ABSTRACT
New England Indians, European fishermen and traders had an intermittent contact for a century, and it is inevitable that more than otter skins, beaver pelts, knives, and kettles can be exchanged. Disease was among the commodities and in this trade the Indians would come off second-best. Most of the seventeenth-century chroniclers called the disease as plague, a word which is often used to mean any pestilence. Europeans did not identify the pestilence victims as smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, or any of Europe's common diseases, which they certainly would have recognized. The narrow geographical limitations of the epidemic suggests that the disease is not the breath-borne maladies like smallpox or measles, which normally surge across vast areas. Starvation often gleans what epidemic disease has missed. Finally, the Indians realized the full extent of the disease and it is undeniable that the pestilence largely emptied the Indian villages of coastal New England.
