THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 1, 1996 TAG: 9605010402
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Why, I asked prize-winning Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn, did many settlers die at Jamestown in a land brimming with plate-sized oysters and berries as big as your fist?
``Partly because a search for products to send back to England for profit diverted them from devoting themselves chiefly to agriculture,'' he said, ``and partly because they couldn't cope with problems of the environment and partly because they were almost continually at war with the Indians.
``In those very bad years they couldn't realize the wealth of the country.''
Dr. Bailyn's spontaneity and directness suggest we hear him Friday at 8 p.m. at the Norfolk Historical Society in the dining center at Virginia Wesleyan College. Admission is free.
Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for books on early trans-Atlantic immigration to America and for the ideological origins of the Revolution, he will speak at the behest of a former student, Bill Woolridge, a director of the historical society.
In the 17th century large numbers of English people coming to Virginia had difficulty creating communities because of very high death rates, Bailyn remarked in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Encounters with the Indians were numerous, bloody and intense, he noted. In the heat and humidity, people from England didn't have the right dress and didn't know how to deal with their water supply.
Indians, from centuries of experience, knew not to drink from the James River at flood stage or in dry times when the water was salty.
And there was malaria.
``People commonly didn't die of malaria, but it weakened them and, in the beginning, they lacked immunity to infectious diseases and had deficient nutrition,'' he said.
Why was the settling of New England more orderly?
``You had family groups going into New England,'' he replied. ``They stayed together and formed communities. New England was settled by 20,000 people. An annual growth of 3 percent brought them to nearly 100,000 by the end of the century.
``In the early years, the South was settled by individuals, some 116,000 who came to the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland. Some 85 percent of them were male indentured servants who were needed to work tobacco, and the Chesapeake population declined against the whole number that came over.''
He offered a telling ratio: ``In New England it was three men to two women, but in Virginia it was six to one, mainly because of the demand for men servants to toil in tobacco.''
Not only does Bailyn know more of the settlers than they knew of themselves, he can intrigue us through his continuing research for yet another volume on America's origins. by CNB