xtreme
weakness and sicknes oppressed us. And thereat none need marvaile if
they consider the cause and reason, which was this: whilst the ships
stayed, our allowance was somewhat bettered, by a daily proportion of
Bisket, which the sailors would pilfer to sell, give, or exchange with
us for money, Saxefras, furres, or love. But when they departed, there
remained neither taverne, beere-house, nor place of reliefe, but the
common Kettell. Had we beene as free from all sinnes as gluttony, and
drunkennesse, we might have been canonized for Saints. But our President
would never have been admitted, for ingrissing to his private, Oatmeale,
Sacke, Oyle, Aquavitz, Beef, Egges, or what not, but the Kettell: that
indeed he allowed equally to be distributed, and that was half a pint
of wheat, and as much barley boyled with water for a man a day, and this
being fryed some twenty-six weeks in the ship's hold, contained as many
wormes as graines; so that we might truly call it rather so much bran
than corrne, our drinke was water, our lodgings Castles in the ayre;
with this lodging and dyet, our extreme toile in bearing and planting
Pallisadoes, so strained and bruised us, and our continual labour in the
extremitie of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to
have made us miserable in our native countrey, or any other place in the
world."

Affairs grew worse. The sufferings of this colony in the summer equaled
that of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in the winter and spring. Before
September forty-one were buried, says Wingfield; fifty, says Smith
in one statement, and forty-six in another; Percy gives a list of
twenty-four who died in August and September. Late in August Wingfield
said, "Sickness had not now left us seven able men in our town." "As
yet," writes Smith in September, "we had no houses to cover us, our
tents were rotten, and our cabins worse than nought."

Percy gives a doleful picture of the wretchedness of the colony:
"Our men were destroyed with cruel sickness, as swellings, fluxes,
burning-fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly, but for the
most part they died of mere famine.... We watched every three nights,
lying on the cold bare ground what weather soever came, worked all the
next day, which brought our men to be most feeble wretches, our food was
but a small can of barley, sod in water to five men a day, our drink but
cold water taken out of the river, which was at the flood very salt, at
a lo