G. Lee Hearl wrote: I guess the members of this list will think I'm a "nit picker", but I read the historical information about the first colonies of Virginia and found it quite interesting, HOWEVER, I must question the part which stated that the water of James River, which the colonists had been drinking, became contaminated and a deep well was dug for drinking water. The water of James River has never been drinkable because it is brackish (salty) up to the falls at Richmond. I am sure the person who posted the information obtained it from some source which was thought to be reliable and true. In reference to the post about "taking on water at Newport News", I worked 24 years at Newport News Shipbuilding Co. and there was a spring along the bank of James River, inside the shipyard, a building had been built over it but the water seeped up through the floor and finally had to be piped into the river. I wonder if that was the watering place of colonial ships??? Any of you who go to Jamestown and Williamsburg, Va. should drive down to Newport News and visit the Mariners Museum, it's very interesting. G. Lee Hearl.. Abingdon, Va. G.Lee Hearl; I'm glad you're a nit picker, it gives me a chance to respond. No one person can know everything. Many misleading genealogy records pass over the Internet without correction. The following sources, which speak to the subject of the salt in the James River and deaths of 1607-1625, as the tide goes out and the tide comes in, for the above questioning by you, I hope will be satisfactory to all: I-"The first year in Virginia portended the dreadful mortality that ravaged the colony until 1624." Observations by Master George Percy, 1607, Lyon Gardiner Taylor,ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625. II-". . .our men were destroyed with cruell diseases, as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, . . ." p.97, Travels & Works of Capt. John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, 1580-1631, Edward Arber & A.G.Bradley, eds. Edinburgh, 1910. III-Wyndham B.Blanton, "Epidemics, Real & Imaginary, and Other Factors Influencing Seventeenth Century Virginia Population," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXXI, 1957. IV-Edward C.Raney, "Freshwater Fishes," in The James River Basin, Past, Present, & Future, Virginia Academy of Science, James River Project Committee, Richmond, Va., 1950. V-". . . actual causes of death-typhoid, dysentery, & perhaps salt poisoning." John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America, Baton Rouge,La., 1953. VI-"Our drinke [was] cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at low tide full of slime & fieth, which was the destruction of many of our men." Observation of Master George Percy, Narratives of Early Vir. 1606-1625. VII-" . . . The ebb tide, though less saline, was very turbid, organically polluted, and deadly. The trapped pathogeny of typhoid & dysentery, thus floated back and forth past Jamestown with the summer tide. The danger from contaminated water faded in Sept. River discharge increased, pushing the salt incursion & its deadly associated downstream toward Hog Point." The First English Towns of North America, Geographical Review, LXVII, Carville Earle. VIII-" . . . the annual summer invasion of saltwater up the James River that contaminated the Jamestown water supply." Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia. Carville V.Earle. p.104. IX-" . . . Highest discharge customarily comes in the spring, and pushes the saltwater to its seaward maximum; on the James the retreat is to Hog Point . . ." ibid., p.105. For further reading and research on the subject of the James River salt and death happening at early Jamestown, the following material and authors may be of worth to all Augusta 'listers': Philip L.Barbour, 'The Three Worlds of Capt. John Smith, Boston, 1964. Richard L.Morton, 'Colonial Virginia: The Tidewater Period, 1607-1710, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960. Darrett B, and Anita Ratman, 'Of Agues & Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,' WMQ, 3rd Ser. XXXIII, 1976. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, eds Thad W. Tate & David L.Ammerman, 1979. Maynard M.Nickols, 'Sediments of the James River Estuary, Virginia Geological Society of America, 1972. I stand by my early outline. Harry.