The colonists’ lack of hygiene was more than just a smelly inconvenience to the Native Americans they encountered. It also posed a very real danger. Unwashed colonists passed along microbes to which Native Americans had no prior exposure, and therefore no immunity.
Historians estimate that European diseases wiped out more than 90 percent of the Native people in coastal New England before 1620, the year the Pilgrims arrived. Over the next few decades, European diseases would wipe out millions more.
