The Europeans who began colonising North America in the early 17th century steadfastly believed that God communicated his wrath through plague. They brought this conviction with them – as well as deadly disease itself.
Plague brought by early European settlers decimated Indigenous populations during an epidemic in 1616-19 in what is now southern New England. Upwards of 90% of the Indigenous population died in the years leading up to the arrival of the Mayflower in November 1620.
It’s still unclear what the disease behind the epidemic actually was. But this was the first of many plagues that swept through Algonquian territory – Algonquian being the linguistic term used to describe an array of Indigenous peoples stretching, among other places, along the northeastern seaboard of what is now the US.
