" And always there came with them a letter from the company
at home to the old men of the colony reminding them that these
young women did not come to be servants. "We pray you therefore to
be fathers to them in their business, not enforcing them to marry
against their wills, neither send them to be servants," they wrote.
And if the girls did not marry at once they were to be treated as
guests and "put to several householders that have wives till they
can be provided of husbands."
Helped in this quaint fashion and in others the colony prospered
and grew ever larger. It would have prospered even more had it
not been for the outbreak of a kind of plague, which the colonists
simply called "the sickness." It attacked chiefly the new settlers,
and was so deadly that in one year a thousand of them died. Doctors
were not very skilful in those days, and although they did their
best, all their efforts were of little use, till at length the
dread disease wore itself out.
But in spite of all difficulties the colony grew, the settlements
extended farther and farther in a long line up and down both banks
of the James from Chesapeake Bay to what is now Richmond. Had the
Indians been unfriendly, the colony could not have stretched out
in this fashion without great danger to the settlers. But for eight
years the Redmen had been at peace with their white brothers, and
the settlers had lost all fear of attack from them.
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