he
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