
Edward Tilley had like to have "sounded" with cold. The gunner, too, was
sick unto death, but "hope of trucking" kept him on his feet,--a Yankee,
it should seem, when he first touched the shore of New England. Most, if
not all, got colds and coughs, which afterwards turned to scurvy, whereof
many died.

How can we wonder that the crowded and tempest-tossed voyagers, many of
them al