orderly and religious colony. We may justly affirm that some of "the
wisdom, prudence and patience and just and equall carriage of things
by the better part" [Footnote: Bradford's History of Plymouth
Plantation; Bk. II.] was manifested among the women as well as the
men.

In spite of the spiritual zeal which comes from devotion to a good
cause, and the inspiration of steady work, the women must have
suffered from homesickness, as well as from anxiety and illness. They
had left in Holland not alone their loved pastor, John Robinson, and
their valiant friend, Robert Cushman, but many fathers, mothers,
brothers and sisters besides their "dear gossips." Mistress Brewster
yearned for her elder son and her daughters, Fear and Patience;
Priscilla Mullins and Mary Chilton, soon to be left orphans, had been
separated from older brothers and sisters. Disease stalked among them
on land and on shipboard like a demon. Before the completion of more
than two or three of the one-room, thatched houses, the deaths were
multiplying. Possibly this disease was typhus fever; more probably it
was a form of infectious pneumonia, due to enervated conditions of the
body and to exposures at Cape Cod. Winslow declared, in his account of
the expedition on shore, "It blowed and did snow all that day and
night and froze withal. Some of our people that are dead took the
original of their death there." Had the disease been "galloping
consumption," as has been suggested sometimes, it is not probable that
many of those "sick unto death" would have recovered and have lived to
be octogenarians.

The toll of deaths increased and the illness spread until, at one
time, there were only "six or seven sound persons" to minister to the
sick and to bury the dead. Fifteen of the twenty-nine women who sailed