While from the standpoint of years the Cavalier colony at Jamestown might be entitled to the first discussion, it is with the Puritans that we shall begin this investigation.  For, with the Puritan Fathers came the Puritan Mothers, and while the influence of those fathers on American civilization has been too vast ever to be adequately described, the influence of those brave pioneer women, while less ostentatious, is none the less powerful.

What perils, what distress, what positive torture, not only physical but mental, those first mothers of America experienced!  Sickness and famine were their daily portion in life.  Their children, pushing ever westward, also underwent untold toil and distress, but not to the degree known by those founders of New England; for when the settlements of the later seventeenth century were established some part of the rawness and newness had worn away, friends were not far distant, supplies were not wanting for long periods, and if the privations were intense, there were always the original settlements to fall back upon.  Hear what Thomas Prince in his Annals of New England, published in 1726, has to say of those first days in the Plymouth Colony: 

“March 24. (1621) N.B.  This month Thirteen of our number die.  And in three months past die Half our Company.  The greatest part in the depth of winter, wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases, which their long voyage and unaccommodate conditions bring upon them.  So as there die, sometimes, two or three a day.  Of one hundred persons, scarce fifty remain.  The living scarce able to bury the dead; the well not sufficient to tend the sick:  there being, in their time of greatest distress, but six or seven; who spare no pains to help them....  But the spring advancing, it pleases GOD, the mortality begins to cease; and the sick and lame to recover:  which puts new life into the people; though they had borne their sad affliction with as much patience as any could do."[1]

Indeed, as we read of that struggle with famine, sickness, and death during the first few years of the Plymouth Colony we can but marvel that human flesh and human soul could withstand the onslaught.  The brave old colonist Bradford, confirms in his History of Plymouth Plantation the stories told by others:  “But that which was most sad and lamentable, was that in two or three months’ time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter ... that of one hundred and odd persons scarce fifty remained:  and of these in the time of most distress there was but six or seven sound persons; who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no pains, night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, ... in a word did all the homely, and necessary offices for them.”