and rushes about us and though
striped-legged mosquitoes were our nearest and most attentive
neighbours. Fortunately, the mosquitoes did not feel that hospitality
required them to call upon the strangers or to show them any attention
except in the evening. Even then they were more or less distant, rarely
coming into the houseboat, but lingering in a neighbourly way about
doors and windows, and whispering assurances of their regard through
some crossed wires that we happened to have there.

One of the chief causes of illness among the colonists, impure water,
we did not have to contend with. In the early days of James Towne, the
river was the only water supply; later, shallow wells were dug; both
the river and the wells furnished impure, brackish water. To-day, two
artesian wells are flowing on the island. As we got our supply from
them, we often thought of how those first settlers suffered and died
for want of pure water, when all the while this inexhaustible supply
lay imprisoned beneath their cornfields. But even the water from the
artesian wells we took the precaution to boil. So, pitting screens
against mosquitoes and the teakettle against water germs, we lived on,
chill-less and fever-less in the marshes of Back River.

CHAPTER VII

SEEING WHERE THINGS HAPPENED

We were fortunate in visiting Jamestown Island after considerable had
been accomplished in the way of lessening the number of its historic
sites. For a long while, almost every important event in its story had
occurred at so many different places that it was scarcely possible for
the pilgrim to do justice to them all.

But, some time before our visit to the island, an era of scientific
investigation set in; researches were made among old musty records; and
even the soil was turned up in order to determine the place where this
or that event really did happen. The reduction in the number of places
of interest was astonishing. In every instance, it was found that the
historic event in question had happened at but a single place; and
consequently all its other time-honoured sites suddenly became
unhistoric soil.

An instance or two will serve to illustrate.

Upon our visit to James Towne, we found that the site of the colonists'
first fort (long variously fixed at several points along the river
front) was now limited to a single spot near the caretaker's cottage;
so that all the brave fighting that had been going on at those other
sites, had be