“A wonderful plague” is how King James of England described pandemics in the 1620 Charter of New England. “Almighty God, in his great goodness and bounty towards us,” had sent it “among the savages.” In 1634, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the diseases that tore through the native Algonquian-speaking peoples in similar terms: “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them: So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this
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