This material also corresponds to footnote #13 in the PDF and printed booklet editions of “Ditching Socialism in the New World,” and footnote #14 in Heed the Pilgrims.
Bradford Smith, biographer of William Bradford, writes that
on the night of January 14 the [newly built] common house, as full of the sick as it was possible to crowd them, caught fire. A spark had touched off the teach roof which soon burst into flame. A spray of fire began to fall upon the defenseless sick beneath. Open barrels of gunpowder and charged muskets lay in the same room. Only a miracle—or quick action on the part of those hardy people—prevented the complete destruction of the building and possible severe injury or death by fragmentation from the ignited gunpowder. Those about the Mayflower, mindful of the several Indian alarms and the disappearance of a couple of the company in the woods, were certain that Indians must have attacked and left the little village in flames.
Although the fire was put out before it had seriously damaged the building, it gave the sick another setback and destroyed clothing and other items beyond price in this wilderness. Carver and Bradford had the greatest loss.
The sickness was soon raging throughout the small company. Combining the worst features of pneumonia, tuberculosis and scurvy, it killed as many as two or three a day. In January and February when the disease was at its worst there were often but six or seven sound persons to tend all the rest—to fetch them wood and make their fires, to cook and feed them and make their beds, to dress and undress them, to wash their loathsome clothes, bury the dead, and, as Bradford said, to do “all the holy & necessary offices for them which dainty and aussie stomachs cannot endure to hear named.” Among the stalwarts who went thus untouched through the sickness were William Brewster and Miles Standish.
Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth, (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1951), 146-147.
The front cover of this volume describes Smith’s work as “A LIVELY AND SCHOLARLY BIOGRAPHY OF THE REAL ROCK ON WHICH PLYMOUTH COLONY WAS FOUNDED—ITS GREAT GOVERNOR AND AN INCOMPARABLE LEADER OF MEN
This material relates to footnote #4 in the article “Ditching Socialism in the New World.” It relates as well to footnote #13 in the PDF and printed booklet editions.