To argue that all those who died, died of starvation would, on the other hand, be a distortion. Food deficiencies did not always lead directly to death but in many cases to dietary disease. These dietary diseases often terminated in death, but their courses might well not have been fatal if proper medical attention could have been given. In other cases food deficiency resulted in so weakened a physical condition that the body fell prey to infectious diseases which, again, could not be cured with the limited medical help available. The Starving Time did not stand out as a time of want to be contrasted with a normal time of plenty. For many the winter of 1609-10 only brought to a crisis dietary disorders of long standing. One account of the early years describes the daily ration as eight ounces of meal and a half-pint of peas, both "the one and the other being mouldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots loathsome to man and not fytt for beasts...." Nor was the Starving Time the last time that the colonists would have to endure famine and privation. Although written to discredit the administration of Sir Thomas Smith as head of the Company during the years from 1607-19, an account of the hunger of these twelve years should be accepted as having some basis in fact. The account, written in 1624, reported as common occurrences the stealing of food by the starving and the cruel punishments meted out to them (one for "steelinge of 2 or 3 pints of oatemeal had a bodkinge thrust through his tounge and was tyed with a chaine to a tree untill he starved"); and the denial of an allowance of food to men who were too sick to work ("soe consequently perished"). The starving colonists during these twelve years, according to the report, often resorted to dogs, cats, rats, snakes, horsehides, and other extremes for nourishment. Many, in those hungry times, weary of life, dug holes in the earth and remained there hidden from the authorities until dead from starvation. Although the report maintained that these events occurred throughout the twelve-year period, it is likely that many were concentrated during the Starving Time. Famished, disease-ridden, demoralized, with many mentally unbalanced, the settlement at Jamestown languished in a distressful condition after the winter of 1609-10. Jamestown, in May, 1610 appeared: as the ruins of some auntient [for]tification then that any people living might now inhabit it: the pallisadoes... tourne downe, the portes open, the gates from the hinges, the church ruined and unfrequented, empty howses (whose owners untimely death had taken newly from them) rent up and burnt, the living not hable, as they pretended, to step into the woodes to gather other fire-wood; and, it is true, the _Indian as fast killing without as the famine and pestilence within_.