ir number were daring enough to venture out into the ocean in the
longboat, in an attempt to reach the colony, but they must have
perished, for they were never heard from again.[49] The rest of the
company, seeing no other way of escape, built two pinnaces and, in May,
1610, sailed away in them for Jamestown. A few days later, upon their
arrival in Virginia, Gates received the old patent and the seal from the
President and the period of the first royal government in Virginia came
to an end.[50]

But the "faction breeding" government by the Council was by no means the
only cause of trouble. Far more disastrous was the "sicknesse". When the
first expedition sailed for Virginia, the Council in England, solicitous
for the welfare of the emigrants, commanded them to avoid, in the choice
of a site for their town, all "low and moist places".[51] Well would it
have been for the colonists had they obeyed these instructions. Captain
Smith says there was in fact opposition on the part of some of the
leaders to the selection of the Jamestown peninsula, and it was amply
justified by the event. The place was low and marshy and extremely
unhealthful.[52] In the summer months great swarms of mosquitoes arose
from the stagnant pools of water to attack the immigrants with a sting
more deadly than that of the Indian arrow or the Spanish musket ball.

Scarcely three months had elapsed from the first landing when sickness
and death made their appearance. The settlers, ignorant of the use of
Peruvian bark and other remedies, were powerless to resist the progress
of the epidemic. Captain George Percy describes in vivid colors the
sufferings of the first terrible summer. "There were never Englishmen,"
he says, "left in a forreign country in such miserie as wee were in this
new discouvered Virginia. Wee watched every three nights, lying on the
bare-ground, what weather soever came;... which brought our men to bee
most feeble wretches.... If there were any conscience in men, it would
make their harts to bleed to heare the pitifull murmurings and outcries
of our sick men without reliefe, every night and day for the space of
sixe weekes; in the morning their bodies being trailed out of their
cabines like Dogges, to be buried."[53] So deadly was the epidemic that
when Captain Newport brought relief in January, 1608, he found but
thirty-eight of the colonists alive.[54]

Nor did the men that followed in the wake of the _Sarah Constant_, the
_Disco