It is indeed remarkable that, totally unused to any such conditions, wet, cold, poorly fed, overcrowded, storm-tossed, bruised and beaten, anxious, and with no homes to welcome them, exposed to new hardships and dangers on landing, worn and exhausted, any of the may-FLOWER’S company survived.  It certainly cannot be accounted strange that infectious diseases, once started among them, should have run through their ranks like fire, taking both old and young.  Nor is it strange that—­though more inured to hardship and the conditions of sea life—­with the extreme and unusual exposure of boat service on the New England coast in mid winter, often wading in the icy water and living aboard ship in a highly infected atmosphere, the seamen should have succumbed to disease in almost equal ratio with the colonists.  The author is prepared, after careful consideration, to accept and professionally indorse, with few exceptions, the conclusions as to the probable character of the decimating diseases of the passengers and crew of the may-Flower, so ably and interestingly presented by Dr. Edward E. Cornwall in the “New England Magazine” for February, 1897—­From the fact that Edward Thompson, Jasper More, and Master James Chilton died within a month of the arrival at Cape Cod (and while the ship lay in that harbor), and following the axiom of vital statistics that “for each death two are constantly sick,” there must have been some little (though not to say general) sickness on the may-Flower when she arrived at Cape Cod.  It would, in view of the hardship of the voyage, have been very remarkable if this had not been the case.  It would have been still more remarkable if the ill-conditioned, thin-blooded, town-bred “servants” and apprentices had not suffered first and most.  It is significant that eight out of nine of the male “servants” should have died in the first four months.  It was impossible that scurvy should not have been prevalent with both passengers and crew.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MAY-FLOWER’S LADING

Beside her human freight of one hundred and thirty or more passengers and crew, the lading of the may-Flower when she sailed from Plymouth (England), September 6/16, 1620, was considerable and various.  If clearing at a custom-house of to-day her manifest would excite no little interest and surprise.  Taking no account of the ship’s stores and supplies (necessarily large, like her crew, when bound upon such a voyage, when every possible need till her return to her home port must be provided for before sailing), the colonists’ goods and chattels were many, their provisions bulky, their ordnance, arms, and stores (in the hold) heavy, and their trading-stock fairly ample.  Much of the cargo originally stowed in the Speedwell, a part, as we know, of her company, and a few of her crew were transferred to the may-Flower at Plymouth, and there can be no doubt that the ship was both crowded and overladen.