Apart, then, from its special and technical interest, my subject has a meaning which gives a certain importance, and even dignity, to details in themselves trivial and almost unworthy of record.  A medical entry in Governor Winthrop’s journal may seem at first sight a mere curiosity; but, rightly interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief as to the order of the universe and the relations between man and his Maker.  Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the prevailing interpretation and treatment of disease.  When the touch of a profligate monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the common symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to be peopled with still stranger delusions.

Let us go before the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and look at the shores on which they were soon to land.  A wasting pestilence had so thinned the savage tribes that it was sometimes piously interpreted as having providentially prepared the way for the feeble band of exiles.  Cotton Mather, who, next to the witches, hated the “tawnies,” “wild beasts,” “blood-hounds,” “rattlesnakes,” “infidels,” as in different places he calls the unhappy Aborigines, describes the condition of things in his lively way, thus:  “The Indians in these Parts had newly, even about a Year or Two before, been visited with such a prodigious Pestilence; as carried away not a Tenth, but Nine Parts of Ten (yea’t is said Nineteen of Twenty) among them so that the Woods were almost cleared of those pernicious Creatures to make Room for a better Growth.”

What this pestilence was has been much discussed.  It is variously mentioned by different early writers as “the plague,” “a great and grievous plague,” “a sore consumption,” as attended with spots which left unhealed places on those who recovered, as making the “whole surface yellow as with a garment.”  Perhaps no disease answers all these conditions so well as smallpox.  We know from different sources what frightful havoc it made among the Indians in after years,—­in 1631, for instance, when it swept away the aboriginal inhabitants of “whole towns,” and in 1633.  We have seen a whole tribe, the Mandans, extirpated by it in our own day.  The word “plague” was used very vaguely, as in the description of the “great sickness” found among the Indians by the expedition of 1622.  This same great sickness could hardly have been yellow fever, as it occurred in the month of November.  I cannot think, therefore, that either the scourge of the East or our Southern malarial pestilence was the disease that wasted the Indians.  As for the yellowness like a garment, that is too familiar to the eyes of all who have ever looked on the hideous mask of confluent variola.