CHAPTER XI

.

SICKNESSES OF VOYAGES AND COLONIES.

(Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.)

The sicknesses of the first voyages and foreign settlements come into the history of national maladies, both as concerning Britain on the sea and beyond sea, and as showing forth the disease-producing conditions of those early times. In the latter respect there is more to be learned from voyages and colonial experience than the records of domestic life at home are likely to inform us of otherwise than vaguely. The Englishman of the time carried his habits with him to sea and to foreign parts, where the circumstances were more trying and the consequences more obvious.

This history divides itself at once into several branches. There are the disease-incidents of ocean voyages, irregular at first but becoming somewhat uniform after the East India Company’s start in 1601, chief among them being scurvy. There are next the early discouragements from sickness, both on the voyage and after landing, in the planting of colonies in Virginia, New England and the West Indies, among which the troubles of Jamaica were on a sufficiently great scale to deserve minute study. Lastly, among the larger sections of this chapter, we have to notice the beginnings and circumstances of the terrible and long-enduring scourge of West Indian colonies--yellow fever. While we are mainly, in this record of the sicknesses of voyages and of new colonies, concerned with British enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of other nations.

The first accounts of Sea Scurvy.

The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the sequel have been taken.

In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, “by reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger.” Nineteen men, as well as a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some twenty-five or thirty others were sick, “so that there was in a manner none without some disease[1121].”

There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and 1587 (in which last he got to 73° N.) are as nearly as possible free from records of sickness.

Jacques Cartier’s second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their number from “pestilence.”

“The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet; then did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, arms, and neck; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole; so that one could not help the other.... There were already 8 dead and more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery.” The body of one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of red water about it[1123]; his liver was indifferent fair; but his lungs black and mortified ... his milt toward the back was somewhat perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone.

“From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four; then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself! for it was a singular remedy against that disease.” The Indian’s advice was “to take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the legs that is sick.”...

“It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used of it, by the grace of God recovered their health.”

In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, issued from La Rochelle[1124]. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter: “In the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their lymmes: and there died about fiftie.”

The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the early voyages to Guinea for gold-dust[1125]. Mr John Lok sailed on the second voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being the ‘Trinitie,’ 140 tons, the ‘Bartholomew,’ 90 tons, and the ‘John Evangelist,’ 140 tons. After trading some months on the African coast the ships sailed for home: “There died of our men at this last voyage about twenty and four, whereof many died at their return into the clime of the cold regions, as between the islands of Azores and England.” The disease is not named; but it is probable from what follows that it was scurvy.

The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson’s first, in October 1555, from Newport, Isle of Wight, in the ‘Hart’ and the ‘Hind;’ the death of only one man is mentioned; he died “in his sleep” on March 29; by the 7th May, the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in on the coast of Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the wild kernes, paying in gold-dust.

In Towrson’s second voyage there is no word of sickness; but in his third voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The vessels ‘Minion,’ ‘Christopher’ and ‘Tiger’ left Plymouth on January 30, 1577. On the 8th of May, “all our cloth in the ‘Minion’ being sold, I called the company together to know whether they would tarry the sale of the cloth taken in the prize at this place or no: they answered that in respect of the death of some of their men, and the present sickness of 20 more, they would not tarry, but repair to the other ships, of whom they had heard nothing since April 27.” Having at length bartered for gold until the natives would barter no longer, the three ships bore up for home. On July 24 the master of the ‘Tiger’ came aboard the ‘Minion’ and reported that “his men were so weak and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep her above the water.” A muster held of all the three crews the same day showed that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3, there being only six men in the ‘Tiger’ who could work, the gold and stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October 6, when off the coast of Portugal, the ‘Christopher’ reported herself so weak that she was not able to keep the sea. The ‘Minion’ promised to attend her into Vigo; but a fair wind springing up, she signalled that she was off for home, whereupon the ‘Christopher’ followed. On October 16, a great south-westerly storm arose; the men in the ‘Minion’ were not able, from weakness, to handle the sails, which were blown away: however, they made shift to reach the Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of the ‘Christopher.’

The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed by the three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to the West coast of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Cuba and on the Spanish Main[1126]. Only a brief summary remains of the first voyage, in which nothing is said of sickness; in the second, the negroes, at least, appear to have suffered on the somewhat long passage across the tropical belt, especially from want of water; and the third was so calamitous in various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it: “If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the martyrs.” Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the business--the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five hundred. English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from poisoned arrows, it was thought, the wounded dying “in strange sort with their mouths shut some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole.” It was on the return from the Gulf of Mexico, more than a year out from England, that the sickness on board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on November 16, 1568, after which, “growing near to the cold country, our men being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were left grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage our ship” (the ‘Jesus’ of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte Vedra, near Vigo, on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they got turned to their hurt: “our men with excess of fresh meat grew into miserable diseases and died a great part of them.” Twelve fresh hands shipped at Vigo enabled the vessels to reach the nearest English haven at Mount’s Bay in Cornwall.

Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the Portuguese, who had now in the middle of the 16th century a regular trade to the Indies, established by Vasco de Gama’s route round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps the most famous of these records is that of the voyage of St Francis Xavier from Lisbon to Goa in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which he took passage carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to reinforce the garrison of Goa; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle “rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described, and lived among the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of consolation and of peace[1127].” After five months the ships arrived at Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering from fever. Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the Tagus. A more familiar narrative of the same voyage of the Portuguese ships a generation later is given by an English youth, Thomas Stevens, in a letter written home to his father, a citizen of London, shortly after arriving at Goa. Both in its generalities and in its particulars this excellent letter will serve to measure the prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier period of the East Indian trade by the Cape[1128].

The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the ships, “besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of children, which in the seas bear out better than men; and no marvel, when that many women also pass very well.” After a passage along the Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the voyage the Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two routes according to the lateness of the season--either the route by the Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits and fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a time, and passing to the east of Madagascar[1129]. In the latter case, “by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they are fain to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the body becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor foot, and so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues, and so die thereby.

“And this way it was our chance to make; and though we had more than one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-twenty, which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other times.”

The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling anywhere.

The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis Drake’s famous circumnavigation from November 15, 1577, to September 26, 1580[1130]. Drake must have lost many of his men in those three years, but there is nothing in the narrative to show that they perished of disease. The expedition was by way of the Straits of Magellan, and was mainly given up to plundering the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set out for home loaded with treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape of Good Hope. It is not until the narrative brings us to a small island between Ternate and Celebes that we hear of sickness; they graved the ship there and remained twenty-six days, during which the “sickly, weak and decayed” recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found on the island being “very good and restoring meat, whereof we had experience.” But even Drake, with all his systematic care and resource, was destined in after years to have a share of the common sickly experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy than the Spaniard.

Remarkable Epidemic in Drake’s Fleet 1585-6.

Drake’s next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585, with six Queen’s ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300 men. A large number of private adventurers had a money interest in the enterprise, which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in the West Indies and the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at the isthmus of Panama on its way to Spain. The fleet experienced one of the most remarkable epidemics in the whole history of sickness[1131].

Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the island of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16. More than a thousand men were landed, and were marched up the steep and broken ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which stood in a narrow valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and the Atlantic open before it at some distance on the south. The place was surrounded by a wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass ordnance; but no resistance was offered, and the English marched in to find the inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November, the town was quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which remained there for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent dates), taking such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and “trash” of the Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when no one had come to ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men to the village or town of St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the hope of finding the governor and the bishop; but, finding no one, he marched his men back again the same evening. On November 26 the whole force was re-embarked, all the houses in the capital as well as in the country round were set fire to, the port of Playa, a few miles to the westward, was also burned, and on the same night the ships weighed anchor from the latter, and stood away to the south-west. They had filled their water-casks from a pool, near the seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through the capital and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of sickness during the occupation of St Jago; there seems to have been some lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition), which Drake quickly remedied.

The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to Dominica, a distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that quick sailing along the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the steady north-east trade wind behind them, the season the beginning of December and the climate the most delightful and most refreshing on the globe, the ships were visited suddenly with the fury of a deadly pestilential fever, of which the following is the account by a captain of the land-forces on board:

“We were not many days at sea but there began among our people such mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three hundred men. And until some seven or eight days after our coming from St Jago there had not died any one man of sickness in all the fleet. The sickness showed not his infection wherewith so many were stroken until we were departed thence; and then seized our people with extreme hot burning and continual agues whereof very few escaped with life, and yet those for the most part not without great alteration and decay of their wits and strength for a long time after. In some that died were plainly showed the small spots which are often found upon those that be infected with the plague.”

From Dominica the ships sailed to St Christopher, on which island Drake disembarked his whole force, and cleaned and aired his ships, according to an excellent practice which he had followed also in his great circumnavigation. Some days of Christmas having been thus spent ashore, “to refresh our sick people,” the voyage was resumed to Hispaniola. Deaths continued to occur, from the same disease as at first, both among officers and men, and so continued for many weeks. However, they were able to land some 1000 or 1200 men on Hispaniola, and to carry the city of San Domingo by assault. The fleet then sailed southwards along the coast of the mainland to Cartagena, which was captured in turn, and in like manner held to ransom.

It is at this part of the narrative that we next hear of the infection in the fleet:

“We stayed here six weeks [from middle of January to end of February, 1586], and the sickness with mortality, before spoken of, still continued among us, though not with the same fury as at the first. And such as were touched with the said sickness, escaping death, very few or almost none could recover their strength; yea, many of them were much decayed in their memory, insomuch that it was grown an ordinary judgment, when one was heard to speak foolishly, to say he had been sick of the _calentura_, which is the Spanish name of that burning ague; for, as I told you before, it is a very burning and pestilent ague.”

Then follows the Spanish theory of the _calentura_, which may or may not be rightly applied to the deadly epidemic that broke out suddenly in the English ships in mid ocean:

“The original cause thereof is imputed to the evening or first night air, which they term _la serena_, wherein they say, and hold very firm opinion, that whoso is then abroad in the open air shall certainly be infected to the death, not being of the Indian or natural race of those country people. By holding their watch our men were thus subjected to the infectious air, which at St Jago was most dangerous and deadly of all other places. With the inconvenience of continual mortality, we were forced to give over our intended enterprize, etc.”

The land-captains having been consulted by Drake, on February 27, 1586, advised that the expedition should go home from Cartagena, instead of attempting to capture the treasure at Panama. In their memorandum they wrote: “And being further advised of the slenderness of our strength, whereunto we be now reduced, as well in respect of the small number of able bodies, as also not a little in regard of the slack disposition of the greater part of those which remain, very many of the better minds and men being either consumed by death, or weakened by sickness and hurts, etc.” The voyage to England was accordingly begun; St Augustine in Florida was captured by the way, and the struggling colony in Virginia, the first sent out by Raleigh, was taken up and brought back, and Portsmouth reached on July 28. “We lost some 750 men in the voyage, above three parts of them only by sickness.” The names are given of eight captains, four lieutenants, and seven masters, who had died; and there were some other officers dead unnamed. When the ransoms of San Domingo and Cartagena came to be divided, the venture must have been found as unprofitable to the shareholders as it had been disastrous to officers and men.

The Spanish name _calentura_, by which the fever in the fleet is described, was probably used generically for various kinds of fever in the tropics. But of this fever in particular, we have some details not without diagnostic value. It was doubtless contracted at St Jago in the Cape de Verde islands; it broke out suddenly in mid ocean after some seven or eight days sailing before the wind, in a delightful climate, which points to the regular incubation of an infective virus, received by hundreds of men when they were last ashore; the mortality was enormous; the symptoms were those of a burning fever; and in some cases there were small spots or petechiae like those often seen in the plague. It was clearly a febrile form of pestilential infection, and, as few recovered, it must be considered to have had a death-rate such as typhus has rarely had, and such as yellow fever has commonly had. Nothing is said of the black vomit, the haemorrhages, and the saffron colour of skin and eyes, which are distinctive of yellow fever[1132]. On the other hand there is a remarkable after-effect mentioned in both the passages quoted, the loss of memory, impairment of wits, and appearance of foolishness, which made “the calenture” a bye-word in the fleet. I shall not venture to say what the infection was; but it seems tolerably certain that it was contracted by the English during their occupation of the capital town of St Jago. More recent visitors to the Cape de Verde islands have remarked upon their towns and villages as fever-traps, and have pointed to the source of the fever; it is not malaria, or the mere climatic influence, but a pestilential emanation from spots of soil long inhabited by mankind, both black and white, and so situated in cups of the hills as to retain and multiply the filth-ferment in them. According to all analogy, the emanations from such a soil would be felt most by strangers not inured to them, and most of all by men of another stock and from other latitudes[1133].

Sicknesses of Voyages, continued: Management of Scurvy.

The expedition to Virginia which returned in 1586 with Drake’s ships homeward bound from the Spanish Main, was the first sent out by Raleigh with the intention of settling, an earlier voyage in 1584 having been made to explore the country. It is in connexion with Raleigh’s second colony (and fourth expedition) in 1587 that we hear of disastrous sickness[1134]. Having left 118 people to inhabit the country, the two larger ships sailed for home on August 27 of the same year. On board the “fly-boat,” the provisions fell short, the water turned stinking, officers and men died, and the vessel was navigated with difficulty to the west coast of Ireland. When they reached Portsmouth, they found the admiral arrived there three weeks before them, but with an equally disastrous experience: “Ferdinando the master, with all his company were not only come home without any purchase, but also in such weakness by sickness of their chiefest men that they were scarce able to bring their ship into harbour, but were forced to let fall anchor without.”

The following year, 1588, was made memorable in the English annals of the sea by the defeat of the Spanish Armada. There was much sickness in both fleets. As regards the English ships, a writer who has had special access to original documents says[1135]:

“We little think, when we peruse the melancholy tale of disease, starvation and shame, so needlessly undergone by the heroic champions of England’s liberty against the invading might of Spain, from what obscure and insignificant causes the difficulties and hardships of the Island seamen may have chiefly arisen”--namely the peculation of officials, the mouldering rations, empty magazines, and the like. In the ships of the Spanish fleet the infection was like that of the plague itself; the main body of the expedition, fifty sail, reached Corunna, Santander and St Sebastian with such infection among the ten thousand men on board, that the inhabitants shut their houses against them.

Two of the heroes of that fight, Drake and Hawkins, met their death by sickness off the Spanish Main in 1595-6. The expedition, consisting of 2500 men in six Queen’s ships and twenty-one others, left Plymouth on August 28, 1595[1136]. Only the deaths of officers are mentioned in the narrative, but of these there seem to have been a good many, when the ships were in the Caribbean Sea. Hawkins died off Porto Rico on November 12. On December 7, Mr Yorke, captain of the ‘Hope,’ died of sickness, on January 15, captain Plat died of sickness, and then Sir Francis Drake began to keep his cabin and to complain of a scouring or flux: he died on January 28, off Porto Bello. On the 27th died captain Jonas of the ‘Delight,’ captain Egerton, and James Wood, chief surgeon of the fleet, out of the ‘Garland.’ On the 28th died Abraham Kendall out of the ‘Saker.’ Several of the ships were sunk so that their men might go to the Queen’s ships, which were short of hands. A muster on February 6 showed in the whole fleet “two thousand sick and whole,” or five hundred fewer than had sailed. There was some loss of life in encounters with the enemy, but much more from disease.

Of the filibustering cruises or expeditions to the East by the South American route, there remain to be mentioned two by Thomas Cavendish, and one at some length by Richard Hawkins, before we come to the establishment of regular English trade to the East Indies by the Portuguese route round the Cape of Good Hope. Cavendish’s first voyage[1137] by the Straits of Magellan was from Plymouth, 25 July, 1586, with three ships (240 tons in all) carrying 125 men.

Touching on the west coast of Africa, they went ashore and took lemons from the trees. Off the coast of Brazil in November and December two men died “of the disease called scorbuto, which is an infection of the blood and the liver.” Arrived at the Straits of Magellan they found twenty-three Spaniards living on shell-fish, “which were all that remained of four hundred which were left there [to found a colony] in these Straits of Magellan, three years before, all the rest being dead with famine.” They were only too glad to hasten from this place, Port Famine, “for the noysome stench and vile savour wherewith it was infected through the contagon of the Spaniards’ pined and dead carkeises.” In one of Cavendish’s own ships, on February 21, 1588, when among the East Indian islands, Captain Havers died of “a most severe and pestilent ague, which held him furiously some seven or eight days. Moreover presently after his death, myself [Pretty, the narrator] with divers others in the ship fell marvellously sick, and so continued in very great pain for the space of three weeks or a month, by reason of the extreme heat and intemperature of the climate.”

One might guess that these were cases of ship-fever (or calenture); but in Cavendish’s last voyage we meet with a strange sickness which will perhaps baffle all nosological conjecture. This voyage, like the first, was intended for the East Indies by way of the Straits of Magellan[1138]. The three tall ships and two barks, having sailed from Plymouth on August 26, 1591, never got through the Straits; they were still within their recesses in April, 1592, many men having “died with cursed famine and miserable cold,” and sick men having been put ashore into the woods in the snow. The narrative (by John Lane), then follows the fortunes of one of the ships, the ‘Desire.’ Landing at Port Desire, in Patagonia, they found scurvy-grass growing, which they ate with oil: “This herb did so purge the blood that it took away all kind of swellings, of which many [had] died, and restored us to perfect health of body, so that we were in as good case as when we came first out of England.” There also they took on board 14,000 penguins, which they had dried on the rocks, mostly without salt; and sailed northwards on December 22. With only 27 men surviving out of 76, they left the coast of Brazil at Cape Frio (near Rio de Janeiro), and then began their more singular experience of disease.

“After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. This worm did mightily increase, and devour our victuals;” it devoured everything except iron,--clothes, boots, shirts, even the ship’s timbers! “In this woeful case, after we had passed the equinoctial toward the North, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous disease as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it began to swell, from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath, and then fell into their cods, and their cods and yardes did swell most grievously and most dreadfully to behold, so that they could neither stand, lie, nor goe. Whereupon our men grew mad with grief. Our captain [John Davis] with extreme anguish of his soul was in such woeful case that he desired only a speedy end, and though he were scarce able to speak for sorrow, yet he persuaded them to patience.... For all this, divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were incredible to write our misery as it was; there was no man in perfect health but the captain, and one boy.... To be short, all our men died except sixteen [i.e., eleven died of the survivors after Cape Frio] of which there were but five able to move.” Those five worked the ship into Berehaven (Bantry Bay) on June 11, 1593, and there ran her ashore.

The remarkable epidemic on board the ‘Desire,’ among men living upon dried penguin infested with worms, was probably not scurvy, or at least not all scurvy: the dropsy and dyspnœa suggest one of the two forms of beri-beri, of a peculiarly severe type. The co-existence of worms in the dried food may lead one to think of a parasitic malady such as that caused by Anchylostoma duodenale, which has also an anasarcous or œdematous character. But the diagnosis of beri-beri appears to be far more likely. That epidemic, however we interpret it, must rank among the curiosities of the history. But, in the next that we come to, the sickness on board the ‘Daintie,’ Richard Hawkins master, on a voyage in 1593 through the Straits of Magellan, the disease is typical scurvy; and the observations on sea-scurvy by Hawkins himself are among the best that we have for the period, and, indeed, until long after the Elizabethan period[1139].

The ‘Daintie,’ a nearly new ship of 300 to 400 tons, weighed anchor from Blackwall on April 8, 1593. She was deeply laden with merchandise for trade and accompanied by a victualler, of 100 tons, the ‘Hawk.’ It was not until June 12, that they got away from Plymouth. They put in at the Cape de Verde islands, about whose climate and health Hawkins makes some observations already quoted. Sailing thence they had come within three or four degrees of the Line, when scurvy broke out:

“My company within a few days began to fall sick of a disease which seamen are wont to call the scurvie; and seemeth to be a kind of dropsie, and raigneth most in this climate of any that I have heard or read of in the world, though [it is found] in all seas. It possesseth all those of which it takes hold with a loathsome sloathfulnesse, _that even to eate_ they would be content to change _with sleepe and rest_, which is the most pernicious enemie in this sickness that is known. It bringeth with it a great desire to drink, and causeth a general swelling of all parts of the body, especially of the legs, and gums; and many times the teeth fall out of the jaws without pain. The signs to know this disease in the beginning are divers,--by the swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man’s finger, the pit remaining without filling up in a good space; others show it with their laziness; others complain of the crick of the back, etc., all which are for the most part certain tokens of the infection. The cause is thought to be the stomack’s feebleness by change of air in intemperate climates, of diet in salt meats, boiled also in salt water, and corrupted sometimes; the want of exercise, also, either in persons or elements, as in calms.”

Hawkins then recalls the experience of the Queen’s fleet in 1590, at the Azores, the ships being in calm weather for six months: “in which voyage, towards the end thereof, many of every ship (saving the ‘Nonpereli’ which was under my charge and had only one man sick in all the voyage) fell sick of this disease and began to die apace.”

Hawkins wrote out the account of his 1593 voyage some time after, and did not print it until 1622; but it may be supposed that the views about scurvy therein expressed were the same that he held and acted upon in his earlier life[1140]. Thus his remarks upon the prevention and cure of scurvy, about to be given, may be taken to stand for the practical wisdom or sagacity of the Elizabethan period. The ship should be kept clean, vinegar should be sprinkled and tar burned. In hot latitudes salt meats should be shunned, and especially salt fish. Salt water should not be used to dress the meat, nor to wash shirts in; nor should the men sleep in their wet clothes. The crews should be set to various exercises, and encouraged to various pastimes. At this point he seems to feel that he is a layman giving medical advice, and interpolates:

“And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners. Doubtless it would be a work worthy of a worthy man, and most beneficial for our country, for in twenty years (since I have used the sea) I dare take upon me to give account of ten thousand men consumed with this disease.”

The learned man was forthcoming in due course, in the person of John Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company; and we shall see what he made of it. Meanwhile, in default of professional guidance, we may hear Hawkins himself:

“That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour oranges and lemons, and a water called Dr Stevens his water, of which I carried but little, and it took end quickly, but gave health to those that used it. The oyle of vitry [vitriol] is beneficial--two drops in a draught of water with a little sugar. But the principal of all is the air of the land; for the sea is natural for fishes, and the land for men. And the oftener a man can have his people to land, not hindering his voyage, the better it is and the profitablest course he can take to refresh them.”

Hawkins, as well as his contemporaries, as we shall see, knew what lime-juice could do for scurvy, and knew also the limit of its powers; it was useful, as he had himself found; but much else was needed to ward off scurvy. After experience showed clearly enough that some commanders with the same stores as others could carry their crews through a long voyage without scurvy; Hawkins himself, in the ‘Nonpareil’ in 1590, had only one man sick of it, while it was general in the fleet. In the voyage of 1593, for all his knowledge and resource, he appears to have found circumstances too hard for him. His crew showed their bad habits while the ship lay at Plymouth; as in Lancaster’s experience two years before, the evil habits of sailors told upon their constitutions, so that they became an easy prey to monotonous living at sea. Scurvy broke out when they were within three or four degrees of the Line: “The sickness was fervent, every day there died more or less.” The ship’s course was accordingly turned westward, although they were too far south to benefit by the north-east trade wind; and in the end of October they came to the coast of Brazil at Santos, four months and a half out from Plymouth. At Santos they obtained 200 or 300 oranges and lemons, and a few hens; there were so many men sick that there were not above three or four oranges or lemons to a share: “Coming aboard of our ships there was great joy amongst my company, and many with the sight of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart.” It is the great and unknown virtue of that fruit, he says, to be a certain remedy for this infirmity. The rest of the voyage possesses no special interest for us. The scurvy had “wasted more than half of my people;” so that Hawkins took the crew and provisions out of the ‘Hawk,’ and burned her. He left the Brazilian coast on December 18, passed the Straits of Magellan, and after some filibustering on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts, was captured by a Spanish ship, and sent home to Spain to be ransomed.

Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted “lime-juicer;” although he knew the virtues of anti-scorbutic acids, he had a correct apprehension of the need of cleanliness, dry clothing, exercise, amusements and discipline, and if he had understood the need of wind-sails for the ventilation of ’tween-decks, he would have had as scientific a grasp of the whole question as Blane had two centuries after. But in the end of the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period, with abounding enterprise and national expansion, there was little sense of the personal need of breathing space, whether in ships or in houses. The number of souls on board, in proportion to a ship’s tonnage, was twice or thrice as great as the Board of Trade now allows. It was not only in long voyages, or in the monotony of tropical calms, that scurvy was apt to invade a crew. The following experience, on our own shores, is credible enough: In 1611 Purchas was shown a letter from Newfoundland, giving an account of a winter spent there, the writer taking credit to himself for the small amount of scurvy among the men under him: in a company of 39 persons, only four were wanting in the spring; but, by way of contrast, he recalls what happened at home in the year 1600[1141]:

“One Richard Fletcher, that is master pilot here, and a director of the fishing, reported unto me that he was one of the company, consisting of forty persons, that went in a drumbler of Ipswich called the ‘Amitie,’ to the north of Ireland about eleven years ago from London in the late Queen’s service under the charge of one Captain Fleming, and continued there the space of two years. In which time two and thirty died of the scurvie, and that only eight of them returned home, whereof the said Richard Fletcher was one ... notwithstanding that there were to be had fresh victuals and many other helps, which their country [Newfoundland] as yet hath not, but in good time may have.”

We have not yet come to any deliverance of the faculty on the subject of scurvy; Hawkins appears to be giving merely his own experience and reflections. Beside these we may here place the contemporary observations and practice of the French laymen, which are expressly at variance on some points with medical teaching. Some time previous to 1609, Marc Lescarbot wrote an account of ‘the voyage of M. de Monts into New France;’ the expedition sailed from Havre in March, 1604. Their first winter in Canada is thus related[1142]:

In the meanwhile the cold and snows came upon them.... Many idle, sluggish companions drank snow-water, not willing to take the pains to cross the river. “Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those described unto us by James Quartier in his relation, assailed us. For remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor sick creatures did languish, pining away by little and little for want of sweet meats, as milk or spoon meat for to sustain their stomachs, which could not receive the hard meats, by reason of let, proceeding from a rotten flesh which grew and overabounded within their mouths; and when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in one night’s space more abundantly than before.... There died of this sickness thirty-six; and thirty-six or forty more that were stricken with it recovered themselves by the help of the Spring, as soon as the comfortable season appeared. But the deadly season for that sickness is the end of January, the months of February and March, wherein most commonly the sick do die, every one at his turn, according to the time when they have begun to be sick; in such sort that he which began to be ill in February and March may escape, but he that shall overhaste himself, and betake him to his bed in December and January, he is in danger to die in February and March, or the beginning of April.... M. de Poutrincourt made a negro to be opened that died of that sickness in our voyage, who was found to have the inward parts very sound except the stomacke, that had wrinkles as though they were ulcerated.”

Then follow Lescarbot’s views of the treatment and prevention of scurvy. After advising to avoid “cold” meats without juices, gross and corrupted, salted, “smoaky,” musty, raw and of an evil scent, including dried fishes, he proceeds:

“I would not, for all that, be so scrupulous as the physicians, which do put in the number of gross and melancholy meats, beeve’s flesh, bear’s, wild boar’s and hog’s flesh (they might as well add unto them beaver’s flesh, which notwithstanding we have found very good), as they do amongst fishes the tons [tunnies], dolphins, and all those that carry lard; among the birds the hernes, ducks and all other water-birds; for, in being an over-curious observator of these things, one might fall into the danger of starving. They place yet among the meats that are to be shunned, bisket[1143], beans and pulse, the often using of milk, cheese, the gross and harsh wine and that which is too small, white wine, and the use of vinegar”

--just like our own great masters in prohibitory dietetics.

Lescarbot’s advice agrees on the whole with that of Sir R. Hawkins: the men should be well shod and clothed, merriment should be encouraged, and again:

“Good wine taken according to the necessity of nature, it is a soveraigne preservative for all sickness, and particularly for this. The young buds of herbs in the Spring time be also very soveraigne.... We have had some sick that have been (as it were) raised up from death to life, for having eaten twice or thrice of a coolice made of a cock.”

In the voyage of Sir Thomas Smith to Baffin’s Bay in 1616, the treatment of scurvy by vegetable juices is mentioned: “Next day, going ashore on a little island we found great abundance of scurvie grass, which we boiled in beer, and so drank thereof, using it also in sallet, with sorrel and orpen, which here groweth in abundance; by means whereof, and the blessing of God, all our men within eight or nine days shall gain perfect health, and so continue till our arrival in England[1144].”

On the other hand, those who appear to have had the most correct intuition of the teaching of the schools were the Red Indians. Lescarbot says that, in the treatment of scurvy, “they use sweating often.” Perhaps they had some dim notion of the doctrine of peccant humours: at all events they clung to the alterative practice until long after that date, with a tenacity second only to that of the European faculty itself.

Scurvy in the East India Company’s Ships: Professional Treatment.

Until the end of the Tudor period, scurvy had been only an occasional incident of English voyages. But as soon as the regular trade to the East begins, we find it a common experience.

The English voyages to the East Indies by the Cape route really began in 1591, when Captain James Lancaster sailed first in command of ships belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers; but it was not until 1601 that he sailed again to the East Indies in command of the first ships of the East India Company, which had been formed the year before.

The three ships in 1591, the ‘Penelope,’ ‘Marchant Royal,’ and ‘Edward Bonaventure,’ cleared from Plymouth on April 10[1145]. They crossed the Line on June 6, by which time two men were dead and divers sick. In the tropics so much rain fell that “we could not keep our men dry three hours together, which was an occasion of the infection among them, and their eating of salt victuals, with the lack of clothes to shift them.” On this first voyage, Lancaster began the practice which was generally followed when the East India trade in English ships became established; before attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope, he refreshed his crews, who were weak and sick in all three ships, by a sojourn ashore at the Bay of Saldanha, a few leagues to the north of Table Bay. The voyage had already lasted more than three months from Plymouth, and about six weeks from the Line[1146].

At a muster on August 1, in the Bay of Saldanha, Lancaster found that he had 198 men sound and whole, of whom he assigned 101 to the ‘Penelope,’ and 97 to the ‘Edward Bonaventure,’ sending home 50 more or less unfit men in the ‘Royal Merchant.’ Scurvy, he says, was the disease:

“Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held out, but our mariners dropt away, which in my judgment, proceedeth of their evil diet at home.” The voyage was continued to the East Indies, the next that we hear of the state of health being at Penang in the beginning of June 1592, or some fourteen months out. The men were then very sick and many fallen; the sick were landed, and twenty-six died there, but not of scurvy, we may surmise. They had now left but thirty-three men and one boy, “of which not past twenty-two were found for labour and help.”

The two ships sailed for home from Point de Galle on December 8, 1592, and reached St Helena on April 3, 1593; one man was sick of the scurvy, and another had been suffering from the flux for nine months, but on the island both shortly recovered their perfect health. Instead of reaching England, the ships were carried to the West Indies, where, after an attempt to navigate them northwards, they were wrecked, and the small remnants of their crews dispersed.

Lancaster’s first voyage for the East India Company in 1601[1147] was “with foure tall shippes, to wit, the Dragon, the Hector, the Ascension, and Susan, and a victualler called the Guest.” The Company, founded in 1600, began with a capital of £72,000, which was laid out in the purchase and outfit of the ships, and in loading them with merchandise. The crews were as follow:

Dragon, 600 tons, 202 men. Hector, 300 " 108 " Ascension, 260 " 82 " Susan, --- " 88 " --- 480 Guest, 130 tons.

Further, “in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one the other, if any of them should be taken away by death”--a sufficient indication of the risks of foreign trade.

The ships, having loaded in the Thames, sailed from Dartmouth on April 18, 1601, and got clear of Tor Bay on the 22nd. On July 24, two months from the Channel, they crossed the southern tropic. But they had been so long under the Line that “many of our men fell sick.” On August 1, in 30° S., they met the south-west wind, “to the great comfort of all our people. For, by this time very many of our men were fallen sick of the scurvy in all our ships, and, unless it were in the general’s ship only, the others were so weak of men that they could hardly handle the sails.” Headwinds again hindered their course, and “now the few whole men we had began also to fall sick, so that our weakness of men was so great that in some of the ships the merchants took their turn at the helm and went into the top to take in the top sails, as the common mariners did.” Lancaster at length made Saldanha Bay, where he had landed to refresh his crews on his first voyage round the Cape ten years before. The state of three of the ships “was such that they was hardly able to let fall an anchor to save themselves withall;” but “the general went aboard of them and carried good store of men, and hoysed out their boats for them.... And the reason why the general’s men stood better in health than the men of other ships was this: he brought to sea with him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which he gave to each one as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning fasting, not suffering them to eat anything after it till noon. This juice worketh much the better if the partie keepe short diet, and wholly refrain salt meat, which salt meat, and long being at the sea, is the only cause of the breeding of this disease. By this means the general cured many of his men and preserved the rest, so that in this ship (having the double of men that was in the rest of the ships) he had not so many sick, nor lost so many men as they did, which was the mercie of God to us all.”

At Saldanha Bay they bartered with the natives for an abundant supply of fresh meat and other provisions, and in due time doubled the Cape of Good Hope. On Christmas day, eight months out from England, they put in to Antongil Bay, on the east side of Madagascar. On landing they found a writing on the rocks that five Dutch ships had sailed thence two months before, having “lost between 150 and 200 men while they roade in that place.” The English had a similar experience in store for them: on board Lancaster’s ship, the master’s mate, the preacher, the surgeon and some ten others, died; and, in the vice-admiral’s ship, the master with other two. It was mostly the flux that they died of, brought on by the drinking-water, or by the excessive wetness of the season, or by “going open and cold in the stomacke, which our men would often do when they were hot” (Hawkins gives the latter reason for flux at the Cape de Verde islands).

The references to scurvy before reaching the Cape, and to dysentery in Madagascar, are all that is said of sickness in this first venture of the East India Company. But in the accounts of the voyages which regularly followed we hear a great deal of the loss of men at the factories, or in the country trade, or on the voyage home, as well as on the outward voyage[1148]. The Directors in London were naturally well aware how greatly their ventures were imperilled and their profits reduced by the enormous loss of men. Under their own eyes ships would arrive in the mouth of the Channel with crews so weakened that they had to be met at Scilly with help to navigate them through the narrow seas to the Thames. By their correspondence from abroad, they were frequently hearing of artificers dying in their factories, of ships arriving out with so many men dead, and of other ships cast away, partly by stress of weather no doubt, but sometimes from inability of the crews to man them. Accordingly we find that they were alive to the best means of preventing “flux, scurvy, and fever.” Lancaster, as we have seen, carried lime-juice on his first voyage for the Company in 1601. In the Court minutes of August 13, 1607, the following were ordered to be provided with expedition: “Lemon water, ‘alligant’ from Alicante, a wine very fit for beverage and good against the flux, and old corn, etc.” At the Court of Directors on December 10, 1614, there was considered an “offer of Dr Burgis to present the Company with an antidote against poison, scurvy, and other diseases to which people are subject these long voyages: Sir Thomas Roe and Captain Keeling to confer with him and report their opinions.” Trial was also to be made of baking fresh bread at sea, with the grinding of corn, “an exercise fit to preserve men in health.” The offer of Dr Burgis was accepted; and on January 26, 1615, the minutes of the Court mention “instructions in writing, and boxes of such things as are to be used, for prevention of the flux, scurvy, and fever, prepared by Dr Burgis, to be delivered to each ship; the cost, about £23, to be paid.” In the minutes of the Court, November 22, 1619, there is reference to another preventive of scurvy: “The fleet to be supplied with 15 tons of white wine, to be drunk at the Line, and the Cape, which is used by the Dutch to preserve men from scurvy, and will refresh the men and scour their maws, and open and cool as well as lemon water”--the latter having been in all probability disliked or refused by the men. In 1624, “the death of mariners” is a topic at the Court of Directors; again, on October 15, 1626, the Court considers of the great mortality from scurvy in the ‘Charles’ and ‘Hart,’ homeward bound, and how to prevent it. Some were of opinion that lemon water was very good, but Mr Styles related that tamarind was the excellentest thing. However, there had been plenty of tamarinds aboard the ships; and on Lieutenant Hill being called in, he testified that the crews had all got tamarind, but they were all debauched people.

John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, was at this time surgeon-general to the East India Company, having medical charge of their dockyard at Blackwall; his name appears in the Court minutes as early as 1614. In 1617 he published his ‘Surgion’s Mate,’ “chiefly for the benefit of young sea-surgions imployed in the East India companies affairs,” and dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith, himself a navigator, and then chairman of the Court of Directors. This practical manual is largely occupied with the management of fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a part of his subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there appears also in the title, “the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the callenture.” The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one that here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had desired: “And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners.” Woodall begins by disclaiming learning: “A learned treatise befits not my pen.” But, at all events, his was the voice of the faculty, and he plunges boldly into pathology in the very first lines: “Scurvy is a disease of the spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly stopped” etc. Being a man of much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that line of remark, for a time at least. He repeats all the familiar experience of Hawkins, Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East Indiamen, with whom he must have conversed many times (it does not appear that he had himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews from landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being thereby cured “without much other help.” He enforces the need of changes of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just as Hawkins and others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on the virtues of lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely the practice of the latter in 1601: “each morning two or three spoonfuls, and fast after it two hours”; his originality appearing in the rider, grateful to seamen: “and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it is the better.” He mentions that a “good quantity of juice of lemons is sent in each ship out of England, by the great care of the merchants, and intended only for the relief of every poor man in his need.” The ship’s surgeon is advised to lay in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where they were to be had on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam.

So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to the things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and the extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change to land air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional doctrine of scurvy, and a treatment of it _secundum artem_, namely the wisdom of learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we have now to see what that was, according to Woodall. His pathology is that of “obstructions,” a curious fancy of the learned[1149].

The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to obstructions also of the liver and brain:

“But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with obstructions of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth that the head is much diseased, and that there is great obstructions in the brain, for that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also the gums putrefy, and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts of the body bear their part in the disease, for the shrinking and withering of the sinews, with the great pains the party hath, declareth no less” (p. 180).

This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid anatomy:

“Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened after death have had their livers utterly rotted”-others having their livers much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water, others their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which last may have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the mouth).

Such being the pathology of the disease, he comes next to the indications of cure; and these he takes from “a famous writer, Johannes Echthius.” They are:

1. The opening of obstructions.

2. The evacuating of offending humours.

3. The altering the property of the humours.

4. The comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased.

The order of treatment, _lege artis_, is accordingly as follows: the administration of a clyster or clysters; the opening of a vein, if strong (“but beware of taking too much blood away at once”); next day after the bleeding, “if he can bear it,” give him pills of euphorbium or gamboge; and lastly, “if you see cause,” certain days after you have given of any of your former laxatives, you may give a sweat to the patient in his bed. Thus the indications from the pathology would be fulfilled--opening of obstructions, evacuating of ill humours, and altering the property of the humours. It should be said for Woodall that his practice was better than his theory. Thus, he cautions the young dogmatists who sailed as surgeons in East Indiamen, not to carry their principles too far; he has heard that they are somewhat fond of the lancet, and he cautions them not to take too much blood at sea, as excessive depletion “makes the disease worse;” he cautions them also as to the use of gamboge.

We may now proceed with a few more illustrations of what the Company’s ships were actually experiencing during the period that those questions were before the Court of Directors[1150].

In the sixth voyage for the Company, under the command of Sir H. Middleton, the captain of the ‘Darling’ and three of his merchants died at Tecoa, and most of the men were ill. In the eighth voyage, when homeward bound between the Cape and St Helena in the month of June, many of the men fell ill with scurvy, and the ship had to come in to Waterford instead of the Thames. A similar experience befell Captain Thomas Best in the ‘Dragon’ and ‘Hosiander,’ carrying together 380 persons. Having left Gravesend on February 1, 1612, he completed his trading in the Indies, and arrived in the Thames on June 15, 1614, six months from Bantam. The scurvy in this voyage comes in towards the end. On March 4, 1614, “I did set sail in the roade of Saldanha; yet notwithstanding our short passage, having been from Santa Helena but two monethes and nine days, the one half or more of our company are laid up [on June 4] of the scurvie and two dead of it. Yet we had plentie of victuals, as beef, bread, wine, rice, oil, vinegar, sugar; and all these without allowance. Note that all our men that are sick have taken their sickness since we fell with Flores and Corvo. For since that time we have had it very cold, especially in two great storms.... From the Cape of Good Hope to the islands of Flores and Corvo I had not one man sick.” While in the Malay Archipelago they had buried twenty-five men at one place.

On November 3, 1618, the Directors have letters from two of their captains at the Cape, of July 6 and 7, with news of their arrival there on June 26, and the loss or sickness of many men, partly through the stinking beer, the tainted beef, the lack of fresh provisions at the Cape, and the want of warm clothes. A letter of February 25, 1619, announces the arrival of the ‘Peppercorn’ in Bantam roads: A great many men had died in the ten-months’ voyage between England and Bantam; putrefied beef and pork, “not man’s meat,” the chief cause of sickness. When they arrived at Bantam, not six men able to work; the whole fleet in the like distress. Twenty-five men in all dead or drowned. A letter from Batavia, January 11, 1622, says the master of the ‘Anne’ and 14 men of the fleet were dead: “so many men are deceased that they have not enough to man all the ships now in the roads.” The ‘Diamond’ sailed from England on October 8, 1621, and after a “long and tedious voyage” arrived at Jacatra previous to November 24, 1622: enclosed are the accounts of those men who have died, and nine wills. Another letter from Batavia, sometime in 1623, covers an “abstract of the men deceased in the ships.”

On March 28, 1624, the ‘Royal James,’ with five others, sailed from the Downs; she called at Saldanha Bay, and arrived on or before November 15, at Swally bar, Batavia; the bread had been very bad, the water too little, the beef not fit for men; have enclosed the names of those deceased. The ‘Jonas,’ also arrived out at Batavia on November 15, appears to have been one of the five others; she called at Saldanha Bay on July 19; “the wholesomeness of the air and the herb baths caused the most part of their sick men to recover in ten days from the scurbeck.” In June, 1625, the ‘Anne’ had been at Mocha for eight months in great distress, with most part of her men dead and the ship ready to founder.

Writing on October 13, 1625, from Batavia to the East India Company in London, Governor Hawley says that the ‘London’ had arrived out on August 23, with loss of 36 men, and 80 sick. She reported the ‘Discovery’ to have left the Cape for St Helena, having lost 21 men; two other ships, the ‘Moon’ and ‘Ruby’ had their crews “in remarkable health.” On September 14, the ‘Swallow’ arrived out, having lost only 3 men. Of 46 men shipped in the ‘Abigail’ out of England, all were dead but 5, in her coasting voyages upon Sumatra. Most of the workmen and soldiers sent in the ‘London’ had arrived; “but since, by disorders, are dead, as are those in the ‘Swallow.’ The smiths are all dead; of the armourers, only John Speed and a boy alive. Most other workmen dead or incapable. This is not remissness of government, but the newcomers, dreaming of nothing but sack and sugar-plums in India, are with much difficulty brought to obedience.” A Dutch ship, the ‘Leyden’ arrived out in 1626, with loss of 22 men, having been twelve months on the passage.

In the end of October, 1628, the ‘Morris’ reached the mouth of the Channel from Bantam, “which was most happily met with near Scilly by Captain Bickly, who was sent out to relieve any ship from the Indies, she being in a very weak state by reason of an infectious disease.” She reached the Downs safely with two other East Indiamen; but having been driven from her anchors in a great storm, was wrecked on the coast of Holland previous to November 19. Next year, about October 28, 1629, the ‘Mary’ of the East India Company was reported to have put into Scilly having lost most of her men by sickness. Therefore, Sir H. Mervyn, of H.M.S. ‘Lyon,’ in the Downs, having got early word of the ‘Mary’s’ distress, writes to E. Nicholas, to say that if the Company desire a convoy for the ‘Mary’ from their lordships of the Admiralty, “she being rich,” he (Mervyn) hopes that Nicholas will remember him.

But, although it was not unusual for ships to come home with crews weakened by scurvy, it was not invariable. The ‘William’ returned to England in 1628, as rich a ship as the Company ever had from the East Indies, with not a sick man in her, nor any dead on the way; her lading was computed to be worth £170,000[1151].

In a despatch of February 6, 1626, Hawley gives an account of a truly disastrous sickness in the factory and among the Company’s ships at Batavia during the previous year, which illustrates another risk than that of scurvy or flux, and an experience in the East Indies not altogether exceptional[1152].

“On March 12, I dispeeded the ‘Diamond’ for Japan to fetch boards, planks, etc. [to repair the ‘Bull’ with]; but hardly had fourteen days passed when the ‘Bull’s’ men fell sick and died daily; then the ‘Reformation’s’ men died by five, six or more in a day; in a short time the ‘Bull’s’ men all died but the master and one more, who were dangerously sick, and in the ‘Reformation’ the master and all the men lay at God’s mercy. We were forced to relieve them by blacks, and hale the ships to the open bay [they would seem to have been careened] where they rode like wrecks without other help than some few to comfort their sick, for more from the other ships might not be spared. The contagion was so pestilent that their blood, being licked by dog or cat, caused them to swell, burst and die. It was more moderate on shore, and was least on the ships in the open bay, though they also were daily visited.... The ‘Diamond’ returned on April 11, with planks etc.; also slaves and 44 Chinamen, which were with no small charge procured, and who all fell sick, and 10 or 12 died.... Thinking the mortality was occasioned, not by pestiferous air or soil, nor by any noxious tree, but by surfeit and the wet monsoon, I enacted orders for government building, and cleansing the trees to get more air. Wanted no provisions of fresh victual; could at pleasure command neighbours to fish and fetch anything needed, and the island itself furnished deer. On April 12, took general view of all people, as follows:

English English Portuguese in health sick sick

On shore 40 58 5 In the ‘Charles’ 32 10 " ‘Roebuck’ 16 2 " ‘Bull’ 2 8 " ‘Reformation’ 23 14 12 " ‘Abigail’ 8 3 " ‘Rose’ 7 2 5 ----- ----- ----- 128 97 22

--leaving, of course, an immense proportion dead.

These are instances from the records of the East India Company during the first thirty years of its existence. It would be tedious, even if it were practicable, to follow the history continuously. But meanwhile to show that its experiences, good and bad, remained much the same until long after, let us take two voyages in the year 1682. Governor William Hedges, passenger on board one of the Company’s ships, enters in his diary the 25th of May, 1682, being then off the Cape of Good Hope: “Not lost a man (except Mr Richards) either by sickness or any other accident, since we left England, which wants but three days of four months, and is just two months since we passed the Equinoctial Line,” nothing being said of sickness in the rest of the voyage. But another of the Company’s ships the same year fared worse: “December 9, 1682, ship ‘Society’ arrived at Balasore. She left the Downs on May 30, and, not touching at any place by the way, lost seventeen men of the scurvy[1153].”

Sickness in the Colonizing of Virginia and New England.

Leaving now the long voyages of the English beyond the Line, and their factories in the East, let us see how they fared as regards health when they merely crossed the Atlantic in their own latitudes. The earliest series of voyages to Virginia, at Raleigh’s instigation, from 1585 to 1590, have been already referred to. The continuous history of Atlantic voyages, and of the North American colonies, begins with the expedition of 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers[1154].

Seven of the ships fitted out in the Thames, and sailed from Woolwich on May 15, 1609. Having been joined at Plymouth by two more, the fleet sailed thence on June 2, and from Falmouth on June 8. The expedition included “many unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill destinies,” with the proportion of women and children usual among emigrants, as well as horses, and probably other live stock. The navigation, to reach Western land in 37° N., appears to have been somewhat erratic:

“We ran a southerly course from the tropic of Cancer, where, having the sun within six or seven degrees right over our head in July, we bore away West; so that by the fervent heat and loomes breezes, many of our men fell sick of the calenture”--Noah Webster takes that to mean a spotted pestilential fever--“and out of two ships was thrown overboard thirty-two persons. The vice-admiral [the ‘Diamond’] was said to have the plague in her; but in the ‘Blessing’ we had not any sick, albeit we had twenty women and children.”

A storm came on, in which the ships were scattered, the admiral’s ship being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the storm “some lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their yards; the seas over-raking our ships, much of our provision was spoiled, our fleet separated, and our men sick, and many died; and in this miserable state we arrived at Virginia.” The ‘Blessing,’ on board which was Gabriel Archer, the principal narrator of events, seems to have fared better than the rest: “The ‘Unity’ was sore distressed when she came up with us; for, of seventy landmen [emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen were down, but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King’s River [James River] haply the 11th of August.” They found the colony “all in health (for the most part).” There were fourscore living 20 miles from the Fort, who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks’ space. “After our four ships had been in harbour a few days, came in the vice-admiral, having cut her mainmast overboard, and had many of her men very sick and weak.” This was the ship that was said to have the plague in her. The admiral and his ship’s company, wrecked on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the whole number of 150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only 60 remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the other ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but probably the most of it after landing; Jamestown “is in a marish ground, low, flat to the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town, but what we drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river oozing into it, from whence I verily believe the chief causes have proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues.” Lord De La Warre, one of the early governors, had a succession of illnesses--hot and violent ague, followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a month, “then the flux surprised me and kept me many days,” then the cramp, with strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy--which last, however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said to have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western Islands, and by the voyage thither[1156].

Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was really due to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates; but a great deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the “tainted air” of “foreign climes” was mere confusion of ideas. A more correct view of events was that of the Governor and Council of Virginia, in a letter of January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in London:

“The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four butts of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies and empty their purses[1157].”

The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down great numbers “since their last.” According to Purchas, the emigration to Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the years 1619, 1620 and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42 ships. Overcrowding, we may be sure, was the rule. We shall find particular evidence of it in speaking of West Indian colonization in the sequel; and for the present, it may suffice to quote a document of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers for New England per ‘Confidence’ of 200 tons.

If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by no means clear of it. The first voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620, carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614 and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in 1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic

## particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the

‘Arbella,’ under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal:

“This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly and noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took order, and appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room clean for three days, and then four others should succeed them, and so forth on.”

Nothing more is said of the health on board the ‘Arbella.’ The ‘Mayflower’ and ‘Whale’ had their passengers all in health, but most of their cattle and horses dead. The ‘Success’ lost -- goats, and many of her passengers were near starved. The ‘Talbot’ lost fourteen passengers. The colony had various experiences of sickness in due course. In 1633, smallpox proved fatal to whole settlements of Indians: “the English came daily and ministered to them; and yet few, only two families, took any infection by it[1160].” In 1646 an epidemic of influenza went among the Indians, English, French and Dutch, “not a family, nor but few persons, escaping it;” few died, not above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was appointed by the government of Connecticut, one reason among others being “the mortality which had been among the people of Massachusetts.” In 1655 there was another influenza, in 1658 “great sickness and mortality throughout New England,” in 1659 “cynanche trachealis,” croup perhaps, and in 1662 again general sickness, which, along with drought, called for a day of thanksgiving on their cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose to follow the epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the subject, the following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699, will suffice to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed long after the first voyages: “Arrived the ‘Britannia’ from Liverpool, which had been 13 weeks on her passage; she had 200 passengers on board,--had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly[1163].”

West Indian Colonization: Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade.

The other field of English colonial enterprise that concerns us is the West Indies. The West Indian colonies of Britain play a great part in the commercial history, in the naval history, and in the legislative history in connexion with the negro slave-trade and the institution of negro slavery. From the very first they play a great part, also, in the history of epidemic sickness; they and the Spanish, French and other colonies there were the peculiar home of yellow fever for two centuries, having shared that unenviable distinction, after a generation or two, with certain ports of the North American continent. The larger part of the history of yellow-fever epidemics falls outside the period to which I here limit myself. But the beginnings fall within it; and as the beginnings raise the whole question of causation, this part of the subject resolves itself into a somewhat comprehensive discussion of the circumstances of yellow fever as illustrated by the first English colonizations in the Caribbean Sea, and the tradings connected therewith.

By far the most important disease-producing conditions in the West Indies arose out of the Guinea slave-trade. But, so that we may set down to that no more than it deserves, we shall have to review also the earlier experiences of English and French emigrants, both on the voyage and in their settlements in Barbados and St Christopher, and, at greatest length, the disastrous first occupation of Jamaica in 1655 by the army of the Commonwealth. It will be convenient to begin the history, in which there is so much to disentangle, with a few facts about the negro labour-traffic to the New World previous to the time when the demands of the sugar-plantations caused it to be established on a great scale.

African negroes were brought first to the West Indies by the Spaniards to work in the mines of Hispaniola. They are heard of as early as 1501, and are much in evidence after that date. The Christian conscience appears to have been at first tender. It was the high purpose of Isabella of Spain to convert the Indies to the Christian faith; and the cruelties of the negro importation and of the forced labour in the mines were obviously inconsistent with the humanitarian teaching of the Gospels. The remonstrances of missionaries were listened to at the Spanish Court, and licences to trade in negroes were either granted under strict conditions or withheld altogether. However, there were rapacious pro-consuls to deal with as well as monarchs at home, and cargoes of slaves found their way to Cuba, to Hispaniola (St Domingo), and at length to the Spanish Main. Each importation as late as 1518 was still regulated by special licence; but soon after that date a powerful minister sold the privilege to the Genoese, so that it passed somewhat beyond control of the Spanish Court[1164]. Connected with these importations in the first quarter of the 16th century, were the disastrous epidemics of two diseases with somewhat similar names and inextricably confused in the records--the great pox and the small pox; it is not easy to say which did the most harm among the native population of the islands and mainland occupied by Spain; but it is said that by disease of one kind or another Mexicans and Caribs on the main, in Hispaniola, and in Cuba, came near to being exterminated[1165].

The first English share in the negro traffic over sea fell to John Hawkins and partners, who had not even the excuse of an open market for their wares in the Spanish colonies, and had sometimes to dispose of their negroes by stealth. It would appear that it was still in part for the mines that African negroes were in request. In Richard Hawkins’ account of his voyage to the Pacific in 1593, he mentions that he captured a Portuguese ship of 100 tons shortly after leaving the coast of Brazil; she was bound for Angola to load negroes to be carried to and sold in the River Plate: “It is a trade of great profit and much used. The negroes are carried to work in the mines of Potosi.”

It is not until a generation after that we hear of the English as slave-owners. On February 16, 1624, there were 22 negroes on the English settlements in Virginia, the whites numbering 1253[1166]. In somewhat greater numbers, negroes are next heard of in English possession in the Bahamas; but, from the correspondence between the Company of Providence Island in London and their agents in the colonies, it would appear that the policy of using forced labour was by no means admitted by all, or free from difficulties. Thus in 1635 the Company condemned as indiscreet and injurious Mr Rushworth’s behaviour concerning the negroes who ran away, “arising, as it seems, from a groundless opinion [of Rushworth] that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude during their strangeness from Christianity[1167].”

Whatever negroes the English colonists possessed at this time they got either by capture or purchase from Dutch and other foreign traders. Thus, in the instructions to a shipmaster sailing from London, dated March 19, 1636, captured negroes were to be conveyed to the Somers Islands, those who can dive for pearls to be employed at Providence. Again, the instructions to the captain of the ‘Mary Hope,’ bound for the West Indies, January 20, 1637, refer to the distribution of negroes “if a prize be taken.” And, on June 7, 1643, the earl of Warwick instructs the captain of the ‘Elias,’ 400 tons, that captured negroes are “to be left at my island of Trinidad[1168].” The negro carrying-trade was in those years mostly in the hands of the Dutch, who not only stocked their own colony of Surinam on the mainland but used their small island of Curaçoa as a slave-depot for the supply of colonies belonging to other nations. Thus the governor of Antigua, which had then no negroes, says in a despatch of about the year 1670: “At Curaçoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready pieces-of-eight carried thence great store. They intend to settle a mart for negroes at Tortola to engross the trade of Porto Rico.”

The direct share of England in the negro carrying-trade arose out of the monopoly of the Guinea Company. The history of English interests in Guinea and “Binney” need not detain us. When the first patent for sole trade was granted in 1624, it was felt to be a grievance, as “many had been there almost for fifty years since.” The charter was renewed on November 22, 1631; but in course of time, some who had been ousted from their original share in the monopoly traded on their own account, the rivalries at home being aggravated by conflicts with Swedes (in 1653) and Dutch at the factories on the coast. The trade was ostensibly for gold dust and ivory, but live freight soon found a place in English bottoms as well as in Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others. We may now return to our proper subject--the state of health in the first English and French plantations in the West Indies.

The English and French arrived in the West Indies almost at the same moment. Their experiences were probably not very different, but it happens that it is of the French emigrants that we have particulars, which it is important to introduce here.

In the year 1625, a Norman adventurer of good family, D’Enambuc, sailed from Dieppe in a brigantine armed with four pieces and manned with 35 or 40 men, on a roving cruise to the West Indies[1169]. Having been battered by a Spanish galleon at the Kaymans, D’Enambuc made the island of St Christopher. He found it occupied by the native Caribs and a few stranded Frenchmen, who were on good terms with the natives. Shortly after, an English captain (“Waërnard”) appears upon the scene, who joined D’Enambuc in the alleged murdering and poisoning of the natives and the plundering of the island. Loaded with his Carib spoils and a quantity of tobacco, D’Enambuc set sail for France, and having sold his tobacco and other things in Normandy, entered Paris with a fine equipage, thus giving evidence to all men of the fortunes that awaited them in the Indies. In a short time he had an audience of Richelieu, and on the 31st October 1626 the charter was signed of the Compagnie des Isles, granting a monopoly of trade with “les isles situées à l’entreé du Perou”--namely St Christopher and Barbados. The Company raised 45,000 livres, of which capital Richelieu held 10,000 livres in his own name. The money was spent in fitting out and furnishing with stores three ships--the ‘Catholique’ at Havre, a craft of 250 tons, and the ‘Cardinal’ and ‘Victoire’ at St Malo, two much smaller vessels. Numerous poor peasants and artisans from Brittany and Normandy were induced to go out as colonists, the ‘Catholique’ (250 tons) carrying 322 souls, the ‘Cardinal’ 70, and the ‘Victoire’ 140. The two last sailed from St Malo on February 24, 1627 under the command of Du Rossey. The passage was long, the provisions both bad and insufficient, and the mortality terrible. When the ‘Cardinal’ arrived at the Pointe de Sable of St Christopher on May 8, only 16 of her 70 souls remained alive, and these were sick. In the other ships, also, “most of the people died on the passage out.”

The English experience can hardly have been so bad as that. When the French colonists landed, they found four hundred Englishmen settled near the chief anchorage, hale and strong and well stocked with provisions, having lately come out under Lord Carlisle’s patent. Cordial to each other at first, the two nationalities soon fell out. The French had rather the worst of it, having lost many of their number by sickness, while the English kept their health. Help came to the former from home, and a victory over the English is claimed for them. But they had also a Spanish fleet to reckon with, and eventually the French colony fell into disorder and escaped to Antigua, while its leader, Du Rossey, went home to France and was thrown into the Bastille by Richelieu, one of the largest shareholders. The refugees to Antigua soon returned to St Christopher, again suffered from famine, and had the mortification of seeing all the profits of their monopoly swallowed up by unlicensed Dutch traders. In 1635 they obtained a new charter; at the same time a fortunate capture of a ship-load of negroes from the Spaniards gave them a supply of labour so that “the island began to change its face.” English usurpation was kept within limits, and the French colony grew daily, by addition of European settlers and of “Moorish slaves whom the French and Dutch ships go to buy in Guinea, or capture from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil.” The French on St Christopher were now strong enough to send branch colonies to Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635). It was then the turn of the English to have disastrous sickness among their immigrants. Sir Thomas Warner, who had planted the English colonies in Barbados and St Christopher, and was now governor of the latter, went to England in 1636 to bring over new settlers. On his arrival out on 10 September, he wrote home that one of his two ships, the ‘Plough,’ was given up for lost, and that in his own ship there had been “great sickness and mortality, not 20 out of 200 having escaped and 40 having died, some near to him in blood and many of especial quality and use.”

Meanwhile Barbados had been the chief scene of English enterprise, from a date (1624-26) almost the same as that of the joint occupation of St Christopher by French and English. Its earliest annals contain little else than the accounts of rivalries under Lord Carlisle’s patent and other patents. So far as regards sickness, the annals were probably uneventful. In 1643 the island had plantations stocked with no fewer than 6400 negro slaves, and its prosperity advanced so steadily, that by the year 1666, the slaves in the island numbered some 50,000: “The buildings in 1643 were mean; but in 1666 [when Bridgetown was burned], plate, jewels and household stuff were estimated at £500,000[1170].” It is a date intermediate between those two that directly concerns us--the year 1647. In that year, Ligon, the historian of the colony, arrived out from England about the beginning of September[1171]. The ship in which he came to Barbados was consigned thence to Cutchew, on the African coast, to trade for negroes. On their arrival they found twenty-two good ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay (Bridgetown), a brisk trade going on, and plantations visible all along the shore. A plantation of 500 acres had 96 negroes and 28 Christians; some plantations contained 10,000 acres. The population was difficult to estimate, so many ships were arriving with passengers daily; and Ligon’s estimate of 50,000, “besides negroes,” is doubtless too much. About one hundred sail visit the island every year; they bring “servants” and negro slaves, both men and women. The servants are bound for five years, and are worse treated than the negroes. The negroes are more than double the number of the Christians; they come from different parts of Africa--Bonny, Cutchew, Angola and Gambia--and do not understand each other’s language. They are bought out of the ship naked, being chosen as horses are in a market, the strongest, youthfullest and most beautiful yielding the highest price (man £30, woman £25 to £27, children at easier rates).

We have to note, also, Ligon’s account of the colony’s chief harbour--Bridgetown. The whole of Carlisle Bay is environed by high ground. Bridgetown is so-called “for that a long bridge was made at first over a little nook of the sea, which was rather a bog than sea.” The stream which discharges there into the bay is like a lake for want of outfall. The spring tides fill it, but during the neap tides the salt water is kept stagnant behind the sea-banks, making a small lagoon. The spring tides seldom rise above four or five feet, but high enough to flow over the low ground in front of the houses, making the flat a kind of bog, which vents out a loathsome savour.

Ligon landed at Bridgetown about the beginning of September, 1647, in time to witness the ravages of a deadly epidemic:

“Yet, notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the inhabitants of the island, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with the plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired after our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead. Whether it was brought thither by shipping, (for in long voyages diseases grow at sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove contagious), or by the distemper of the people of the island”--he leaves uncertain. For one woman that died, there were ten men. The ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were, for the most part, infected with this disease.

What was the disease? How came it there? What sort of origin did its characters, symptoms, or type suggest? On these questions we have some light thrown by other writings besides Ligon’s, relating to the same epidemic.

John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, writes in his journal, under the year 1647[1172]:

“It pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as sugar, cotton, tobacco and indigo, were a good help to discharge our engagements in England. And this summer there was so great a drouth as their potatoes and corn, etc. were burnt up; and divers London ships which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had not supplied them, they could not have returned home.... After the great dearth of victuals in these islands followed presently a great mortality (whether it were the plague, or pestilent fever, it killed in three days), that in Barbados there died six thousand, and in Christophers, of English and French, near as many, and in other islands proportionable.”

The mention of the French on St Christopher brings us to the third source of information, the Jesuit father Dutertre, who was an eye-witness[1173]:

“During this same year, 1648, the plague (la peste), hitherto unknown in the islands since they were inhabited by the French, was brought thither by certain ships. It began in St Christopher, and in the eighteen months that it lasted, it carried off nearly one-third of the inhabitants.” This plague, or peste, was marked by violent pain in the head, general debility of all the muscles, and continual vomiting. It was contagious. A ship, the ‘Bœuf’ of Rochelle, carried it to Guadeloupe, the sailors and passengers dying on board of her. A priest went on board to administer the sacraments, and caught the infection; he recovered, but [had a relapse and] died on August 4. It was contagious at Guadeloupe also, and lasted twenty months.

This testimony of Dutertre is important for several things. He had arrived at Guadeloupe in 1640 in a small vessel of 100 to 120 tons, crowded with stores and carrying besides, 200 souls of both sexes and all ages. Much distress and sickness followed their arrival; he mentions nearly 100 sick in the quarters of M. de la Vernade, with only the ground to sleep on; more than three-fourths of the help for the struggling colony that arrived from St Christopher died, perhaps by infectious disease bred by the others. Now, with that personal experience in his mind, and with personal experience also of the epidemic of 1647-8, he describes the latter as a pestilence “hitherto unknown in the islands since they were inhabited by the French.” Like Ligon and Winthrop, he is led to think of plague itself by the rapidity and fatality of the infection; but he mentions no signs of plague proper, and at the same time mentions continual vomiting. The disease was, in short, the Yellow Fever; and the epidemic in the end of 1647 at Bridgetown, and shortly after at St Christopher and Guadeloupe, was the first of it, so far as is known, in the West Indies.

But what then were the earlier epidemics spoken of by Dutertre? The branch colony to Guadeloupe from St Christopher in 1635 had been only two months in their new home, when, in September, their experiences of famine began. The famine or scarcity, says Dutertre, continued for five years, and was followed by “a mortality almost general.” It was part of that mortality which Dutertre himself saw on his arrival at Guadeloupe in 1640. He calls the fever _coup de barre_--a name which in the sequel was sometimes given to yellow fever; and he mentions symptoms which agree, in part at least, with those of yellow fever--violent pains in the head, throbbing of the temporal arteries, great distress of breathing, lassitude, pains in the calf of the legs, as if they had been struck by a _coup de barre_. But in speaking of the sickness which he found prevalent on landing in 1640, he does not mention the irrepressible vomiting, which he puts in the first place when he describes the other fever of 1647-8; and, to repeat, he says that the latter was a pestilence hitherto unknown since the occupation of the French Antilles, and as fatal as the plague. It is tolerably certain, therefore, that the sickness on Guadeloupe sometime between 1635 and 1640, was of the usual kind incidental to the settlement of a new colony. We have had to notice it in Virginia (“from pestilent ships,” the governor thought), in St Christopher, and in other new settlements. In a petition of the Governor and Company of the Somers Islands, July 28, 1639, it is said that about one hundred and thirty of their colonists had transplanted themselves last year to St Lucia, where they suffered so much from sickness that not one was in health[1174]. Any one of those epidemics among new settlers might be diagnosed yellow fever with as much warrant as another; but the deadly infection of 1647-8 was something special, different from all that had preceded, and to be accounted the first appearance of yellow fever whether in the West Indies or anywhere else[1175].

Yellow fever received much elucidation in after years, both as regards its symptoms and pathology, and as regards its circumstances and causation. To get a familiar view of what the disease was like, let us take the following graphic case recorded by Moseley at Jamaica more than a century after the date with which we are still engaged[1176]:

“The last patient I saw, in the last stage of the yellow fever, was Captain Mawhood of the 85th regt. at Port Royal, in Jamaica on the 24th Sept., 1780. It was on the fourth day of his illness. He had been in the island seven weeks.

I arrived at the lodgings of this much esteemed young man about four hours before his death. When I entered the room, he was vomiting a black, muddy cruor; and was bleeding at the nose. A bloody ichor was oozing from the corners of his eyes, and from his mouth and gums. His face was besmeared with blood; and with the dulness of his eyes, it presented a most distressing contrast to his natural visage. His abdomen was swelled, and inflated prodigiously. His body was all over of a deep yellow, interspersed with livid spots. His hands and feet were of a livid hue. Every part of him was cold excepting about his heart. He had a deep, strong hiccup, but neither delirium nor coma; and was at my first seeing him, as I thought, in his perfect senses. He looked at the changed appearance of his skin, and expressed, though he could not speak, by his sad countenance, that he knew life was soon to yield up her citadel, now abandoning the rest of his body. Exhausted with vomiting, he at last was suffocated with the blood he was endeavouring to bring up, and expired.”

One of the best summaries of its symptoms is that given by the Rev. Griffith Hughes, rector of one of the Barbados parishes[1177]:

“The attack begins with a feeling of chill lasting an hour or two. Then violent fever comes on, with excessive pain in the head, back, and limbs, loss of strength, great dejection of spirits, insatiable thirst, restlessness, sometimes vomiting, redness of the eyes, and that redness in a few days turning to yellow. If the patient turn yellow soon, he has scarce a chance for life, and, the sooner he does, the worse. After some days the pain in the head abates, as well as the fever. A sweat breaks out, and the patient appears to be better; but on a narrow view a yellowness appears in his eyes and skin, and he becomes visibly worse. About this time he sometimes spits blood, and that by mouthfuls; as this continues, he grows cold and his pulse abates till at last it is quite gone, and the patient becomes almost as cold as a stone, and continues in that state with a composed sedate mind. In this condition he may perhaps live twelve hours, without any sensible pulse or heat, and then expire. Such were the symptoms and progress of this fever in the year 1715.” He adds that the hæmorrhage was sometimes from the nose or rectum. “A loose tooth being drawn from a person who had the fever very severely, there issued out from the hole a great quantity of black stinking blood, which still kept oozing till the third day, on which the patient died in great agonies and convulsions.” The symptoms were not uniform in all, nor in every visitation. It was most commonly rife and fatal in May, June, July and August, and then mostly among strangers, though a great many of the inhabitants died of it in 1696 and a great many at different periods since. (The next Barbados epidemic after 1647 was in 1671.)

Now, of that remarkable disease, a pestilent fever with hæmorrhages, having a final stage of collapse not unlike the algid termination of cholera, and a mortality equalled only by that of plague itself, or, in after times, by that of cholera, it will be difficult to find instances in any part of the world previous to the Barbados, St Christopher, and Guadeloupe epidemics of 1647-48. Not only so, but these and other West Indian harbours were the distinctive seats of it for long after. From first to last yellow fever has been an infection of certain harbours--of the shipping anchored, moored, or careened in them, and of the houses nearest to the shore. In the Barbados epidemic of 1647, Ligon says, the ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were for the most part infected; Dutertre says that the crew and passengers died of it on board the ship which brought it to Guadeloupe; he says, also, that it had come to St Christopher with certain ships; and Ligon clearly suspects that it may have had an origin on board ship: “for in long voyages diseases grow at sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove contagious.” We have had many instances of the sicknesses of voyages, not only scurvy but also fevers. But these ship-fevers were not yellow fever; we know more of them in later periods of the history, when they were recognized as ship-typhus. For yellow fever we must seek something more distinctive, and that distinctive thing we shall probably find in a kind of voyage which we have not hitherto considered from the point of view of its sicknesses--the Middle Passage, or the voyage with negroes from the African coast across the tropical belt to one part or another of the New World. Let us then take that particular kind of voyage, as we have already taken the voyages of the East India Company’s ships, the voyages of emigrant ships from England to the North-American Colonies, and those from France and England to the West Indies.

Dutertre, our authority for the first yellow fever in St Christopher, is also a witness to the sicknesses and mortality of the Middle Passage. Of the negroes, he says, more die on the passage than land. He has known captains who have taken on board up to 700 in one ship and landed only 200; they died of misery and hunger, and the stifling monotony of tropical calms. Some of the slaves are of high degree; there was one negress, in

## particular, whom all the rest looked up to as a princess.

The African slave-trade was not altogether so reputable as to have had the incidents of the voyages recorded with anything approaching to scientific fulness. But within the period that now occupies us, there are four notices of arrivals of slavers in the West Indies from Guinea, in which the health of the voyage had called for remark[1178]. In a letter from Barbados, March 20, 1664, it is said that the ‘Speedwell’ has arrived with 282 negroes, who have greatly lost in value owing to smallpox breaking out amongst them; the ‘Success’ brought 193 blacks; the ‘Susan’ 230, which were not allowed to be landed until the officers of the ship had proved that they had not collected them within the Royal African Company’s limits. Another Barbados letter of March 31, 1664, says that “there has been a great mortality amongst the negroes [? on St Christopher and Nevis] which the African Company’s physician at Barbados, De La Rouse, assures them is through a malignant distemper contracted, they think, through so many sick and decaying negroes being thronged together, and perhaps furthered by the smallpox in Captain Carteret’s ships. Most men refused to receive any of them, and Philip Fusseires, a surgeon, to whom they sold twenty at a low rate, lost every one.” This is a confused letter, but the reference to “sick and decaying negroes thronged together,” appears to mean, not a sharp sickness soon over, but a general sickly state and loss of condition, which had come upon them during the voyage[1179]. The third letter is from Barbados, June 25, 1667: from Guinea are arrived four ships, two of the African Company’s, and two private; in which had happened a great mortality of negroes and of the ships’ companies. Once more, to bring out the long imprisonment of negroes under decks while the slaver was filling up on the coast, T. Barrett writing from Port Royal on October 17, 1672, to James Littleton, “has heard that Capt. James Tallers bought the negroes for Littleton from another ship in Guinea which had them three months aboard, and that they were almost all starved and surfeycatted [surfeit had come to mean dysentery], he having fed them with little else but musty corn. There must have been something extraordinary that so many of them died.”

In one of the letters we hear of sickness and mortality not only of slaves on the passage but also of the ships’ companies. Long after, Clarkson showed from the muster-rolls of Liverpool slave-ships that the slave-trade, instead of being a “nursery” of British sailors, was their grave[1180]. There are, however, few medical particulars; doubtless many of the deaths among the crews occurred on the coast, from fever, dysentery and the like brought on by debauchery and during trading excursions up the rivers in the long-boat; but from the third of the letters quoted it appears that there had been also deaths on the voyage. Of the sicknesses among the negroes, more is said of smallpox than of any other malady in the foregoing records. But smallpox was not in ordinary circumstances a very fatal or very severe disease among negroes, although it was very common. An early medical writer on the diseases of the Guinea Coast, both of white men and negroes, Dr Aubrey, “who resided many years on the coast of Guinea,” may pass as a credible witness in the matter, the more so as his book shows him to have been competent in his profession[1181].

“Measles and smallpox,” he says, “are no ways dangerous, nor so troublesome as in cold climates, neither are they so very sick e’er they come out, nor remains there any great sign of them after they recover. Abundance of these poor creatures are lost on board ships, to the great prejudice of the owners and scandal of the surgeon, merely through the surgeon’s ignorance; because he knows not what they are afflicted with, but supposing it to be a fever, bleeds and purges or vomits them into an incurable diarrhœa, and in a very few days they become a feast for some hungry shark. When they are in the woods sick of these diseases, they take nothing but cold water, and suck oranges, and yet recover, as I myself have been an eyewitness many a time; and the grandy-men’s children are treated no otherwise in their sickness, and are very well of the smallpox in less than half a moon,” etc. It is conceivable, however, that smallpox left to itself would not have run so favourable a course in the hold of a slaver as in the native huts of the negroes. On board ship the subjects of smallpox died from a complication of diarrhœa; and, according to the same writer, diarrhœa or dysentery was the grand cause of mortality on the voyage, the most inveterate form of it, (according to his fixed belief), occurring in those who had been constitutionally affected by yaws: “This (the yawey flux) is the mortal disease that cuts off three parts in four of the negroes that are commonly lost on board ships.” But the same writer reveals enough to let us understand the prevalence of flux as a primary malady. The food of the slaves on board ship, to say nothing of the regimen, was distasteful to them. They missed their palm oil and other accustomed articles of diet. They were fed, morning and evening, on pease, beans, and the like, mixed with “rotten salt herrings,” with an occasional meal of salt beef or salt pork, and a stinted allowance of water.

“These are foods that very few of them will eat. Very often they are abused by sailors, who beat and kick them to that degree that sometimes they never recover; and then the surgeon is blamed for letting the slaves die, when they are murthered, partly by strokes and

## partly famished; for if they do not eat such salt things as are enough

to destroy them, they must fast till supper; and then they lose their appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly through fasting and partly with grief to see themselves so treated; and if once they take anything to heart, all the surgeon’s art will never keep them alive; for they never eat anything by fair means or foul, because they choose rather to die than be ill-treated.... When they are costive and griped [by the salt food], they stay betwixt decks and will eat nothing; but cry _yarry, yarry_, and perhaps creep under one of the platforms and hide themselves, and die there, and the surgeon can’t think what is the meaning on’t..., I am very sensible that it is impossible to maintain the slaves on board, after one quits the Coast, without salt provisions; but then care might be taken to water the beef and pork ere it be boiled, and also to bring a cruce of palm-oil round the deck from mess to mess, and also pepper, and let everyone take as he pleaseth.... Another principal cause of their destruction is forcing them into a tub of cold water every day, and pouring the water on their heads by buckets-full”--doubtless for the sake of cleanliness, although they were too ill to stand such washings.

Whatever else the negroes died of on the voyage from Guinea, they did not die of yellow fever: there is hardly another generality of pathology so well based as that Africans of pure blood have been found immune from that infection in all circumstances ashore or afloat--protected not by acclimatisation but by some strange privilege of their race. And yet we have to think of yellow fever as somehow related to the over-sea traffic in negroes. Two instances from the later history will serve to bring the problem concretely before us. In 1815, a British transport, the ‘Regalia,’ was employed in carrying recruits from the West Coast of Africa to the black regiments in the West Indies. The health of the ship when on the African coast had been good; but on the voyage across with the newly-enlisted negroes, much sickness, chiefly dysenteric, occurred among the latter, whereupon yellow fever broke out with great malignancy, attacking all on board except the black soldiers, who were from first to last untouched by it. From such experiences as that, Sir Gilbert Blane formulated a somewhat vague doctrine that the causes which produced dysentery in the negro produced yellow fever in the white race. But it is more probable that the dysenteric matters of the negroes had themselves in turn bred an infection of yellow fever for the whites. To take another case: In 1795, after the capture of Martinique from the French, one of the frigates ‘La Pique,’ was manned by a British crew and sent to Barbados. On the voyage they rescued two hundred negroes from a ship which was about foundering. The negroes were confined in the hold of ‘La Pique;’ and in a short time yellow fever broke out among her English crew, killing one hundred and fifty of them, although it was not prevalent among the blacks at all. “Such a mixture of men,” says Gillespie, “strangers to each other, has been often found to occasion sickness in ships; and, together with other causes, fatally operated here before the arrival of the ship at Barbados.... This is a melancholy instance of the generation of a fatal epidemic on board ship at a time when the inhabitants of Barbados and the crews of the other ships in company remained free from any such disease[1182].”

But such instances are comparatively rare, while epidemics of yellow fever on shore, or among the shipping in an anchorage, have been common. It is possible that the yellow fever experiences of the ‘Regalia’ and ‘La Pique’ had happened often to the white crews of slavers; we shall never know. What we do know is that the ports of debarkation of the slave-trade became the endemic seats of yellow fever. The theory is that the matters productive of yellow fever were brought to the West Indian harbours, deposited there, left to ferment and accumulate, and so to taint the soil, the mud and the water as to become an enduring source of poisonous miasmata. The facts in support of that view are not far to seek.

Let us come back to the circumstances of Bridgetown, Barbados, when the yellow fever broke out first in 1647. A good many slavers had landed their cargoes at Bridgetown in the years preceding (in 1643 the island had at least 6400 negroes), and each of them had left behind a material quantity of the filth of the voyage, having probably been careened for the purpose of cleaning out and overhauling. There are traditions still extant that the cleaning of a slave-ship after a voyage from Africa was an exceptional task, to which Kroomen used to be set. Be that as it may, it needs only a little reflection to see that a crowd of some hundreds of negroes under gratings in the hold or ’tween decks of a brig or schooner, suffering at first from sickness of the sea and, as the voyage across the tropic belt progressed, from the more distressing flux, must have set all rules of cleanliness at defiance. The ship’s bilges and ballast would be foul beyond measure: and it was just the contents of her bilges, with or without the ballast itself, that would be pumped out or thrown out when the ship was moored in the harbour or careened on the mud. At Bridgetown there were no plunging tides, such as we watch on our own shores, to carry the filth out to sea. The spring tides, says Ligon, rose only four or five feet; the flood tide carried the water over the banks into the lagoon, and the ebb carried it off; but at neap tides a quantity of water remained stagnant behind the sea-banks, according to the familiar experience in such circumstances. The flat shore, says Ligon, became “a kind of bog, which vents out so loathsome a savour as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.” A brackish estuary, with an impeded outfall, will often smell badly, from rotting sea-wrack or other decomposing matters; but we have yet to learn that any so commonplace conditions can breed a deadly pestilence such as arose at Bridgetown for the first time in the autumn of 1647. Carlisle Bay was doubtless a leeward harbour, with high land all round it and a sluggish ebb and flow of the tide, subject to calms and a scorching sun; but besides all that, the careenage at the head of the bay was the regular receptacle of the ordure of slave-ships year after year. Travellers and imaginative writers have sometimes pictured the bays and creeks of the islands and main of the Caribbean Sea as if the mere decay of tropical vegetation had made them pestilential[1183]. Risk, of course, there is in such situations, but chiefly when men are exposed by turns to the noonday heat and the nocturnal chill. The ill repute of West Indian harbours, with their sweltering mud, mangrove swamps, and lazy tides, is a composite and confused idea. It is not so much Nature that has made them unwholesome, as man. Yellow fever, in particular, is not a miasm of remote and primeval bays or lagoons into which a boat’s crew may come once and again; it is not a fever of any and every part of the coast of a tropical island; it is a fever of only a few inhabited spots on the wide shores of the globe; and those seats of it, so far as it has been steady or periodic in its prevalence, are all of them harbours distinguished at one time or another as the resort of slave-ships, and distinguished from many other ports of either Hemisphere in no other way. Everything in the subsequent history of yellow fever pointed to its being a poison lurking in the mud or even in the water of slave-ports, and in the soil of their fore-shores, wharves and houses along the beach. Miasmata rose from the ground in the latter situations, to taint the air of the town at certain seasons; the poison also entered the bilges of ships moored or careened in the harbour, and rose from the holds as a noxious vapour to infect the crews. The miasmata were deadly for the most part to new comers, especially to those from the colder latitudes, although acclimatised residents were not exempt in a time of epidemic; but there is very general agreement that they carried no risk for negroes of pure blood.

What was there special in the circumstances of 1647 to give rise to the first epidemic explosion of yellow fever? There was, in the first place, the accretion of the peculiar fermenting filth in the mud and soil, which had been going on for several years. Secondly, there was the brisk trade, as indicated by the large number of ships in the harbour, a great concourse of new arrivals having been often remarked in the later history as one of the conditions of an outbreak. But more particularly there were the peculiarities of the season: it was one of those seasons in which the regular rains of June and following months had failed. What we know on that head comes exclusively from Winthrop’s ‘Journal,’ already quoted. There was so great a drouth, he says, that their potatoes, corn, &c., were burnt up; and after the “great dearth of victuals in these islands followed presently a great mortality.” But the mortality was certainly not from famine, nor from the effects of famine. It was the parching drought that the epidemic really followed, and not merely the scarcity, which was, indeed, relieved by the ships from New England, and was so little felt that Ligon does not mention it. The rainy season missed, or all but missed, in a tropical country means a great fall of the ground water; it means the pores of the ground filled with air to an unusual extent; and that is a state of any soil, if it be already full of fermenting organic matters, which breeds the most dangerous half-products of decomposition, or, in other words, the most poisonous miasmata. There needs always some such special determining thing to explain the epidemic outbursts of yellow fever; in the later history we shall see that the first great epidemic of it at Jamaica followed immediately upon the earthquake that destroyed Port Royal.

Illustrations of the ordinary principle that seasonal and periodic infection is dependent on the state of the ground water, are given at greater length in the chapters upon the later epidemics of plague in London. What applies in that respect to one soil-poison applies to another; and it will be shown in the proper place to apply with least ambiguity of all to Asiatic cholera, as well as to typhoid fever. Yellow fever is, in clinical characters, allied more to typhus than to typhoid; but it is a typhus of the soil, whereas the common and much less fatal typhus of ordinary domestic life in colder latitudes is an infection above ground--of the air, walls, floors and furnishings of rooms. There is the same relation between yellow fever and ordinary typhus in that respect, as between plague and ordinary typhus. When ordinary typhus has passed into a soil-poison, by aggravation of conditions, as in the experience of Arab encampments in North Africa, it has become at the same time bubonic fever, or, approximately plague proper. Yellow fever had its habitat essentially in the soil, from the peculiar circumstances (importation of the crude materials of it by ships engaged in the slave-trade); and plague in ordinary, or in European experience, had also its habitat in the soil, from circumstances which have been elsewhere given as its probable conditions.

It is perhaps because they are soil-poisons that those two diseases rank so high in their fatality and quickness of execution, in which respects they resemble Asiatic cholera, and differ from most other infections. Winthrop says that the first yellow fever killed in three days, and was therefore comparable to the plague. Ligon says that it was as killing a disease as the plague (of which both he and Winthrop would have had old experience at home), and he uses the stock phrase, that the living were hardly able to bury the dead. Winthrop says that 6000 died in Barbados: and one of his correspondents in the island, Vines, writes that “in our parish there were buried twenty in a week, and many weeks together fifteen or sixteen.” Dutertre says that nearly a third of the colonists of St Christopher died of it, and that it lingered there for eighteen months, and for twenty months in Guadeloupe, whither it was believed to have been brought in the ship ‘Le Bœuf.’

Barbados, St Christopher and Guadeloupe (with minor settlements on Martinique, Nevis, &c.) were the earliest English and French colonies in the Caribbean Sea. The Spaniards had occupied the Greater Antilles (Hispaniola or San Domingo, Cuba, Porto Rico and Jamaica) long before. Nothing particular is known of the health of these colonies except for the earlier years of the 16th century, when the native populations were ravaged by the great pox and the smallpox. But when Jamaica was seized from the Spaniards by the army of the Commonwealth in 1655 we begin to have authentic information, the state of health being perhaps the most prominent thing (although little noticed by historians) in the despatches. That incident in the expansion of England, relating as it does to the planting of what was for long our greatest island colony, and illustrating the risks of those early enterprises more fully than any other of the kind, may fitly come into this chapter and conclude it.

The Great Mortality in the occupying of Jamaica.

The Lord Protector’s design in the year 1654, to acquire one or more of the Spanish Antilles for an English colony, was more methodically conceived and more strenuously supported by the resources of the State than any previous attempt at colonization. It was attended with disasters on a proportionate scale, and at first with ignominy and failure which must have added seriously to the burden of Cromwell’s later years. The original design, in the admiral’s sealed orders, was to seize upon the old Spanish colony of Hispaniola or San Domingo[1184]. A fleet had been fitted out at Portsmouth, which sailed on 19th-21st December, 1654, carrying a land force of three thousand men. After a favourable voyage, the fleet of thirty sail, half of them victuallers, arrived at Barbados on February 1, where they lay until March 31, engaging settlers for the proposed new colony as well as campaigners, including a troop of cavalry, from the not very choice class of English subjects in that island. Some twenty Dutch ships were seized and made victuallers or transports. The expedition received a draft also from Nevis, and calling at St Christopher they took up 1300 more, making in all an addition of over 5000 colonial men, besides women and children, to their original force. On April 13 the fleet arrived off the harbour of St Domingo. It came out afterwards that the sight of so many English frigates and other ships had driven the townspeople to instantaneous flight, so that the capital would have fallen to the English without a blow. But no landing was attempted in the harbour, owing to difficulties about piloting, ignorance of the depth of water, and the like. It was decided to disembark the force in a bay at the mouth of a river some six or ten miles (two leagues) to the eastward, where Drake had landed in 1586. Most of the ships, however, were carried past the appointed place, and came to anchor in another bay thirty miles (ten leagues) eastwards from St Domingo; there a multitude of some 7000 soldiers and colonials, with their women and children, were landed on the beach with three days’ rations. Several of the ships landed their men at the original rendezvous two leagues from St Domingo, to the number of about 2000 in three regiments. The larger and farther-off force began to advance on St Domingo through dense woods; their presence in the country was soon known in all the plantations, whence the people fled to the capital for safety, so that the San Domingans were able to extemporise a considerable force for defence. The advance of the English was hindered by the stifling heat; distressed by thirst, they ate immoderately of oranges and other fruits, and in one way or another brought on dysentery. General Venables, in a despatch to Cromwell, says that by these causes they “were troubled with violent fluxes, hundreds of our men having dropped down by the way, some sick, others dead.” Meanwhile the nearer and smaller force of some 2000 had advanced on St Domingo; they got over one of the two leagues between them and the capital, but an old fort, manned for the occasion, barred the way, and the regiments fell back upon the river whence they had started, and rested there five days, the main body having meanwhile come up with them. One attempt after another was made to pass the half-way fort, but the Spaniards held their ground, and actually inflicted defeat in the open and a disgraceful rout upon the English, some of whose gallant officers threw their lives away in a vain attempt to lead their men. All the while this broken and demoralised mob was without proper supplies from the fleet, the officers of which were either unable to communicate with the land force or indifferent as to their duty. The state of health on the 25th of April, some ten or twelve days after landing, is thus described in a letter: “And the rains nightly pouring, with fogs and dews along the river, so soaked our bodies with flux, and none escaping that violence, that our freshment [by retreat to the river] proved a weakening instead of support.” Another letter of two days’ later date (April 27) says: “The rains increasing, our men weakening, all even to death fluxing, the seamen aboard neglecting,--that forced us to eat all our troop horses.” An attempt was made to restore discipline; an officer of high rank was cashiered for a coward, his sword having been broken over his head; a soldier was shot for desertion; some loose women in men’s clothes from Barbados were chastised, and a sharp look-out kept for other camp-followers of the kind. At length it was decided by Venables and his council that the attempt on San Domingo must be abandoned; probably it was seen that the Barbadian and St Christopher following was a fatal encumbrance at that stage, the more so as the rainy season was in progress. By the third of May the whole expedition was re-embarked, the Spaniards making no attempt to harass the operation. The number reshipped is said to have been seventeen hundred short of that which landed three weeks before: a good many had fallen fighting, others were slain by the Spaniards or negroes in the woods, and some appear to have died of the flux. The attempt on St Domingo having failed it was decided to make a descent on Jamaica, the least important of the Spanish Antilles. On the passage thither, Winslow, one of the three lay commissioners or “politicals” with the expedition, died “very suddenly of a fever.”

On May 10 the ships entered the bay of Caguya. Admiral Penn, being resolved not to repeat the mistake they had made at St Domingo, kept sail on the ‘Martin’ galley until she was beached under the small fort of the Passage, at the head of the bay, so as to cover the debarkation with his guns. However, the few Spaniards living at the shore fled, and the whole force, to the number of some 7000, was landed by midnight. Venables then returned to his ship for his usual repose, leaving the men under arms all night. Not until nine next day, by which hour the cool of the morning was lost, did the march begin to the capital, St Jago de la Vega (“St James of the Plain”), situated on an elevation by the river Cobre, in the midst of an alluvial plain with an amphitheatre of hills behind it, some six miles from the place of landing. About two in the afternoon they came before the town, and marched in that night: they found it empty, “nothing but bare walls, bedsteads, chairs and cowhides.” The town is said to have had some 1700 houses (too many for its population), two churches, two chapels, and an abbey; there all the Spaniards dwelt in ease and indolence, “having their slaves at their several small plantations, who constantly brought them store of provisions and fruits.” In this great island there were but about 3000 inhabitants, half of them, if not more, being slaves. There were no manufactures or native commodities, except a very little sugar and cocoa. The four ships that came thither in a year traded generally for hides and tallow only.

The Spanish colony had removed as much of their property as they could in their first flight, and shortly sent their head men with their governor, “an old decrepid seignior full of the French disease” carried by two bearers in a hammock, to treat for their re-entry into the town. Venables was afterwards much blamed for returning the politeness of the Spaniards; he received their presents of fresh provisions and fruit, accepted their promises of a steady supply for his men, and gave them the free run of their own houses for a week or so, by which time they are said to have carried off all their personal belongings of value. They objected to leave the island, saying that Jamaica was their home, and that they had no friends either in New Spain or in Old Spain. At length they left their old settlement, with the avowed purpose of embarking for Cuba from a bay on the same side to the west. There were divided counsels among the English as to the treatment of the Spaniards, and Colonel Bullard was sent towards the bay with a large force to intercept them in their flight. They had, however, given a false direction, and had in reality crossed the mountains northwards to the other side of the island, clearing the country as they went of cattle and produce of every kind. Some of them, including eight families of the upper class, at length found their way to Cuba, but the larger number remained on the north of the island, where they were overtaken by famine and pestilence before a few months, and nearly exterminated. Their negroes took to the mountains, and became the maroons, famous in the later history of Jamaica.

In pursuing the Spaniards, the English troops went roaming over the country, destroying the hogs and cattle in mere wantonness, and leaving their carcases to putrefy. In a short time the multitude of English at St Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) were on short rations, and before long “dogs and cats the best part of their diet.” The stores from the ships had been left on the beach exposed to the weather, and soon turned mouldy, the men refusing to carry them, in the absence of waggons, over the six miles between the shore and the head-quarters. Two or three victuallers besides had arrived from England within a week or two of the first landing, but, for all that, the expedition was starving. Many of the men were suffering from the flux which they had contracted in St Domingo. Venables, in a private letter of May 25, or a fortnight after landing, gives the number of the sick at near 3000; in a despatch to Cromwell, of June 4, he says:

“The want we have been in hitherto of bread (we not being able to be suddenly supplied therewith out of the fleet, or our stores, through want of waggons and other conveniences for the transportation thereof), joined with the drinking of water, hath already cast both officers and soldiers into such violent fluxes that they look more like dead men crept out of their graves than persons living; and this so generally that we have not above two colonels in health, three majors, some seven field officers in all; besides many have been already swept away with this disease. We lost Mr Winslow very suddenly, in our sailing towards this island, of a fever.”

On June 9 there was a general muster of the land forces, “whose number was found to be much diminished of late, not so much by any pestilential or violent disease, as for mere want of natural sustenance; which, in common reason, may seem strange that of all men soldiers should starve in a cook’s shop, as the saying is[1185].”

In a despatch of June 13, Venables says that “about 2000 are sick. Our men die daily, eating roots and fresh fish (when any food is got), without bread or very little.” He was himself ill, having had the flux for five weeks. Admiral Penn (father of the founder of Pennsylvania) had resolved to go home with two-thirds of the ships, thinking that his services were no longer needed, and having been advised that he could be of more service to Cromwell in England. He sailed on June 21, leaving the frigates and the Dutch prizes, under Goodson; and Venables followed in four days, with the surviving “political,” leaving the settlement in charge of Fortescue, who wrote home, “I am left to act without book.”

Meanwhile Cromwell had got ready reinforcements, sparing no trouble or expense at home. The expedition in aid left Plymouth on July 11, 1655, under the command of Sedgwick, and arrived at Barbados on August 26-31, after a fine passage; they left again on September 7, having trimmed their casks and taken in water with other refreshments. This force was in the best of health until after leaving Barbados. Sedgwick writes:

“I think never so many ships sailed together with less trouble, grief or danger than we did; only God did in a little visit us between this [Jamaica] and Barbados with some sickness, I apprehend caused by some distemper taken there [? yellow fever]; in which visitation, I think, in the whole fleet we lost between 20 and 30 seamen and soldiers.”

Finding the Spanish flag flying at San Domingo, they came on to Jamaica on October 1, and there found a calamitous state of things.

“For the army, I found them in as sad and deplorable and distracted condition as can be thought of: commanders, some left them, some dead, some sick, and some in indifferent health; the soldiery many dead, their carcases lying unburied in the highways and among bushes, to and again; many of them that were alive walked like ghosts or dead men, who, as I went through the town, lay groaning and crying out, Bread, for God’s sake!”

Sedgwick brought with him in four victuallers a thousand tons of provisions, which he secured in a store built for the occasion on the beach. Among his troops was Colonel Humphry’s regiment of 831 “lusty, healthful, gallant men, who encouraged the whole army.” But now we begin to see that the sickness at St Jago de la Vega had become infective or pestilential. The new-comers, healthy and well found as they were, began at once to sicken and to die. Of Humphry’s regiment, on November 5:

“There are at this day 50 of them dead, whereof two captains, a lieutenant, and two ensigns, the colonel himself very weak, the lieutenant-colonel at death’s door. Soldiers die daily, I believe 140 every week, and so have done ever since I came hither. It is strange to see lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the grave, snatched away in a moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and dropsies, a confluence of many diseases. We furnished the army now with 60 butts of Madeira wine, and to every regiment a butt of brandy, and a hogshead or two of sweet oil. Our soldiers have destroyed all sorts of fruits, and provisions and cattle. Nothing but ruin attends them wherever they go.” On January 24, 1656, Sedgwick again writes to Thurloe: “Did you but see the faces of this poor small army with us, how like skeletons they look, it would move pity; and when I consider the thousands laid in the dust in such a way as God hath visited, my heart mourns. Here hath come down to us from many of the Windward Islands divers people with intentions of sitting down with us, but at their coming hither, either fall sick and die, or are so affrighted and dismayed as that, although to their much impoverishing, yet will not be persuaded to stay with us.”

The men in the fleet were in better health; but among them also “some die and some are sick, in so much that we need a good recruit fully to man our ships as men-of-war.” On the same date (January 24, 1656) Admiral Goodson, writing to Thurloe, estimates the surviving officers and men at 2600, besides women and children; and in another despatch of that date from Sedgwick and Goodson jointly to Cromwell it is stated:

“The numbers of the army are much lessened since our last letters [November 5]; the whole not extending to 3000, many of them sick and weak, the best and soundest much abated of their strength and vigor, and God goes on every day to shorten our number. We die daily, not less than fifty every week, which is much considering our small numbers.”

As the season advanced the health of the troops on shore improved. A letter of March 12 says that the condition of the army is much mended; the soldiers are far more healthful, but much dejected and averse to the place. The fleet was in good spirits, and impatient for action; however, there was sickness also on board the ships; they had lost some fourscore men since the last despatch; and on April 30 the report is: “our seamen are indifferently well in health; yet some few are sick, and God is daily shortening them, so that our fleet will want a recruit of men.” Several of the frigates were wormeaten, and careened for repairs. Sickness is reported in the ships as late as October 10, 1656.

The sickness among all ranks had been so general and severe that it was hardly possible to find senior officers to undertake the government. Fortescue died in October, 1655, and was succeeded temporarily by D’Oyley and others, the sole government being at length given by Cromwell to Sedgwick, who died a few days after receiving his unwelcome commission. Brayne, transferred from Lochaber to Jamaica, also died, and it fell at length to D’Oyley, an effective person in whom all on the spot had confidence, to carry the colony through its troubles. Cromwell spared no effort at home. Immense quantities of provisions were shipped; planters, with their families, ‘servants’ and slaves, to the number of some 1700, were removed to Jamaica from Nevis, under Stokes, the governor of that island; the New Englanders were also encouraged to resort to the new colony; and a thousand or so of young men and marriageable young women were furnished from Ireland, together with pioneers, described as of a rougher kind, from Scotland. “And so at length,” says Carlyle, “a West-Indian interest did take root; and bears spices and poisons, and other produce, to this day.”

The sickness and mortality among the first English colonists of Jamaica gave the island a bad name, and must have added not a little to the confusion of ideas already existing as to the pestilent character of tropical climates[1186]. The older sugar-colonies, such as Barbados, which saw in Jamaica a formidable competitor, would appear to have encouraged the notion that climates varied much, that of Jamaica being bad. Soon after the Restoration, Charles II. was urged to give back Jamaica to Spain, and is said to have seriously entertained that purpose. Among the state papers is a document, supposed to have been written in November, 1660, which sets forth the natural advantages of Jamaica, together with two sets of reasons why England should retain it[1187]:

“The air here is more temperate than in any of the Caribee Islands, being more northerly and as sufferable hot as in many places.... The winds here constantly all day blow easterly, so coolly that it renders any labour sufferable at midday.... We find here is not such antipathy between the constitution of the English and the climate that sickness is not inevitable and contingent; for we have experimentally found that persons observing a good diet and using moderate exercise, enjoy a somewhat (?) measure of health. The said causes of the mortality of the Army at their first arrival were want of provisions, unwillingness to labour or exercise, and inexcusable discontent to be constrained to stay here. The diseases that strangers are most incident to are dropsies (occasioned often by evil diet and slothfulness), calentures (so frequently produced of surfeit), and fevers and agues, which, although very troublesome, are never mortal.... Cagway [Port Royal] is the place where all the merchants reside, being the most healthy place in the island; whither resort all the men that frequent the Indies, which makes houses so dear that an ordinary house in this town is worth £40 or £60 per annum. There are about 200 houses there, all built by the English. About 50 houses have been built by the English at the fort of the Passage [at the head of the harbour and the nearest point to Spanish Town]; of the houses in the old capital, St Jago de la Vega, about 800 are ruinous. As to the number of English in the island, the relics of the six regiments do muster 2200, and it is probable that the planters, merchants, sailors and others may be as many.”

The above statements about the healthiness of Jamaica in 1660 were repeated by Dr Trapham, in his work on the climate and diseases of the colony in 1678[1188]. This earliest medical writer is, indeed, more optimist than those who followed him, as to contagious or infective sickness; there was no smallpox, or very rarely, saving sometimes brought from Guinea by negroes; and “no depopulating plague that ere I have heard of,” saving a pestilential fever brought in by the victorious fleet returned from the signal Panama expedition in 1670. The experiences of yellow fever at Port Royal and Kingston were mostly, if not entirely, subsequent to these dates. But, as there had been yellow fever at Barbados, St Christopher, and Guadeloupe as early as 1647-48, it has been thought probable that the enormous mortality in Jamaica in 1655-56 was from the same endemic cause[1189] Undoubtedly the epidemic at Spanish Town became at length more than the dysentery which had been brought by some of the troops from San Domingo, or had been induced among others of them by bad food and water; it became a virulent specific infection, attacking the healthy and well-found reinforcements from England and the new arrivals from the Windward Islands, and destroying them quickly, “in three or four days.” Fevers are specially named, as well as fluxes and dropsies; and the question arises whether the pestilential fever was not yellow fever.

There is certainly nothing said of the striking and ghastly symptoms of the _vomito negro_. Moreover the sickness was nearly all at the town of St Jago de la Vega, six miles from the bay, situated on a rising of the plain with a declivity to the Cobre river, a place which was only exceptionally the seat of yellow fever in after-experience. Thus Judge Long, the able historian of Jamaica, says[1190]:

“After a series of hot, dry, and calm weather, eight days of continued rain succeeded in May, 1761. Spanish Town grew more sickly than ever I knew it, either before or since. From that period to August there were buried 29 white inhabitants, of whom 15 were soldiers. Their disorder had all the appearance of being the true yellow fever, and was supposed to have been communicated from some ship in Kingston harbour:”

--Kingston and Port Royal, or the ships moored near to them, being the common habitat of the disease, as in the corresponding circumstances at other West Indian islands.

But if the infective fever at Spanish Town in 1655-56 was almost certainly not yellow fever, it was probably allied to it in type. Dysentery had been almost universal; there was no care of the sick, and, so far as one hears, no medical attendance, no hospitals, no scavenging, no security taken to keep the water-supply pure--nothing, in short, of what is now called sanitation. Sedgwick, arriving on October 1, 1655, found even the dead unburied by the highways and among the bushes. The correlation between dysentery and pestilential fever is no new hypothesis: flux first and fever afterwards has been an experience both in sieges and in ordinary domestic famines on many occasions. The origin of the yellow fever at Barbados and elsewhere in 1647-8, which has been outlined in this chapter, is but a special application of the same principle, the dysenteric matters which represent the crude source of the infection having been brought in the bilges and ballast of slave-ships, thrown into the mud of almost tideless harbours, left to ferment amidst the heat and moisture of the shore, and so made into a soil-poison which, in due season, would give off emanations, fatal especially to new-comers. Port Royal and Kingston had full experience of that endemic influence in after-years, for the first time in 1692, after the earthquake and disturbance of soil which destroyed the former town and occasioned the building of the latter on the other side of the bay. By that time there had been slavers enough in the bay to bring all the ordure that the hypothesis requires. But, down to 1655, the Spaniards had traded only with hides and tallow in some four ships every year, and had the headquarters of their cultivation and stock-raising at the town in the plain some six miles from the shore. Four or five years after their expulsion we find the whole aspect of the port changed, according to the description already given. It does not appear that Cromwell looked forward to negro labour in his colony, although the Nevis planters brought their blacks with them. Charles II. had not been many months on the throne when James, earl of Marlborough, petitioned him to offer inducements to the Royal African Company to make Jamaica the staple for the sale of blacks, and to contract with that company for one hundred negroes to be delivered at the island[1191]. Negroes did begin from that time to arrive in Jamaica, although Port Royal was at first rather a general centre of commerce and piracy than a slave-port like Bridgetown, perhaps because the Windward Islands were strong enough to keep their privileges undivided. As late as 1670 the negro slaves in Jamaica were reckoned at no more than 2500, not counting the old Spanish maroons[1192]. On September 20 of that year, Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Jamaica, sent to Secretary Arlington certain proposals for the improvement of the colony, of which the following bears upon our subject[1193]:

“That they may have licence gratis or at moderate rates to trade for negroes in Africa. Did those honourable persons, which make that Royal [African] Company so glorious, but fall into considerations how much more it is his Majesty’s interest to increase the number of his subjects than bullion of gold or silver (which by law all nations may import), they would not only freely consent to this proposal for us but for the whole nation and foreigners also. Mankind is the principal, gold the accessory: increase the first considerably, and the other must follow. Barbados had never risen to its late perfection had it not been lawful for Dutch, Hamburghers, and our whole nation, and any other, to bring and sell their blacks or any other servants in the colony’s infancy.”

The harbours of Port Royal and Kingston did, in the event, become the chief resort of slave-ships in the British West Indies, slaves having been landed there up to ten thousand in a year throughout the 18th century. They came also to be among the chief seats of yellow fever, and continued so until a recent date. The subsequent progress of yellow fever there, and in other West Indian harbours as well as in the ports of some of the North American colonies, is not the least important of the subjects that fall to the second period of this history.

##