The Dutch Among the Natives: American Indian-Dutch Relations, 1609–1664

"Up the river [the Hudson] ... formerly many people have dwelt, but who for the most part have died or have been driven away by the Wappenos [Eastern Abenakis]." Isaack de Rasière, 1628.

"None of the chiefs was at home, except for ... Adriochten, who was living 1/4 mile from the fort in a small cabin because many Indians here in the castle had died of smallpox." Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert among the Mohawks, 13 December 1634.

"Their numbers have dwindled owing to smallpox and other causes to the extent that there is now barely one for every ten." Adriaen van der Donck, 1655, on the Indians of the Hudson Valley.

Standing in the shadows of those first generally untroubled years of Indian-Dutch interaction was disease. Although illness and debilitation were a familiar part of life to Native peoples, what Europeans unwittingly brought with them was not. The first epidemic in the Northeast--maybe plague, perhaps a hepatic virus, probably leptospirosis, a bacterial disease affecting animals and humans--struck coastal New England in 1616. The Natives of the Hudson Valley remained unscathed until the late 1620s when they were swept by an unknown sickness. It may have been smallpox, the most virulent of all infections. But there were other deadly contagions that Indians would experience--typhus, measles, cholera, pertussis, and others. Mortality rates reached and exceeded 60 percent. Such high rates of death led to the loss of leaders and learned, experienced persons, and the rending of kinship ties. The toll in Indian lives also aroused anxiety among the people, posing a challenge to religious beliefs, spirituality, and the effectiveness of their means of treating disease. The grim depiction by one early writer of the aftermath of the epidemics as a "new found Golgotha," the place of the Crucifixion, is tragically fitting.