1 Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), “Of Death,” quoted in David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (New York, 1977). Two histories of Puritan death ways argue opposite theses. Stannard stresses the death-fears which were highly developed in this culture; Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England (Ann Arbor, 1981), brings out death-hopes, which were equally intense. Both of these interpretations accurately describe one side of a complex culture, in which hopes and fears were closely intertwined.
2 The seventeen shiploads of immigrants in the Winthrop fleet suffered much in 1630. Thomas Dudley wrote home that “many were interrupted with sickness and many died weekly, yea almost daily.” Altogether, he counted about 200 deaths from April to December 1630, with a crude mortality rate of perhaps 125 per thousand, assuming a population of “1600 English.” In Plymouth, the crude death rate was 500 per thousand in the first year; in Virginia, it was near 700 per thousand. See Thomas Dudley to Countess of Lincoln, 12 March 1630, NHHSC, 4 (1834), 224-49.