Chapter III: The Black Death (3)

With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo, where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen; of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has always been bubo-plague in the “cradle of the human race,” and concluding that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe? Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each separately. Let us take them in some sort of order.

Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hâyil and others, where the people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil, although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in passing the graveyard of Hâyil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks: “Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under the squalid gravel in his shirt.” Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of plague, he says: “We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!” He is led to the following general remarks: “The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth.” Again, of Bedouin burials in general: “The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow. They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground.”

Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages.

The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is
cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing
water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The
ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in
these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants
live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to
information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in
a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five
or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six
leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off
from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes
in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial
spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Faïk’s own household the disease
began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechiæ, headache and
burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population
of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45
women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries.

Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains village of Kumaon[309].

Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read:

“Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the
ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed
to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle
to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around
all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a
hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the
level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives.” In
that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some
three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying
huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their
lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened:
those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate.

The following is by Renny: “Fourteen died at a place in the forest
half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best
description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were
only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families,
the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had
to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst
season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague]
commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it
appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together
till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of
age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no
particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague
was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in
their houses.”

Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in the same district in 1876-77[310].

Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the
houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and
unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the
dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most
convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that
good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any
pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all
countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For,
by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave
more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid
in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the
place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the
floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to
handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of
the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the
active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of
opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any
cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of
families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are
sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all
that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation,
their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes
clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic
seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the
infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a
hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered
throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those
few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or
one portion of the village.

Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French Consular services[311].

The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much
mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it
frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines
inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher’s opinion, aggravates
the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of
this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier
and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the
traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is
raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the
exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal,
although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in
Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they
leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling
over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information
from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long,
low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so
hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The
approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen’s or
goose’s egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of
the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the
floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing
continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to
jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of
the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own
that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an
equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first
engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo,
appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the
neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not
connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague.

The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by Dr Lowry[312].

It occurred in the hot weather of June (85° Fahr. day, 76° Fahr.
night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on
the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a
population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every
house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of
their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of
them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for
the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: “anyone going to the bedside
of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had
to deal with.” The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve
miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China
Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in
certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no
particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal,
every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi.

One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated
with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In
the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking
and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged
from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead.
Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal.
“Here,” says Dr Macgowan, “was evidently a subsoil poison which
affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the
Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect
animals that live above ground[313].”

The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years 1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat.

Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague.

The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the most famous corn-lands of antiquity.

There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague
in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of
Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These
Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small
patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had
been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended
by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found
employment among the traders of Merdjé, and at the end of March, 1873,
had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring
hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by
the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may
be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of
the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene
of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case
being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The
other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis,
petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and
delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in
several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was
brought from the tents to the village of Merdjé, in which 270 were
attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known
attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with
208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The
sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the
houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the
courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the
houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the
village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and
the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village
and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of
attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at
least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime.

These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317].

It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and
human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also.
The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with
water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus,
or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the
gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the
observers says: “The only other concomitant affection worthy of note
is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body;
this, however, is only met with in a very few instances.” The other
authority says: “Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the
groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or
second relapse.” To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree
from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague
(Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is
more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan
since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the
damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and
then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally
complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: “In the Doab, as
in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very
rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but
this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318].” Again, General
Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the _Golos_ that twenty men
died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with
glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And
lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is
reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the
first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the
axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary
typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus
concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length
recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319].

One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the great plague of Justinian’s reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and 14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became familiar as far as Norway and Greenland.

But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas Lodge writes: “And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake their wonted places of aboade[320].” That is only one of many proofs that the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation, associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison, and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather than in the atmosphere of living-rooms.

* * * * *

The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty products of cadaveric decomposition.

It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour. No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms.

The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble, dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, _ab aevo, ab ovo_, is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living things.

The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian’s reign, may seem to have depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference. Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy. Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters, were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village churchyard.