of bread. Another wrote that the settlers died like rotten sheep and
"full of maggots as he can hold. They rot above ground." As in 1609-10,
inadequate diet weakened the body and made it easy prey to infection.

During this winter the colonists--in addition to suffering from want of
food--had to endure a "pestilent fever" of epidemic proportions matched
only by the seasoning of 1607. About 500 persons died in the course of
the winter.

The origin of the winter's epidemic, according to contemporaries, lay
in the infectious conditions of numbers of the immigrants who had been
poisoned during the ocean voyage "with stinking beer" supplied to the
ships by Mr. Dupper of London. It is more likely that the pestilent
fever of the winter was a respiratory disease rather than a disorder
resulting from "stinking beer." Another commentator on the winter
called attention to the continued "wadinge and wettinge" the colonists
had to endure, bringing them cold upon cold until "they leave to live."

Whether continual wadings and wettings brought on respiratory diseases,
or bad beer dietary, is debatable, but the critics of the Company used
the dreadful winter of 1622-23 to discredit its administration. They
pointed out that the Company had sent large numbers of immigrants to
Virginia without proper provisions, and to a colony without adequate
means of providing food and shelter for them. Many of these persons had
subsequently died during the winter of 1622-23.

The Company, embarrassed by failures in Virginia--many of which
resulted directly from unhappy combinations of famine and disease--and
plagued by political dissension and economic difficulties, had its
charter annulled in May, 1624. One of the most adversely critical--and
somewhat prejudiced--tracts written against the Company summed up
conditions in the colony after fifteen years under its direction:

There havinge been as it is thought not fewer than tenn thousand
soules transported thither ther are not through the aforenamed
abuses and neglects above two thousand of them at the present to be
found alive, many of them alsoe in a sickly and desperate estate.
Soe that itt may undoubtedly [be expected that unless the defects
of administration be remedied] that in steed of a plantacion it
will shortly gett the name of a slaughterhouse....

The Company did not live on after 1624 to acquire such a name, but
during its short--and unhealthy--existence