Chapter XI: Sicknesses of Voyages and Colonies (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Mortality in the occupying of Jamaica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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