Miraculous Plagues: Epidemiology on New England’s Colonial Landscape

But they did not understand that the Jes Grew epidemic was unlike physical plagues. Actually Jes Grew was an anti-plague . . . Terrible plagues were due to the wrath of God; but Jes Grew is the delight of the Gods.

So Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text. For what good is a liturgy without a text?

—Ishmael Reed

During his 1605 voyage down the coast of present-day New England, Samuel de Champlain made note of the numerous people and cultivated fields that he encountered along the way: at the mouth of the Saco River in what is now southern Maine, he described the corn “which [the Almouchiquois] raise in gardens,” as well as the “many squashes, and pumpkins, and tobacco, which they likewise cultivate,” and in Boston Harbor, he noted that “all along the shore there is a great deal of land cleared up and planted with Indian corn” (64–65, 72–73). A decade later, John Smith wrote about the same region using idyllic terms in his Description of New England (1616), observing that “the Countrie of the Massachusets . . . is the Paradise of all those parts . . . [T]he Sea Coast as you passe, shewes you all along large corne fields, and great troupes of well proportioned people” (204–5). These images of bountiful gardens and a populated paradise are designed to present potential settlers and investors with visions of an inviting, edenic landscape that might support European plantations with minimal effort. And yet these very same images stand in stark contrast to those that would be painted by the first generation of settlers in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay; within a decade of Smith’s visit, men like William Bradford and Edward Winslow described an increasingly apocalyptic wasteland; indeed, efforts to settle New England permanently in the early 1620s produced a class of narratives whose primary goal was to justify expansion, rather than to describe new territory. A prototypical justification narrative—Robert Cushman’s 1622 “Reasons and Considerations touching the lawfulness of removing out of England into the parts of America”— went so far as to center its argument around a description of New England as a “vast and empty chaos” (93).

Ironically, as much as Cushman’s characterization differs from de Champlain’s and Smith’s, it would prove to be just as inviting to English settlers, whose concerns were by then focused on widespread anxieties about the inherent dangers of migrating to the New World, and potential hostility from Native Americans. To address these concerns, justification narratives (which took varied forms, including pamphlets, sermons, journals, and correspondence), borrowed tropes and generic conventions from earlier European explorers to represent the region as hospitable to the English, healthy for their constitutions, and free for them to appropriate.¹ Furthermore, they shared a common detail described by Thomas Dermer in a 1619 letter to Samuel Purchas, which highlights a remarkable transformation that would prove to shape the physical and ideological landscapes of New England for generations to come. Addressing a catastrophic collapse in the Native American population during the intervening half-decade since Smith’s visit, Dermer wrote,“I passed alongst the coast where I found some antient Plantations, not long since populous now utterly void; in other places a remnant remaines, but not free of sicknesse. Their disease the Plague, for wee might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such that usually die” (129). Historians have long since acknowledged it unlikely that the (bubonic) plague actually made its way from Europe to New England in the early seventeenth century, but Dermer’s more general reference to “sicknesse” points to the root cause of this depopulation: a series of epidemics that struck the eastern seaboard of New England between 1616 and 1619, killing up to 95 percent of the Native Americans who were living there at the time.² These epidemics were so widespread and so devastating that no explorer or settler could fail to notice their effects. In New Englands Trials (1622), which chronicled his return voyage to the region, Smith wrote that “where I had...