A "Wonderful Plague" and a New Found Golgotha: The Mystery Behind the Great Dying of 1616-1619

With the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 reports began to reach King James I of England regarding the state of the inhabitants on the coast of New England.  These reports pointed out the desolate nature of the landscape and related tales from the native inhabitants that spoke of a great plague which had only recently visited them and had so utterly decimated their once healthy and vibrant communities by bringing death and disease.  The indigenous peoples themselves had named this mysterious curse of death and suffering, “The Great Dying”.

King James I--renowned for his staunch Puritanism and not exactly sympathetic to the sufferings of native peoples whom he considered to be ungodly heathens--wrote of the reports that he had received, and rather happily related that, “Within these late years, there hath by God’s Visitation reigned a Wonderful Plague that has caused the utter devastation, destruction and depopulation of these lands.”  The lands that the King of England was referring to were those lands that would one day become the northeastern United States.

Even today, no one is quite sure how many indigenous peoples inhabited the present day northeastern United States prior to the Pilgrims arrival in the 1620’s, but most historians speculate that the native population at that time in New England alone probably hovered between 15 and 20 million people.  But, when the Puritans began to arrive in large numbers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around the year 1630, over ninety percent of that native population had already, mysteriously, perished.  In fact, even by 1620 when 102 adventurous Englishmen and women washed up on the shores of Cape Cod, much of the native population had already been decimated by “The Great Dying” due in large part to intermittent contact with European traders and fishermen.

Undoubtedly, the Great Dying was caused by the first contact of native New England peoples with Europeans at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but so much mystery still remains surrounding this unprecedented pandemic in the New World, that even with our modern sensibilities it’s still tempting to believe--like the Puritans of Massachusetts and the native Americans themselves--that the hand of God or Fate or of some unknown supernatural force may have been involved.

Some scientists and historians have attributed the Great Dying to yellow fever, smallpox, cholera or even chickenpox--all diseases which the native inhabitants of New England probably did not have any immunity against at the dawn of the seventeenth century.  It is possible that the Great Dying did have one direct cause, but it’s also just as possible that the pandemic was a combination of all of these diseases and more--a perfect storm of disease or a diverse cocktail of infections from Europe-- that came together all at once to decimate the Native American population of North America.  Some, more recent historians of science have even speculated that, perhaps, the Great Dying of 1616 to 1619 was some sort of bubonic plague or bacterial infection inadvertently brought to the New World by European fisherman and traders aboard ships thanks to a species of black rat indigenous to Europe and Asia but unknown in the western hemisphere at that time.  The exact cause of the Great Dying (if there was one at all!) was, is and probably will remain a great mystery for the rest of history.

Whatever it was it’s a fact that in the winter of 1616-1617 something unforgivably lethal--a tidal wave of disease and death--began to kill off North America’s native population and that by the year 1620 when English settlers first arrived to stay in New England, whatever it was had already depopulated their villages and left their fields barren and desolate.  The Pilgrims and then later the Puritans who arrived to settle in Massachusetts attributed the Great Dying to an act of a beneficent God--an act that had been done on their behalf--to depopulate the land so that they themselves could settle there and form divine Christian communities.  The Native Americans who survived the Great Dying attributed their suffering to the wrath of angry and vengeful spirits.

Prior to the winter of 1616 to 1617 the historical record speaks of populous and vibrant indigenous farming and fishing communities dotted all along the New England coastline.  No less and more reputable a personage than Captain John Smith himself--of Pocahontas fame--when sailing past Cape Cod in 1614 and visiting with the native Agawam people wrote of villages and, “Many rising hills with their tops all dotted with green farms and fields of corn.”  At the time, Captain Smith estimated that the native Agawam population of Cape Cod probably numbered in excess of ten thousand people, but by the time the pilgrims arrived there in 1620, the Agawam population that greeted them numbered only about two dozen souls.

There were reports by the Pilgrims at Plymouth of their inadvertently stumbling upon the skeletons of dead natives as they wandered through the woods or of wandering into villages completely empty of people which seemed as if they had only days before had populations that must have numbered in the hundreds.  So rapid and total was the onset of the Great Dying in the years between 1616 to 1620 that the native populations didn’t even have time to bury their dead.  

Thomas Morton, an early settler in the Plymouth Colony, and possibly the first European to take a deep interest in the culture of North America’s indigenous people said of the landscape that he first encountered there that, “The bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after coming into those parts that it seemed to me a new found Golgotha.”

It would appear, though, that Thomas Morton was one of the few Europeans who at the time was willing to acknowledge the horror and suffering that the Great Dying inflicted upon the native peoples of North America.  With little modern scientific knowledge, and being the type of people who literally saw the hand of God in everything, the Pilgrims and later the Puritans, didn’t spend all that much time speculating on the origins or causes of the Great Dying nor did they bother to express much sympathy for the people around them that had only recently perished by the tens of thousands, but instead, the English who arrived in New England from 1620 to 1640 were wholly confident that it was God Himself who had so orchestrated what the natives called “The Great Dying” all for their benefit.

Daniel Denton, who arrived in Massachusetts as a teenager with his family around the year 1640, and who would go on to travel extensively throughout Puritan North America, before founding Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 1700 as an old man wrote about what he saw in New England as a result of the Great Dying.  He commented that, “Strangely they had decreased by the hand of God…and it hath generally been observed…that wherever the English came to settle a divine Hand had made way for them.”

A Divine Hand or a curse from God.  Though firsthand sources are scarce when it comes to what Native Americans believed regarding what they called the Great Dying, most indigenous peoples generally believed that plagues and great misfortunes were caused by a lack of magical protection or by the intrusion of sorcery, black magic or curses into their daily lives.   They may have viewed the visitation of pale skinned Englishmen to their shores as the literal arrival of spirits from the afterlife to seek vengeance for the native peoples themselves being somehow out of balance with the spiritual world.  In 1618, two years before the arrival of the Pilgrims on the shores of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags, native to that region, reported a great comet in the nighttime skies over Massachusetts--and tales of the Great Dying as a punishment of their people from their Gods began to reach the ears of Europeans.  The Wampanoags beseeched French traders, English fishermen and later Puritan settlers for help and protection from the Great Dying, believing that only the God of the so-called Christians could save them as Europeans appeared immune from the plague, but obviously, no help was forthcoming.

Edward Winslow, esteemed Pilgrim father and Governor of the Plymouth Colony described the symptoms of the Great Dying as, “Not unlike those of the Bubonic Plague”.  Winslow himself, along with many other English settlers, were all too familiar with the symptoms of bubonic plague given their own firsthand experience with that terrible disease back in England, so that the Great Dying may very well have been that sickness which Europeans had long since already referred to as the Black Death.

Eventually, the Great Dying would sort of burn itself out, it would appear, and the native population would increase somewhat as the seventeenth century moved onward though the indigenous population would never again reach pre-pandemic levels in New England thanks in large part to the continued presence of new diseases but also to war, famine, and enslavement on the part of greater and greater numbers of ever encroaching English settlers.

In a sadly ironic historic twist of fate throughout the 1600s the ever expanding population of New England would continue to be visited by new and deadly plagues and pandemics, but unlike the Great Dying of 1616 to 1619 these later epidemics of disease did not discriminate between Europeans and Native Americans or Puritans and Pagans but were, instead, equal opportunity killers.   

In 1633 there was the Great Smallpox Epidemic which once again ravaged the native community that had no immunity to this disease.  Then in 1645 there was something called “The Universal Sickness” which may very well have been a strain of influenza, followed in 1650-1652 by an epidemic of sickness that the Puritans simply named “The Plague and the Pox” another mysterious illness the cause of which, like the Great Dying, remains largely unknown to this day.