Chapter XI: Sicknesses of Voyages and Colonies (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The opening of obstructions.

2. The evacuating of offending humours.

3. The altering the property of the humours.

4. The comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

English English Portuguese
in health sick sick

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

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

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

Sickness in the Colonizing of Virginia and New England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by no means clear of it. The first voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620, carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614 and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in 1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the ‘Arbella,’ under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal:

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

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

West Indian Colonization: Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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