on.

Before leaving, the survivors of the winter had had a consultation with
Gates and Somers about future prospects for the colony. Chiefly fear of
starvation determined the decision to abandon the settlement: the
provisions brought by Gates and Somers would have lasted only sixteen
days. The colonists could hold out no hope of obtaining food from the
Indians. ("It soone then appeared most fitt, by general approbation,
that to preserve and save all from starving, there could be no readier
course thought on then to abandon the countrie.")

After embarking, the settlers, with Gates, Somers, and the new
arrivals, had reached the mouth of the river when they met Lord De la
Warr, the new governor of the colony, coming from England with fresh
supplies and settlers. Heartened, the survivors of the Starving Time
turned back to try the New World again.

In Lord De la Warr's company was Dr. Lawrence Bohun, a physician of
good reputation, who subsequently distinguished himself serving the
medical needs of the settlement. He could not, however, even in his
capacity of personal physician, prevent Lord De la Warr from falling
victim to the common ailments.

In 1610, Lord De la Warr wrote: "presently after my arrival in
Jamestowne, I was welcomed by a hot and violent ague, which held mee a
time, till by the advice of my physician, Doctor Lawrence Bohun I was
recovered." Bohun, in the seventeenth-century tradition of treatment by
clysters, vomitives, and phlebotomy, resorted to bloodletting. The
letting, believed to free the body of fermented blood and malignant
humors, probably gave the governor a psychological lift, if only a
temporary one.

De la Warr, who blamed the distress of the colony upon the failures of
the settlers, soon had another taste of the illnesses which so many of
the colonists endured during their first months in the New World. In
his report to the Company explaining his early departure from the
colony, he included one of the fullest surviving accounts of sickness
at Jamestown during the first few years of settlement:

That disease [the hot and violent ague] had not long left me, til
(within three weekes after I had gotten a little strength) I
began to be distempered with other greevous sicknesses, which
successively and severally assailed me: for besides a relapse into
the former disease, which with much more violence held me more than
a moneth, and brought me to great weakenesse, th