Physicians or surgeons did ship aboard the seventeenth-century ocean-going vessels, but Doctor Wyndham B. Blanton, the chief authority on seventeenth-century Virginia medicine, concludes that most of them probably had poor educations and little more to recommend them than "a smattering of drugs, a little practice in opening abscesses and a liking for the sea." A seventeenth-century contemporary recommended that a ship's surgeon--surgeons went to sea far more often than physicians--be the possessor of a certificate from a barber-surgeon guild and be freed from all ship's duties except the attending of the sick and the cure of the wounded. The ship's surgeon, then, crossed the professional line between surgeon and physician, a line that necessity would soon force so many medical men to cross in America. Throughout the century ship's surgeons abandoned their shipboard duties to settle in the Virginia colony, and there seems little reason to doubt that those remaining aboard ship took advantage of the opportunity when in port to help meet the medical needs of the colonists, thus supplementing the medical talent which had taken up residence in Virginia. The labors of the ship's surgeon at sea, no matter how valiant, could not offset the miseries of the long sea voyage, and the sight of Virginia's coast greatly cheered all hands. After the foul air, crowded quarters, and inadequate provisions of the ship, many settlers must have reacted to the Virginia land as Captain John Smith did: "heaven and earth never agree better to frame a place for man's habitation." It is not surprising then that the first permanent settlers were somewhat less than careful when evaluating, against standards of health, the possible sites for settlement. THE SELECTION OF SITES FOR SETTLEMENT In a fairly extensive set of instructions "by way of advice, for the intended voyage to Virginia," the London Company, in 1606, took into account the part that disease and famine could play in the life--or death--of the colony. Probably knowing that the chances for survival of the Spanish conquistadors had been enhanced by their superhuman qualities in the eyes of the Indians, the Company urged that no information on deaths or sicknesses among the whites be allowed to the natives. More important, as the course of events was to demonstrate, was the advice not to: plant in a low or moist place, because it will prove unhealthfull. You shall judge of the good air by the people; for some part of that coast where the lands are low, have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs: but if the naturals be strong and clean made, it is a true sign of wholesome soil.