With the coming of the white races the decrease in the number of the Indians went on rapidly. Estimates show such to have been the case with the Indians of the North Atlantic coast during the first quarter of the eighteenth century.[1105] Bradford[1106] and Winthrop[1107] bear witness to the small number of the natives, and to the further decrease of that number after the coming of the whites. An early writer on New York declares: “There is now (1670) but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settling in these parts.”[1108] Oldmixon gives the number of Indian men in New York in 1708 as one thousand, “whereas there are seven or eight times as many English.”[1109] According to the same authority, the number of Indians in New Jersey at the opening of the eighteenth century did not exceed two hundred.[1110] A decreased birth-rate was not the least important cause of this decrease in numbers throughout all the tribes. Following the advent of the whites in the new world, “sterility became the rule and not the exception”, where before the Indians were very prolific.[1111] The natives, bond or free, seemed to possess a peculiar susceptibility to the diseases of the whites, and a lack of ability to withstand their effects. The Indians of the Delaware River country complained that during the sixteen years after the coming of the Swedes, their number had been much diminished, presumably by small-pox.[1112] In both North and South Carolina, the Indians were much afflicted by this same disease in early colonial days, one tribe being entirely swept away,[1113] another nearly exhausted,[1114] and still others much reduced in numbers.[1115] Owing to diseases and other causes the several tribes in Carolina at the opening of the eighteenth century were small, most of them not numbering more than fifty men each.[1116] Douglass recorded that the Spanish Indians captured at St. Augustine and brought to New England, soon died of consumption.[1117] Dean Berkeley who repeatedly visited Narragansett to examine the conditions and character of the Indians of that locality, in his sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts at its anniversary in 1731, bears witness to such destruction in the following statement: “The native Indians, who are said to have been thousands within the compass of this colony, do not at present amount to a thousand, including every age and sect; ... the English [having] contributed more to destroy their bodies by the use of strong liquors, than by any means to improve their minds or save their souls. This slow poison, jointly operating with the small-pox, and their wars, (but much more destructive than both), has consumed the Indians, not only in our colonies, but also far and wide upon our confines.”[1118]