Chapter XI: Sicknesses of Voyages and Colonies (1)

(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.