Europeans had brought smallpox to North America when they first began colonizing.

Most Europeans are immune to the disease due to living conditions in overpopulated Europe.

However, twenty settlers on the Mayflower were infected, including their only physician Dr Samuel Fuller.

While the European settlers remain mostly unaffected by smallpox in 1630, they witness their Native American neighbors fall victim to it rapidly.

A New England colonist in 1630 says the Native Americans "fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, not to make a fire, nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead..."

Yet despite the destruction wrought by smallpox, it will seen as a gift from god by some Puritans, including Increase Mather, a future clergyman and one of Harvard College's first presidents, who will state that the smallpox epidemic had been God's solution to the Native American and Puritan land disputes.