Early English colonists in America died at staggering rates, primarily from disease, starvation, and contaminated water. At Jamestown, founded in 1607, roughly 80 percent of settlers who arrived in the first few years did not survive. At Plymouth, half the Mayflower passengers died within their first winter. The causes were interconnected: colonists arrived unprepared, settled in dangerous environments, faced the worst drought in nearly 800 years, and lacked the knowledge or relationships needed to feed themselves.
Contaminated Water at Jamestown
Jamestown’s location on the James River was a slow-motion death sentence. The colonists chose the site because it was defensible and had deep water for anchoring ships, but the river at that point was brackish, a mix of fresh and salt water that created ideal conditions for deadly bacteria. Every summer, rising salt water pushed upriver and concentrated pathogens in the colonists’ drinking supply. Typhoid fever and dysentery hit in recurrent epidemics, killing 30 percent or more of the population with each outbreak.
These weren’t one-time events. The cycle repeated year after year: colonists would begin to recover in cooler months, then summer would bring the salt water back and disease would tear through the settlement again. Settlers who survived one round were often too weakened to work, plant crops, or build adequate shelter, which made them more vulnerable the next time.
The Worst Drought in 800 Years
Tree-ring data from Virginia reveal something the colonists couldn’t have known: they arrived during the driest seven-year stretch in 770 years, lasting from 1606 to 1612. This mega-drought devastated crops, dried up freshwater sources, and made the local Powhatan people far less willing or able to trade food. The colonists had expected to supplement their supplies through trade with Indigenous communities, but those communities were struggling with the same drought.
The same pattern had doomed an earlier attempt. The Roanoke Colony, the famous “Lost Colony” that disappeared in the late 1580s, was established during what tree-ring records show was the most extreme drought in 800 years, spanning 1587 to 1589. The colonists there had hoped to trade with local Algonquian people, but the drought left those communities without surplus food to spare. When supply ships finally returned in 1590, the colony was gone, with only the word “Croatoan” carved into a post. Archaeologists have since found English artifacts on nearby Hatteras Island, suggesting at least some colonists may have relocated and joined a local community rather than simply perishing.
The Starving Time
The winter of 1609 to 1610 at Jamestown was so catastrophic it became known as “the Starving Time.” Of roughly 300 colonists entering that winter, only about 60 survived to spring. They ate horses, dogs, rats, shoe leather, and eventually each other.
Forensic evidence confirmed this in 2013, when Smithsonian scientists analyzed the skull and shinbone of a 14-year-old English girl, nicknamed “Jane,” excavated from the James Fort site. Her skull showed four shallow chops to the forehead, a failed first attempt to open it, followed by deep, forceful blows from a small hatchet that split the cranium. Knife cuts along her jaw indicated someone had removed flesh from her face and throat. The cuts were tentative and unpracticed, showing no experience with butchering. As the Smithsonian’s lead forensic anthropologist, Douglas Owsley, put it, the bone fragments reflected “desperation and overwhelming circumstances.” Jane’s cause of death couldn’t be determined, but the marks on her bones were unmistakably postmortem butchering for food.
Scurvy and Nutritional Collapse
Even when colonists weren’t outright starving, their diets were dangerously limited. Ships from England carried salted meat, hardtack, and dried grains, none of which provided vitamin C. Without fresh fruits and vegetables, scurvy set in within weeks. Vitamin C is essential for immune function, wound healing, and maintaining blood vessels. Severe deficiency causes bleeding gums, reopening of old wounds, extreme fatigue, and in untreated cases, sudden death.
Scurvy didn’t just kill people directly. It made every other threat worse. Colonists too fatigued to build shelter froze. Those with compromised immune systems succumbed more quickly to typhoid and dysentery. Workers too weak to farm or hunt couldn’t produce the food that would have cured their deficiency in the first place. It was a vicious cycle that hit hardest in late winter and early spring, exactly when supplies ran lowest.
Plymouth’s First Winter
The Mayflower colonists at Plymouth faced a different geography but similar devastation. They arrived in November 1620, too late to plant crops and with inadequate shelter. William Bradford, the colony’s governor, recorded that 44 people died between December 1620 and the end of March 1621. Of roughly 100 passengers, scarcely 50 remained by spring. At the worst points, two or three people died per day.
Bradford attributed the deaths to the combined effects of scurvy, other diseases contracted during the long voyage, and the lack of proper housing. The colonists had spent months in cramped, unsanitary conditions aboard ship, and their weakened bodies couldn’t withstand a New England winter spent in half-built shelters. February was the deadliest month, claiming 17 lives. The survivors were so few that at times only six or seven people were healthy enough to care for the sick.
Conflict With Indigenous Nations
Disease and starvation killed far more colonists than warfare did in the earliest years, but violence became a major factor as English settlements expanded onto Indigenous land. The most devastating single event was the Powhatan attack of March 22, 1622, when coordinated surprise strikes hit multiple English settlements along the James River in a single morning. A total of 347 colonists were killed, roughly a third of Jamestown’s entire population at the time. The attack targeted men, women, and children across farms and smaller outposts that had spread beyond the original fort.
The violence wasn’t random. English colonists had been encroaching on Powhatan territory for 15 years, seizing land for tobacco cultivation and frequently mistreating the people who had initially helped them survive. The 1622 attack was a deliberate military response to that expansion, and it reshaped the colony for years afterward. Settlers who survived the attacks were pulled back into fortified areas, abandoning outlying farms and worsening the food shortage.
Why Colonists Kept Coming Unprepared
A recurring pattern across early colonies was that the people funding them in England drastically underestimated what survival required. The Virginia Company, which backed Jamestown, sent gentlemen and their servants rather than farmers and tradespeople. Early groups included goldsmiths and jewelers hoping to find precious metals but few people who knew how to grow food in unfamiliar soil. Supplies shipped from England were often insufficient, spoiled during the crossing, or delayed by months.
The Popham Colony in present-day Maine offers another example. About 100 men settled there in 1607, the same year as Jamestown. Their leader, Captain George Popham, died during the winter, and the colony was abandoned after just one year, with survivors sailing back to England. Harsh weather and poor planning played the same roles they did everywhere else.
Colonists also arrived with a fundamental misunderstanding of the land. English agricultural practices didn’t transfer directly to the American climate, soil, or seasons. Settlers who arrived in late autumn had no time to learn what grew locally before winter hit. Those who arrived in summer at Jamestown walked straight into the season when the water was most contaminated. And nearly all of them depended on trade or supply ships that were unreliable at best, leaving them one delayed voyage away from catastrophe.