Anchoring off other West Indian islands the ships were able to replenish their stores with fresh meat and fish and to replace the evil-smelling and foul water in their casks with fresh. By these measures the colonists demonstrated a concern not only for comfort but also for hygienic precautions. Later voyages during the century took anywhere from two to three months. Despite the precautions taken by some, of a rest, in the West Indies to bring about "restitution of our sick people into health by the helpes of fresh ayre, diet and the baths," the trip aboard the pestered ships continued to exact a heavy death toll and to discharge disease and diseased persons. Benefits resulting from the stopover in the Indies were countered by the considerable exposure to tropical infections. One convoy carrying colonists to Virginia in 1609 and running a southerly course through "fervent heat and loomes breezes" had many of the crew and passengers fall ill from calenture (tropical or yellow fever). Out of two ships so afflicted, thirty-two persons died and were thrown overboard. Another of these ships reported the plague raging in her. Irritated by frequent references to the unhealthy climate of Virginia and fearful that the bad publicity would increase the difficulties in obtaining colonists, officials of the London Company took pains to expose the part that the ocean voyage played in bringing about the deaths of newcomers. Musty bread and stinking beer aboard the pestered ships, according to a contemporary, worked as a chief cause of the mortality attributed falsely to the Virginia climate and conditions at Jamestown. In 1624 Governor Wyatt and his associates recommended to commissioners from England that "care must be had that the ships come not over pestered and that they may be well used at sea with that plenty and goodness of dyet as is promised in England but seldom performed." Others complained of the crowding of men in their own "aires," uncleanliness of the ships, and the presence of fatal "infexion." Insomuch as seventeenth-century medical theory paid scant attention to sanitation and hygiene in the study of the causes of disease, it is surprising to find the early Virginian rightly recognizing the ships as sources of sickness. On the other hand, observation could not help but lead passengers to conclude that sickness, such as flux or dysentery, with which they had to suffer aboard ship, might have a causal relationship to the ship. To have related the transmission of the plague from epidemic centers in England via infected shipboard rats, and transmission of tropical fevers, as well, by the medium of shipboard water buckets infected with mosquito larvae from the tropics, was beyond the capacity of both medical theory and of first-hand observation.