Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 86, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1908 — PAID IN HUMAN LIFE. [ARTICLE]

PAID IN HUMAN LIFE.

Price of. White Settlement at Old Jamestown in * Virginia. No less an antiquarian than Judge Dennis of Baltimore, who, it is said, knows every -Another’s son of the Eastern Shore”—and, we may add, his sisters, cousins and aunts—expressed in the Sun the other day amazement that there should have been such mortality when “they were surrounded by water full of fish,” and “the land was scarcely less prolific.” Major Venable drops his meditations about matrimony and Aristotelian philosophy long enough to suggest that the trouble is due to a particularly virulent type of malaria which once prevailed in that locality. To those two eminent Baltimoreans, accustomed to stimulate their intellects with Lynnhaven oysters, Norfolk spots, roast Virginia wild turkey, haunch of venison, Smithfleld ham, corn pone and cherry roll, it must indeed seem strange that anybody ever starved or was unhappy in Virginia. But it is sadly true tnat the first settlers from causes which were natural enough' at the time suffered a greater mortality it is probable, than any other pioneer colony in all history. At the outset it may be well to state the figures. According to the recent computation of Dr. Alexander crown of Virginia in his "First Republic in America”—an estimate now accepted as the most accurate obtainable 6,294 of the 7,389 persons who arrived in Virginia in the first 18 years of the colony perished within that time, most of them a few months after their arrival. In the absurd histories taught in many of the schools this fact is ignored, while excessive space is wasted in hysterics about the Boston “massacre,” in which fearful a) slaughter five persons were killed. Baltimore Sun.