Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown

Abstract

Death was ever-present for early colonists in America. Mortality rates for Jamestown in its early years were catastrophic. At the end of its first year, 1607-1608, thirty-eight of the original 108 settlers were alive. The winter of 1609 was the notorious starving time in Virginia, when the population dropped from 500 to sixty in six months.' During the period 1619 to 1622, when the Virginia Company poured colonists into Virginia at a massive rate, the mortality rate was once again high. The company sent 3,570 people to America during these three years, making a total population, with the 700 already there, of 4,270. Three thousand colonists died during these three years. At least 6,000 people went to Virginia between 1607 and 1624. In 1625, there were 1,200 people there.2 Virtually every letter from Virginia during this period speaks of the helplessness the colonists felt before the phenomenon of widespread deaths. The high mortality rate was caused by a combination of psychological and physical factors. Observers in America repeatedly spoke of the unexplainable lethargy and apathy of those affected. Clearly, malnutrition was directly or indirectly the leading cause of death. The fact that the colonists were virtually all suffering from malnutrition also offers a way of explaining the colonists' conviction that people were dying of apathy or, as they put it, of idleness and laziness. The nutritional deficiency diseases to which the colonists were prey are characterized in their early stages by symptoms that appear to the layman to be purely psychological, such as anorexia (loss of appetite) and indifference. Since they also cause aching in the limbs, the sufferer may insist on staying in his bed. Therefore, when the colonists speak of people dying of laziness and