Scarcely three months had elapsed from the first landing when sickness and death made their appearance. The settlers, ignorant of the use of Peruvian bark and other remedies, were powerless to resist the progress of the epidemic. Captain George Percy describes in vivid colors the sufferings of the first terrible summer. "There were never Englishmen," he says, "left in a forreign country in such miserie as wee were in this new discouvered Virginia. Wee watched every three nights, lying on the bare-ground, what weather soever came;... which brought our men to bee most feeble wretches.... If there were any conscience in men, it would make their harts to bleed to heare the pitifull murmurings and outcries of our sick men without reliefe, every night and day for the space of sixe weekes; in the morning their bodies being trailed out of their cabines like Dogges, to be buried."[53] So deadly was the epidemic that when Captain Newport brought relief in January, 1608, he found but thirty-eight of the colonists alive.[54] Nor did the men that followed in the wake of the _Sarah Constant_, the _Discovery_ and the _Goodspeed_ fare better. In the summer of 1608, the sickness reappeared and once more wrought havoc among the unhappy settlers. Captain Smith, who probably saved his own life by his frequent exploring expeditions, on his return to Jamestown in July, "found the Last Supply al sicke".[55] In 1609, when the fleet of Summers and Newport reached Virginia, the newcomers, many of whom were already in ill health, fell easy victims to malaria and dysentery. Smith declared that before the end of 1610 "not past sixtie men, women and children" were left of several hundred that but a few months before had sailed away from Plymouth.[56] During the short stay of Governor De la Warr one hundred and fifty, or more than half the settlers lost their lives.[57] Various visitors to Virginia during the early years of the seventeenth century bear testimony to the ravages of this scourge. A Spaniard named Molina, writing in 1613, declared that one hundred and fifty out of every three hundred colonists died before being in Virginia twelve months.[58] DeVries, a Dutch trader to the colony, wrote, "During the months of June, July and August it is very unhealthy, then people that have lately arrived from England, die, during these months, like cats and dogs, whence they call it the sickly season."[59] This testimony is corroborated by Governor William Berkeley, who reported in 1671, "There is not now oft seasoned hands (as we term them) that die now, whereas heretofore not one of five escaped the first year."[60]