The toll of deaths increased and the illness spread until, at one time, there were only “six or seven sound persons” to minister to the sick and to bury the dead. Fifteen of the twenty-nine women who sailed from England and Holland were buried on Plymouth hillside during the winter and spring. They were: Rose Standish; Elizabeth, wife of Edward Winslow; Mary, wife of Isaac Allerton; Sarah, wife of Francis Eaton; Katherine, wife of Governor John Carver; Alice, wife of John Rigdale; Ann, wife of Edward Fuller; Bridget and Ann Tilley, wives of John and Edward; Alice, wife of John Mullins or Molines; Mrs. James Chilton; Mrs. Christopher Martin; Mrs. Thomas Tinker; possibly Mrs. John Turner, and Ellen More, the orphan ward of Edward Winslow. Nearly twice as many men as women died during those fateful months of 1621. Can we “imagine” the courage required by the few women who remained after this devastation, as the wolves were heard howling in the night, the food supplies were fast disappearing, and the houses of shelter were delayed in completion by “frost and much foul weather,” and by the very few men in physical condition to rive timber or to thatch roofs? The common house, twenty foot square, was crowded with the sick, among them Carver and Bradford, who were obliged “to rise in good speed” when the roof caught on fire, and their loaded muskets in rows beside the beds threatened an explosion.[8] Although the women’s strength of body and soul must have been sapped yet their fidelity stood well the test; when _The Mayflower_ was to return to England in April and the captain offered free passage to the women as well as to any men who wished to go, if the women “would cook and nurse such of the crew as were ill,” not a man or a woman accepted the offer. Intrepid in bravery and faith, the women did their part in making this lonely, impoverished settlement into a home. This required adjustments of many kinds. Few in number, the women represented distinctive classes of society in birth and education. In Leyden, for seven years, they had chosen their friends and there they formed a happy community, in spite of some poverty and more anxiety about the education and morals of their children, because of “the manifold temptations”[9] of the Dutch city.