american-holocaust

108 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTMorgan. This way the war of extermination "would pay for itself," sinceit was likely that a sufficient number of female and child slaves would becaptured "to defray the whole cost." 41By the time this clever enterprise was under way in Virginia, the Britishhad opened colonies in New England as well. As usual, earlier visits byEuropeans already had spread among the Indians a host of deadly plagues.The Patuxet peoples, for example, were effectively exterminated by someof these diseases, while other tribes disappeared before they were even seenby any white men. Others were more fortunate, suffering death rates of50 and 60 percent-a good deal greater than the proportion of Europeanskilled by the Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century, but still farshort of total liquidation. These were rates, however, for any given singleepidemic, and in New England's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fewepidemics traveled by themselves. 42 The extant descriptions of what lifeand death were like at times like these are rare, but the accounts we dohave of the viral and bacteriological assaults are sobering indeed, reminiscentof the earlier Spanish and Portuguese accounts from Mesoamericaand Brazil. Wrote Plymouth Colony's Governor William Bradford, for instance,of a smallpox epidemic from which huge numbers of Indians "diedmost miserably":For want of bedding and linen and other helps they fall into a lamentablecondition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering andrunning one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the matsthey lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as itwere, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And thenbeing very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rottensheep. The condition of this people was so lamentable and they fell down sogenerally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another,no not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to burythe dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procureno other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays anddishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And somewould crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by theway and not be able to get in again. 43While "very few" of the Indians escaped this scourge, including "thechief sachem ... and almost all his friends and kindred," Bradford reported,"by the marvelous goodness and providence of God, not one ofthe English was so much as sick or in the least measure tainted with thisdisease." Time and again Old World epidemics such as this coursed throughthe veins of the native peoples of the North Atlantic coast, even before thearrival of the first great waves of British settlers, leaving in their wake somany dead that they could not be buried, so many piles of skeletal remains