Chapter VIII

.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, so that many died.’... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. _Our author_ (_l. c._ civ.), and Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks (those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases.”

[1166] _Calendar of State Papers._ Amer. & W. I., I. 57.

[1167] _Ibid._

[1168] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates.

[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre’s _Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François_, 4 vols., Paris, 1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654.

[1170] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., II. 529.

[1171] Ligon, _Hist. of Barbadoes_. London, 1657.

[1172] Winthrop’s _Journal_, II. 312.

[1173] Dutertre, _Hist. gen. des Antilles habitées par les François_. 4 vols. Paris, 1667-1671.

[1174] _Cal. State Papers_, Amer. and W. I., I. 301.

[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order.

[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., _Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the Climate of the West Indies_, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476.

[1177] Hughes, _The Natural History of Barbados_. London, 1750, p. 37.

[1178] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I., under the dates.

[1179] In Sir John Hawkins’ second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his “lean negroes,” which were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had been tedious, and the supply of water short “for so great a company of negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never suffereth His Elect to perish,” etc. Hakluyt, III. 501.

[1180] Clarkson, _History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade_. New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to Pitt:--

“Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ.” (p. 273.)

[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., _The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum_. London, 1729, p. 107.

[1182] Gillespie, _Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.’s Squadron on the Leeward Island Station in 1794-6_. Lond. 1800.

[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of _Treasure Island_.

[1184] Thurloe’s _State Papers_, III. IV. and V.; _Harl. Miscell._ III. 513; Long’s _History of Jamaica_, 3 vols. London, 1774; _Cal. S. P._, Amer. and W. I.

[1185] _Harl. Miscel._ _l. c._

[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, “we have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place.” Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (_History of Jamaica_, 1774, II. 221) states the case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables in 1655: “The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like calamitous situation.”

[1187] _MS. State Papers_, _Colonial_ (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57 (1660).

[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., _Discourse of the State of Health in Jamaica_. Lond. 1679.

[1189] Moseley, _op. cit._ p. 421, without reasons given; followed by Hirsch. _Geog. and Hist. Pathol._ (English transl.), I. 318.

[1190] _Hist. of Jamaica_, III. 615.

[1191] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I.

[1192] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, § 144.

[1193] _Ibid._ § 264, III.

[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning “The reprinting of these sad sheets.” Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company.

[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley’s edition of Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year_.

[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. Λοιμογραφια, _or, An experimental Relation of the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in the City of London_, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles’ in the Fields. London, 1666.

[1197] Reprinted in _A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in the year 1665_. London, 1721.

[1198] Λοιμολογια. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720.

[1199] Λοιμοτομια, _or, the Pest Anatomized_. By George Thomson, M.D. London, 1666.

[1200] London, 1667.

[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in 1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe’s book also) was one by Richard Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on _The Plague of Marseilles. Also Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician, who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno 1665._ London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five minutes’ research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed to be distinctive signs of plague--extraordinary inward heat, difficulty of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep, frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate, and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst’s third chapter is occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same. However, Defoe would have seen Bradley’s title-page, and might have inquired after the Sloane MS.

[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles’s-in-the-Fields.

[1203] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks.

[1204] _Ed. cit._ Chap. XIV. p. 131:--“Diseases which seem to be nearest like its (plague’s) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and malignant; for ’tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a pestilential fever.”

[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, _Hist. MSS. Commis._ X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: “There is a strange opinion here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be the infection.”

[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent’s book.

[1207] _Cal. State Papers._

[1208] _Ibid._

[1209] Evans, _l. c._

[1210] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, II. 1. 2.

[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of _Paradise Lost_, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the lines in the 9th book:

“As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms,”--

An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than--

“Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss, And all his people.”

Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, II. 708-11

“and like a comet burn’d, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.”

Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which startled the licenser;” those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the figure of the sun’s eclipse, which

“with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.”

[1212] _Brit. Mus. Addit. MS._ 4376 (8). “Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague,” from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665.

[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and re-interred. (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary’s Spital outside Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665.

[1214] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1665, p. 579.

[1215] _Reliquiae Hearnianae._ Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of Jan. 21, 1721).

[1216] _The City Remembrancer._ London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon Harvey’s notes).

[1217] Procopius (_De Bello Persico_, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: “ut vere quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec postea clarius patuerunt.” On this Gibbon remarks: “Philosophy must disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;” and most men will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity (and Boghurst’s testimony is a little weakened by his deference to Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds.

[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited by Heberden, _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. London, 1801. Woodall, writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603, 1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much in individuals and in seasons.

[1219] _Cal. State Papers._ _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 321.

[1220] _Cal. State Papers._ _Cal. Le Fleming MSS._ p. 37 (also for Cockermouth).

[1221] _Ibid._

[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in 1665.

[1223] _Cal. S. P._

[1224] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 115.

[1225] _The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666._ By William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions. Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall, William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in the _Book of Golden Deeds_.

[1226] Bacon (_Sylva Sylvarum_, Cent. X. § 912. Spedding II. 643) says: “The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths.”

[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Castle of Health_ (1541), says that “infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened, has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died.” (Cited by Brasbridge, _Poor Man’s Jewel_, 1578,