Sicknesses of Voyages and Colonies (Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.)

CHAPTER XI. SICKNESSES OF VOYAGES AND COLONIES. (Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.) THE sicknesses of the first voyages and foreign settlements come into the history of national maladies, both as concerning Britain on the sea and beyond sea, and as showing forth the disease-producing conditions of those early times. In the latter respect there is more to be learned from voyages and colonial experience than the records of domestic life at home are likely to inform us of otherwise than vaguely. The Englishman of the time carried his habits with him to sea and to foreign parts, where the circumstances were more trying and the consequences more obvious. This history divides itself at once into several branches. There are the disease-incidents of ocean voyages, irregular at first but becoming somewhat uniform after the East India Company's start in 1601, chief among them being scurvy. There are next the early discouragements from sickness, both on the voyage and after landing, in the planting of colonies in Virginia, New England and the West Indies, among which the troubles of Jamaica were on a sufficiently great scale to deserve minute study. Lastly, among the larger sections of this chapter, we have to notice the beginnings and circumstances of the terrible and long-enduring scourge of West Indian colonies — yellow fever. While we are mainly, in this record of the sicknesses of voyages and of new colonics, concerned Scurvy in the first longvoyages. 579 with British enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of other nations. The first accounts of Sea Scurvy. The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the sequel have been taken. In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing westwards from the last land ; their provisions had run short, and, " by reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger." Nineteen men, as well as a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some twenty-five or thirty others were sick, " so that there was in a manner none without some disease1." There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years after : and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness : it was only 1 Purchas, His Pilgrimes. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. 1. Book 11. p. 36. 37—2 580 Scurvy in Jacques Cartiers expedition, 1535. when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our subject ; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West passage in 1576, 1577 and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and 1587 (in which last he got to 730 N.) are as nearly as possible free from records of sickness. Jacques Cartier's second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to suffer from scurvy1. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their number from " pestilence." " The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet ; then did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour ; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, arms, and neck ; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole ; so that one could not help the other... There were already 8 dead and more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery." The body of one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of red water about it2; his liver was indifferent fair; but his lungs black and mortified... his milt toward 1 Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599, m. 225-6. 2 Pericarditis scorbutica — a condition which has been observed mostly in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis. Scurvy among the French in Canada. 581 the back was somewhat perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone. "From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four ; then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself ! for it was a singular remedy against that disease." The Indian's advice was "to take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the legs that is sick."... "It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used of it, by the grace of God recovered their health." In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, issued from La Rochelle1. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter : " In the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their lymmes : and there died about fiftie." The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the early voyages to Guinea for gold-dust2. Mr John Lok sailed on the second voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being the ' Trinitie,' 140 tons, the ' Bartholomew,' 90 tons, and the 'John Evangelist,' 140 tons. After trading some months on the African coast the ships sailed for home : 1 Hakluyt, in. 241. 2 Hakluyt, 11. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48. 582 Sickness in the English voyages to Gui/iea. " There died of our men at this last voyage about twenty and four, whereof many died at their return into the clime of the cold regions, as between the islands of Azores and England." The disease is not named ; but it is probable from what follows that it was scurvy. The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson's first, in October 1555, from Newport, Isle of Wight, in the 'Hart' and the 'Hind;' the death of only one man is mentioned; he died "in his sleep " on March 29 ; by the 7th May, the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in on the coast of Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the wild kernes, paying in gold-dust. In Towrson's second voyage there is no word of sickness ; but in his third voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The vessels ' Minion,' ' Christopher ' and ' Tiger ' left Plymouth on January 30, 1577. On the 8th of May, "all our cloth in the ' Minion ' being sold, I called the company together to know whether they would tarry the sale of the cloth taken in the prize at this place or no : they answered that in respect of the death of some of their men, and the present sickness of 20 more, they would not tarry, but repair to the other ships, of whom they .had heard nothing since April 27." Having at length bartered for gold until the natives would barter no longer, the three ships bore up for home. On July 24 the master of the 'Tiger' came aboard the 'Minion' and reported that " his men were so weak and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep her above the water." A muster held of all the three crews the same day showed that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3, there being only six men in the ' Tiger ' who could work, the gold and stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October 6, when off the coast of Portugal, the ' Christopher ' reported herself so weak that she was not able to keep the sea. The ' Minion ' promised to attend her into Vigo ; but a fair wind springing up, she signalled that she was off for home, whereupon the ' Christopher' followed. On October 16, a great south-westerly storm arose; the men in the ' Minion ' were not able, from weakness, to handle the sails, which were blown away : however, they made Hawkins in the slave-trade, 1562-67. 583 shift to reach the Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of the ' Christopher.' The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed by the three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to the West coast of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Cuba and on the Spanish Main \ Only a brief summary remains of the first voyage, in which nothing is said of sickness; in the second, the negroes, at least, appear to have suffered on the somewhat long passage across the tropical belt, especially from want of water ; and the third was so calamitous in various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it : " If all the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the martyrs." Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the business — the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five hundred. English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from poisoned arrows, it was thought, the wounded dying " in strange sort with their mouths shut some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole." It was on the return from the Gulf of Mexico, more than a year out from England, that the sickness on board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on November 16, 1568, after which, "growing near to the cold country, our men being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were left grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage our ship" (the 'Jesus' of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte Vedra, near Vigo, on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they got turned to their hurt : " our men with excess of fresh meat grew into miserable diseases and died a great part of them." Twelve fresh hands shipped at Vigo enabled the vessels to reach the nearest English haven at Mount's Bay in Cornwall. Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the Portuguese, who had now in the middle of the 16th century a regular trade to the Indies, established by Vasco de Gama's route round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps the most famous 1 Hakluyt, III. 501. 584 Sickness in Portuguese East Indiamen. of these records is that of the voyage of St Francis Xavier from Lisbon to Goa in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which he took passage carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to reinforce the garrison of Goa ; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle "rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described, and lived among the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of consolation and of peace1." After five months the ships arrived at Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering from fever. Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the Tagus. A more familiar narrative of the same voyage of the Portuguese ships a generation later is given by an English youth, Thomas Stevens, in a letter written home to his father, a citizen of London, shortly after arriving at Goa. Both in its generalities and in its particulars this excellent letter will serve to measure the prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier period of the East Indian trade by the Cape2. The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the ships, " besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of children, which in the seas bear out better than men ; and no marvel, when that many women also pass very well." After a passage along the Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the voyage the Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two routes according to the lateness of the season — either the route by the Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits and fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a time, and passing to the east of Madagascar3. In the latter case, "by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they are fain to cut 1 Sir James Stephen's Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, pop. ed. p. 125. 3 Hakluyt, 11. pt. 2, p. 99. 3 The famous figure in Paradise Lost (iv. 159) is taken from the route to India passing within Madagascar — a poetic colouring of dreary and painful realities : — As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest ; with such delay Well plcas'd they slack their course, and many a league Cheer'd with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles : Drake s voyage round the world, 1577-80. 585 them away, their legs swell, and all the body becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor foot, and so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues, and so die thereby. " And this way it was our chance to make ; and though we had more than one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-twenty, which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other times." The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling anywhere. The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis Drake's famous circumnavigation from November J5> 1 577, to September 26, 15801. Drake must have lost many of his men in those three years, but there is nothing in the narrative to show that they perished of disease. The expedition was by way of the Straits of Magellan, and was mainly given up to plundering the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set out for home loaded with treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape of Good Hope. It is not until the narrative brings us to a small island between Ternate and Celebes that we hear of sickness ; they graved the ship there and remained twenty-six days, during which the " sickly, weak and decayed " recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found on the island being " very good and restoring meat, whereof we had experience." But even Drake, with all his systematic care and resource, was destined in after years to have a share of the common sickly experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy than the Spaniard. Remarkable Epidemic in Drake's Fleet 1585-6. Drake's next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585, with six Queen's ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300 men. A large number of private adventurers had a money interest in the enterprise, which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in the West Indies and the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at the isthmus of Panama on 1 The World Encompassed &c, Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and Hakluyt, in. 740. 586 Drake at the Cape de Verde islands, 1585. its way to Spain. The fleet experienced one of the most remarkable epidemics in the whole history of sickness1. Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the island of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16. More than a thousand men were landed, and were marched up the steep and broken ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which stood in a narrow valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and the Atlantic open before it at some distance on the south. The place was surrounded by a wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass ordnance ; but no resistance was offered, and the English marched in to find the inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November, the town was quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which remained there for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent dates), taking such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and "trash" of the Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when no one had come to ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men to the village or town of St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the hope of finding the governor and the bishop ; but, finding no one, he marched his men back again the same evening. On November 26 the whole force was re-embarked, all the houses in the capital as well as in the country round were set fire to, the port of Playa, a few miles to the westward, was also burned, and on the same night the ships weighed anchor from the latter, and stood away to the south-west. They had filled their water-casks from a pool, near the seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through the capital and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of sickness during the occupation of St Jago ; there seems to have been some lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition), which Drake quickly remedied. The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to Dominica, a distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that quick sailing along the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the steady north-east trade wind behind them, the season the beginning of December and the climate the most delightful and most refreshing on the globe, the ships were visited suddenly with the fury of a deadly pestilential fever, of which the following is the account by a captain of the landforces on board : " We were not many days at sea but there began among our people such mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three hundred men. And 1 A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian voyage begun in the year 1585. Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier pari of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Crofles. Strange epidemic in the 'Desire] 1 593593 we were in as good case as when we came first out of England." There also they took on board 14,000 penguins, which they had dried on the rocks, mostly without salt ; and sailed northwards on December 22. With only 27 men surviving out of 76, they left the coast of Brazil at Cape Frio (near Rio de Janeiro), and then began their more singular experience of disease. " After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. This worm did mightily increase, and devour our victuals;" it devoured everything except iron, — clothes, boots, shirts, even the ship's timbers ! " In this woeful case, after we had passed the equinoctial toward the North, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous disease as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it began to swell, from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath, and then fell into their cods, and their cods and yardes did swell most grievously and most dreadfully to behold, so that they could neither stand, lie, nor goe. Whereupon our men grew mad with grief. Our captain [John Davis] with extreme anguish of his soul was in such woeful case that he desired only a speedy end, and though he were scarce able to speak for sorrow, yet he persuaded them to patience For all this, divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were incredible to write our misery as it was ; there was no man in perfect health but the captain, and one boy.... To be short, all our men died except sixteen [i.e., eleven died of the survivors after Cape Frio] of which there were but five able to move." Those five worked the ship into Berehaven (Bantry Bay) on June 11, 1593, and there ran her ashore. The remarkable epidemic on board the ' Desire,' among men living upon dried penguin infested with worms, was probably not scurvy, or at least not all scurvy : the dropsy and dyspnoea suggest one of the two forms of beri-beri, of a peculiarly severe type. The co-existence of worms in the dried food may lead one to think of a parasitic malady such as that caused by Anchylostoma duodenale, which has also an anasarcous or cedematous character. But the diagnosis of beri-beri appears to be far more likely. That epidemic, however we interpret it, must rank among the curiosities of the history. But, in the next that we come to, the sickness on board the ' Daintie,' Richard Hawkins master, on a voyage in 1593 through the Straits of Magellan, the disease is typical scurvy ; and the observations on sea-scurvy by Hawkins himself are among the best that we c. 38 594 Scurvy in Richard Hazvkinss voyage, 1593. have for the period, and, indeed, until long after the Elizabethan period1. The ' Daintie,' a nearly new ship of 300 to 400 tons, weighed anchor from Blackwall on April 8. 1593. She was deeply laden with merchandise for trade and accompanied by a victualler, of 100 tons, the ' Hawk.' It was not until June 12, that they got away from Plymouth. They put in at the Cape de Verde islands, about whose climate and health Hawkins makes some observations already quoted. Sailing thence they had come within three or four degrees of the Line, when scurvy broke out : " My company within a few days began to fall sick of a disease which seamen are wont to call the scurvie ; and seemeth to be a kind of dropsie, and raigneth most in this climate of any that I have heard or read of in the world, though [it is found] in all seas. It possesseth all those of which it takes hold with a loathsome sloathfulnesse, that even to eate they would be content to change with sleepe and rest, which is the most pernicious enemie in this sickness that is known. It bringeth with it a great desire to drink, and causeth a general swelling of all parts of the body, especially of the legs, and gums ; and many times the teeth fall out of the jaws without pain. The signs to know this disease in the beginning are divers, — by the swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man's finger, the pit remaining without filling up in a good space ; others show it with their laziness ; others complain of the crick of the back, etc., all which are for the most part certain tokens of the infection. The cause is thought to be the stomack's feebleness by change of air in intemperate climates, of diet in salt meats, boiled also in salt water, and corrupted sometimes ; the want of exercise, also, either in persons or elements, as in calms." Hawkins then recalls the experience of the Queen's fleet in 1590, at the Azores, the ships being in calm weather for six months : " in which voyage, towards the end thereof, many of every ship (saving the ' Nonpereli ' which was under my charge and had only one man sick in all the voyage) fell sick of this disease and began to die apace." Hawkins wrote out the account of his 1 593 voyage some time after, and did not print it until 1622 ; but it may be supposed that the views about scurvy therein expressed were the same 1 Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins's own narrative of the voyage, published a few months nficr the author's death in 1612). Sir Richard Hawkins on Scurvy.. 595 that he held and acted upon in his earlier life1. Thus his remarks upon the prevention and cure of scurvy, about to be given, may be taken to stand for the practical wisdom or sagacity of the Elizabethan period. The ship should be kept clean, vinegar should be sprinkled and tar burned. In hot latitudes salt meats should be shunned, and especially salt fish. Salt water should not be used to dress the meat, nor to wash shirts in ; nor should the men sleep in their wet clothes. The crews should be set to various exercises, and encouraged to various pastimes. At this point he seems to feel that he is a layman giving medical advice, and interpolates : "And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners. Doubtless it would be a work worthy of a worthy man, and most beneficial for our country, for in twenty years (since I have used the sea) I dare take upon me to give account of ten thousand men consumed with this disease." The learned man was forthcoming in due course, in the person of John Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company ; and we shall see what he made of it. Meanwhile, in default of professional guidance, we may hear Hawkins himself: " That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour oranges and lemons, and a water called Dr Stevens his water, of which I carried but little, and it took end quickly, but gave health to those that used it. The oyle of vitry [vitriol] is beneficial — two drops in a draught of water with a little sugar. But the principal of all is the air of the land ; for the sea is natural for fishes, and the land for men. And the oftener a man can have his people to land, not hindering his voyage, the better it is and the profitablest course he can take to refresh them." Hawkins, as well as his contemporaries, as we shall see, knew what lime-juice could do for scurvy, and knew also the limit of its powers ; it was useful, as he had himself found ; but 1 Mr J. K. Laughton {Diet, of National Biography. Art. " Hawkins, Sir Richard ") points out that Hawkins's narrative of the ' Daintie's ' voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in Drake's fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy. 38-2 596 Scurvy in Richard Hawkins's voyage, 1593. much else was needed to ward off scurvy. After experience showed clearly enough that some commanders with the same stores as others could carry their crews through a long voyage without scurvy; Hawkins himself, in the 'Nonpareil' in 1590, had only one man sick of it, while it was general in the fleet. In the voyage of 1593, for all his knowledge and resource, he appears to have found circumstances too hard for him. His crew showed their bad habits while the ship lay at Plymouth ; as in Lancaster's experience two years before, the evil habits of sailors told upon their constitutions, so that they became an easy prey to monotonous living at sea. Scurvy broke out when they were within three or four degrees of the Line : " The sickness was fervent, every day there died more or less." The ship's course was accordingly turned westward, although they were too far south to benefit by the north-east trade wind ; and in the end of October they came to the coast of Brazil at Santos, four months and a half out from Plymouth. At Santos they obtained 200 or 300 oranges and lemons, and a few hens ; there were so many men sick that there were not above three or four oranges or lemons to a share : " Coming aboard of our ships there was great joy amongst my company, and many with the sight of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart." It is the great and unknown virtue of that fruit, he says, to be a certain remedy for this infirmity. The rest of the voyage possesses no special interest for us. The scurvy had " wasted more than half of my people;" so that Hawkins took the crew and provisions out of the ' Hawk,' and burned her. He left the Brazilian coast on December 18, passed the Straits of Magellan, and after some filibustering on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts, was captured by a Spanish ship, and sent home to Spain to be ransomed. Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted " limej nicer ;" although he knew the virtues of anti-scorbutic acids, he had a correct apprehension of the need of cleanliness, dry clothing, exercise, amusements and discipline, and if he had understood the need of wind-sails for the ventilation of 'tweendecks, he would have had as scientific a grasp of the whole question as Blane had two centuries after. But in the end of Scurvy in an English coaster, 1600. 597 the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period, with abounding enterprise and national expansion, there was little sense of the personal need of breathing space, whether in ships or in houses. The number of souls on board, in proportion to a ship's tonnage, was twice or thrice as great as the Board of Trade now allows. It was not only in long voyages, or in the monotony of tropical calms, that scurvy was apt to invade a crew. The following experience, on our own shores, is credible enough: In 161 1 Purchas was shown a letter from Newfoundland, giving an account of a winter spent there, the writer taking credit to himself for the small amount of scurvy among the men under him : in a company of 39 persons, only four were wanting in the spring; but, by way of contrast, he recalls what happened at home in the year 16001 : " One Richard Fletcher, that is master pilot here, and a director of the fishing, reported unto me that he was one of the company, consisting of forty persons, that went in a drumbler of Ipswich called the ' Amitie,' to the north of Ireland about eleven years ago from London in the late Queen's service under the charge of one Captain Fleming, and continued there the space of two years. In which time two and thirty died of the scurvie, and that only eight of them returned home, whereof the said Richard Fletcher was one.... notwithstanding that there were to be had fresh victuals and many other helps, which their country [Newfoundland] as yet hath not, but in good time may have." We have not yet come to any deliverance of the faculty on the subject of scurvy; Hawkins appears to be giving merely his own experience and reflections. Beside these we may here place the contemporary observations and practice of the French laymen, which are expressly at variance on some points with medical teaching. Some time previous to 1609, Marc Lescarbot wrote an account of ' the voyage of M. de Monts into New France;' the expedition sailed from Havre in March, 1604. Their first winter in Canada is thus related2: In the meanwhile the cold and snows came upon them.. ..Many idle, sluggish companions drank snow-water, not willing to take the pains to cross the river. " Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those described unto us by James Ouartier in his relation, assailed us. For remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor sick creatures did 1 Purchas, part iv. p. 1877. 2 Ibid. p. 1623. 598 Lescarbot on the dietetics of Scurvy. languish, pining away by little and little for want of sweet meats, as milk or spoon meat for to sustain their stomachs, which could not receive the hard meats, by reason of let, proceeding from a rotten flesh which grew and overabounded within their mouths ; and when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in one night's space more abundantly than before.... There died of this sickness thirty-six ; and thirty-six or forty more that were stricken with it recovered themselves by the help of the Spring, as soon as the comfortable season appeared. But the deadly season for that sickness is the end of January, the months of February and March, wherein most commonly the sick do die, every one at his turn, according to the time when they have begun to be sick ; in such sort that he which began to be ill in February and March may escape, but he that shall overhaste himself, and betake him to his bed in December and January, he is in danger to die in February and March, or the beginning of April.. ..M. de Poutrincourt made a negro to be opened that died of that sickness in our voyage, who was found to have the inward parts very sound except the stomacke, that had wrinkles as though they were ulcerated." Then follow Lescarbot's views of the treatment and prevention of scurvy. After advising to avoid "cold" meats without juices, gross and corrupted, salted, " smoaky," musty, raw and of an evil scent, including dried fishes, he proceeds : " I would not, for all that, be so scrupulous as the physicians, which do put in the number of gross and melancholy meats, beeve's flesh, bear's, wild boar's and hog's flesh (they might as well add unto them beaver's flesh, which notwithstanding we have found very good), as they do amongst fishes the tons [tunnies], dolphins, and all those that carry lard ; among the birds the hemes, ducks and all other water-birds ; for, in being an over-curious observator of these things, one might fall into the danger of starving. They place yet among the meats that are to be shunned, bisket1, beans and pulse, the often using of milk, cheese, the gross and harsh wine and that which is too small, white wine, and the use of vinegar " — just like our own great masters in prohibitory dietetics. Lescarbot's advice agrees on the whole with that of Sir R. Hawkins : the men should be well shod and clothed, merriment should be encouraged, and again : " Good wine taken according to the necessity of nature, it is a soveraigne preservative for all sickness, and particularly for this. The young buds of herbs in the Spring time be also very soveraigne.... We have had some sick that have been (as it were) raised up from death to life, for having eaten twice or thrice of a coolice made of a cock." 1 Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his Surgeon's Alatc, published in 1617. Medicinal treatment of Scurvy. 599 In the voyage of Sir Thomas Smith to Baffin's Bay in 1616, the treatment of scurvy by vegetable juices is mentioned : " Next day, going ashore on a little island we found great abundance of scurvie grass, which we boiled in beer, and so drank thereof, using it also in sallet, with sorrel and orpen, which here groweth in abundance ; by means whereof, and the blessing of God, all our men within eight or nine days shall gain perfect health, and so continue till our arrival in England1." On the other hand, those who appear to have had the most correct intuition of the teaching of the schools were the Red Indians. Lescarbot says that, in the treatment of scurvy, "they use sweating often." Perhaps they had some dim notion of the doctrine of peccant humours : at all events they clung to the alterative practice until long after that date, with a tenacity second only to that of the European faculty itself. Scurvy in the East India Company's Ships : Professional Treatment. Until the end of the Tudor period, scurvy had been only an occasional incident of English voyages. But as soon as the regular trade to the East begins, we find it a common experience. The English voyages to the East Indies by the Cape route really began in 1 591, when Captain James Lancaster sailed first in command of ships belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers; but it was not until 1601 that he sailed again to the East Indies in command of the first ships of the East India Company, which had been formed the year before. The three ships in 1591, the 'Penelope,' 'Marchant Royal,' and 'Edward Bonaventure,' cleared from Plymouth on April io2. They crossed the Line on June 6, by which time two men were dead and divers sick. In the tropics so much rain fell that " we could not keep our men dry three hours together, which was an occasion of the infection among them, and their eating of salt victuals, with the lack of clothes to shift them." On this first voyage, 1 Purchas, m. 847. '2 The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies. Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, II. pt. 1, p. 102. 600 Scurvy in Lancaster's voyage to India, 1591. Lancaster began the practice which was generally followed when the East India trade in English ships became established ; before attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope, he refreshed his crews, who were weak and sick in all three ships, by a sojourn ashore at the Bay of Saldanha, a few leagues to the north of Table Bay. The voyage had already lasted more than three months from Plymouth, and about six weeks from the Line1. At a muster on August 1, in the Bay of Saldanha, Lancaster found that he had 198 men sound and whole, of whom he assigned 101 to the ' Penelope,' and 97 to the ' Edward Bonaventure,' sending home 50 more or less unfit men in the ' Royal Merchant.' Scurvy, he says, was the disease : " Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held out, but our mariners dropt away, which in my judgment, proceedeth of their evil diet at home." The voyage was continued to the East Indies, the next that we hear of the state of health being at Penang in the beginning of June 1592, or some fourteen months out. The men were then very sick and many fallen ; the sick were landed, and twenty-six died there, but not of scurvy, we may surmise. They had now left but thirty-three men and one boy, " of which not past twenty-two were found for labour and help." The two ships sailed for home from Point de Galle on December 8, 1592, and reached St Helena on April 3, 1593; one man was sick of the scurvy, and another had been suffering from the flux for nine months, but on the island both shortly recovered their perfect health. Instead of reaching England, the ships were carried to the West Indies, where, after an attempt to navigate them northwards, they were wrecked, and the small remnants of their crews dispersed. Lancaster's first voyage for the East India Company in 1601 2 was "with foure tall shippes, to wit, the Dragon, the Hector, the Ascension, and Susan, and a victualler called the Guest." The Company, founded in 1600, began with a capital of ^72,000, 1 The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course shaped : instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage'into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the season. - Purchas, 1. 147. First voyage for the East India Company, 1601. 60 1 which was laid out in the purchase and outfit of the ships, and in loading them with merchandise. The crews were as follow : Dragon, 600 tons, 202 men. Hector, 300 ,, 108 „ Ascension, 260 „ 82 „ Susan, „ 88 „ 480 Guest, 130 tons. Further, " in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one the other, if any of them should be taken away by death "■ — a sufficient indication of the risks of foreign trade. 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 300 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, 602 Scurvy usual in East Indiameii. 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 voyage1. 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, 1 Calendar oj Slate Papers, East Indies (under the respective dates). Continuance of Scurvy in East Indiamen. 609 needed, and the island itself furnished deer. On April 12, took general view of all people, as follows : English in health English sick Portuguese sick On shore 40 58 5 n the ' Charles ' 32 IO ,, 'Roebuck' 16 2 „ ' Bull ' 2 8 „ ' Reformation ' 23 H 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 scurvy1." 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 1 William Hedges' Diary. Hakluyt Society, 1887, 1. 24, 54. C. 39 610 Sickness in the Virginia ships, 1609. the North American colonies, begins with the expedition of 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers1. 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 $J° 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 loonies 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 wrecked2. 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 nth of August." They found the colony "all in health (for the most part)." There were fourscore living 20 miles from the J A Letter of M. Gabriel Ar char, in Purchas, pt. iv. p. 1733; Smith's Virginia, in Pinkerton, xnr. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt. iv. p. 1753. a Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare brings into the Tempest. Sickness among the Virginia settlers. 6 1 1 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 thither1. 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 1 8th 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 purses2." 1 Purchas, IV. p. 1762. 2 Cal. S. P. America and West Indies. 39—2 612 The emigration to New England. 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 1 10 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 16 14 and the other in 16191. 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 Winthrop2. 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." 1 Dermcr, in Purchas, iv. p. 1778: Belknap's American Biography ("Life of Gorges"), I. 355. - John Winthrop's yoiirnaf, p. 11. Epidemics in New England, 1633-1662. 613 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 it1." 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 Connecticut2. 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 October3. 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 1 3 weeks on her passage ; she had 200 passengers on board, — had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly4." 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, 1 Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123. 2 Ibid. II. 310. 3 Refs. in Noah Webster's Hist, of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases. Hartford, 1799, 1. 189, 191, 193. 4 Letter of Norris, in Hist, of S. Carolina, 1. 142. 6 14 Early history of the African slave-trade. and in the legislative history in connexion with the negro slavetrade 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 Early history of the African slave-trade. 615 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 15 18 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 Court1. 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 exterminated2. 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 1 Saco, History of African Slavery in the Nezv World (Spanish). Barcelona, 1879. 2 Ovieclo, in Purchas, III. 996 : — "Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo : — ' I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and second voyages of Columbus ; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began the disease to arrest some courtiers ; but in those beginnings it was only amongst baser persons of small authority ; and it was thought that they got it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, so that many died. '...But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. Our author {I.e. civ.), and Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear... The covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks (those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases." 616 The first negroes in English colonies. 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 I2531. 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 Christianity2." 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 ship-master 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 Trinidad3." 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 Curacoa 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 Curacoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready 1 Calendar of Stale Papers. Amer. & W. I., I. 57. - Ibid. :' Cal. S. J'. Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates. The French in the West Indies, 1625. 617 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, 163 1 ; 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 Indies1. 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 (" Waernard ") 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 1 The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre's Histoire generate des Antilles habities par les Francois, 4 vols., Paris, 1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654. 618 Mortality among French emigrants, 1627. 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 situees a l'entree 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 Mortality of tJie Guinea slave-trade. 625 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 shiptyphus. 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 remark1. 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 1 Cat. S. P. Amer. and W. I., under the dates. c. 40 626 Sickness and mortality among negro slaves. 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 voyage1. 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 grave2. There are, however, few medical 1 In Sir John Hawkins' second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his "lean negroes," which were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had been tedious, and the supply of water short "for so great a company of negroes Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great death of negroes and of themselves ; but the Almighty God, who never suffereth His Elect to perish," etc. Hakluyt, III. 501. 2 Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to Pitt : — ■ "Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the muster-rolls were contained, with great patience ; and when he had looked over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman inserted, his former abode or service, the lime of lu's entry, and what had become of him, either by death, discharge, or Smallpox and Flux in slave-ships. 627 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 profession1. " 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 diarrhoea, 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 eye-witness 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 diarrhoea ; and, according to the same writer, desertion, he expressed his surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the inquiry ; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ." (p. 273.) 1 T. Aubrey, M.D., The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man's Vade Mecum. London, 1729, p. 107. 40 — 2 628 Diet and regimen on board slave-ships. diarrhoea 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 Dysentery in negroes, Yellow Fever in white men. 629 in negroes. Two instances from the later history will serve to bring the problem concretely before us. In 181 5, 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 disease1." 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 1 Gillespie, Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.'s Squadron on the Leezvard Island Station in 1794-6: Lond. 1800. 630 Source of the Yellozv Fever at Bridgetown, 164.7. 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 Yellow Fever due to the ordure of slave-ships. 631 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 pestilential1. 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, 1 For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of Treasure Island. 632 Dry season at Bridgetown, 1647. 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 infee- Mortality from Yellow Fever in 1647-48. 633 tion 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 Bceuf.' 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 634 Expedition against St Domingo, 1654-55. 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 Domingo1. 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 1 Tliurloe's Stale Papers, III. IV. and v.; Harl. Miscell. in. 513; Long's Histor of Jamaica, 3 vols. London, 1774; Cat. S. P., Amcr. and W. I. Unhealthiness of Jamaica at length ceases. 641 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 climates1. The older sugarcolonies, such as Barbados, which saw in Jamaica a formidable competitor, would appear to have encouraged the notion that 1 Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, "we have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place." Hakluyt, III. 601. Long {History of J amaica, 1774, 11. 221) states the case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables in 1655 : " The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like calamitous situation." C. 41 642 The natural climate of Jamaica. 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 whyEngland should retain it1: " 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 £dp or ffoo 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 16782. 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 1 MS. State Papers, Colonial (Record Office), Vol. xiv. No. 57 (1660). 2 Thomas Trapham, M.D., Discourse of the State of Health in Jamaica. Lond. 1679. Character of the infection in 1655-56. 643 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 cause1. 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, says2 : "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 1 Moseley, op. cit. p. 421, without reasons given; followed by Hirsch. Geog. and Hist. Pathol. (English transl.), 1. 318. 2 Hist, of Jamaica, 11 1. 615. 41 — 2 644 Not Yellow Fever at Spanish Town, 1655. 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 watersupply 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 newcomers. 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 island1. Negroes did begin from that time to arrive in Jamaica, although Port Royal 1 Cat. S. P. Amer. and W. I. Yellow Fever later at Port Royal and Kingston. 645 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 maroons1. 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 subject2 : " 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. 1 Cat. S. P. Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, § 144. 2 Ibid. § 264, III. 704 Index. St Giles's-in-the-Fields, leper-hospital of 83, 88, Great Plague begins at 656 St Johnstone, see Perth St Kilda, boat-cold 274 St Olave's parish, plague of 1603 478, description of 479 St Paul's, churchyard, state of in 1582 333, the charnel-house of 334 St Sepulchre's parish, plague of 1563 in 306, churchyard of 334 Salvetti, on the plague of 1625 512, 519, describes a fast 513 Sandwich, plague in 1609 500, in 163537 528, in 1665 68r, 688 Sanitary Act, the first 324 Sayer, Dr H., treats plague at Oxford in 1645 559 Scavengers, at Ipswich 327, duties of at Exeter 327, in London 328 Scurvy, in voyages 579, 581-5, 594-6, 599-609, among the French in Canada 580, 597, in a coaster 597, lime-juice for 595, 601, 602-3, pericarditis in 580 note Scyllatius, Nicolas, on French pox at Barcelona in 1494 434 Searchers, at Shrewsbury in 1539 320 note, in London 319, 321, oath taken by in St Mary-le-Bow 322, at Colchester 689 note Seebohm, F. , on mortality of Black Death among clergy 134, ditto in manor of Winslow 136, on remote effects of Black Death 196 Shakespeare, John, fined 327 Shakespeare, Wm., his business interfered with by plague 495, dies in a sickly year 536. See also titles of plays. Shambles, a nuisance in London 216, 3^4. 325> 330, 487 Sheppey, plague 348 Sherborne, plague in 161 1 501, in 1665 681 Sherburn, leper-hospital at 94 Short, Dr Thomas, his epidemiological works 57 note, 404 Shrewsbury, privilege of lepers at 99, new civic class after Black Death 199, sweat of 1551 259, plague at in 1525 292, in 1536-7 301, 302, in 1575 340, in 1592-3 357, in 1604 499, in 1630 527, in 1650 564 Simpson, Sir James, on leprosy in Scotland 106 note, on syphilis in Scotland 418 Skeat, Dr, on the derivation of "measles" 451 note Skene, Dr Gilbert, on moles in plaguetime 173 note, on cadaveric cause of plague 336, his book on plague (1568) 363-5 "Slaedan, Irish name supposed of influenza 398 note Slave-ships, ordure of, 630 Slave-trade, early history of 614-17, mortality of 625-28 Smallpox, originally an Arabic subject 439, in the Elephant War 441, nature and affinities of 442-4, in medieval compends 446 and note, Gaddesden's alleged case 447-8, erroneously chronicled in 1366 455, in England 16th cent. 456-62, case of in 1561 459, in 17th cent. 463, Fracastori on 467, among American Indians (immunity of English) 6r3, in Hispaniola 615, type of in Africans 627, in slave-ships 625, 627, confused with great pox 436-7, 456, 464, 468 Somersetshire, Black Death in 117, spotted fever in 543 Southampton, plague in Venetian galley in 1519 292, plague in 1625 524, in 1665 681 Southwell Abbey, plague in 1471 230, in 1478 232 Spanish Main, sickness of English ships off 588, 591 Spanish Town, mortality at in 1655 638642 Sprat, Bishop, on "remedy" of the sweat 243 Stamford, plague in 1574 339, in 1580 348, in 1602-3 360, 49^, in 1641 545 YALE MEDICAL LIBRARY HISTORICAL LIBRARY Makch 12, 1892.] had resided some time at Ls hegan acutely with vomiting a1 I EX LIBRIS JOHN FARQUHAR FULTON REVIEWS. r 557 West Africa. His illness ining with a friend, who 3 evidence that both these ways of infection might occur to make the subject worthy of careful and thorough study. The balance of evidence appears to be in favour of the view that, although protection aftorded by an attack of influenza is of much less force than is the case in many other diseases, yet, cxteris paribus, a person who has bad an attack of influenza is less likely to take the disease than one who has not had it. Boric Acid in Foods.— Mr. (!. E. Cassal writes, with reference to the report of the meeting of the Society of Medical Officers of Health, which appeared in the British Medical Journal of March 5th, 1892, p. 504 : I did not say that I was "the first to demonstrate the presence of boric acid in butter and cream." I said that I believed I was the first public analyst to certify milk, butter, cream, and other foods containing borates as adulterated under the Acts, and that it was not possible for a public analyst to deal with the matter otherwise. It was in 1887 (not 1882) that Dr. Dudfield and I reported on the subject, but to the Kensington Vestry (misprinted Kennington). The opinions of Sir A. Clark, Sir H. Thompson, and Dr. Brunton, were not sought for by that body at that time, but in 1891. Dr. Brunton did not refer to the investigations of Forster. I referred to them in my paper. It was not Forster, but L. Hotter who found that boric acid and borates acted injuriously on plants. The amounts of boric acid stated by me to have been added to butter were from 0.05 to as much asO 5, and even 1 per cent. REVIEWS. A History of Epidemics in Beitain feom a.d. 664 to the Extinction of Plague. By Chaeles Cbeighton, M.A., M.D. Cambridge : The University Press. 1891. The present work is at once an important contribution to British epidemiology and a valuable instalment of that history of English medicine of which so small a part has been written. We hasten to express our appreciation of its worth. Being formed on the best models of modern original historical research, we are no longer treated to the well-worn anecdotes and untested statements of former compilers. Monastic records, Rolls series, MS. correspondence, parish registers, diaries, Acts of Parliament, and numerous other reliable sources of information have been searched to illustrate and strengthen, or else to' disprove, accepted theories and facts. And although some of its conclusions come into startling collision with many historical commonplaces, yet since each one is founded on more or less reliable evidence, it will not suffice to dismiss them with a mere expression of incredulity. An equally caref ul examination and comparison of original evidence will be necessary for their disproof ; and since few have either the necessary knowledge, time, or industry for such a labour, there is danger lest its novel conclusions, true and untrue, will in future be adopted unhesitatingly by less competent and conscientious historians, and so in their turn become the accepted commonplaces of future writers. From a critical standpoint, the work may be divided into three portions of varying authority and excellence : (a) an historical record of events of the very highest value. This may be unhesitatingly accepted with very little reserve, (b) Historical conclusions concerning matters of fact which, being in all cases supported by quoted evidence, demand a respectful, if critical, consideration, and are of a very interesting and stimulating character ; and (c) theories of the origin of epidemics, which, contradicting as they do the great triumph of modern epidemiological research — namely, bacteriological discoveries— will probably be unhesitatingly rejected, both now and still more in the future. It is impossible to discredit the positive discoveries of competent observers, carefully checked and rechecked, on the authority of historical evidence, fragmentary in character, compiled in remote ages, when neither the necessary instruments nor training for the accurate observation of obscure phenomena existed. As easy would it be to overturn the modern science of astronomy by records culled from the astrological archives of Nineveh, or to disprove a chemical equation of to-day out of some ancient alchemical treatise, as it is to upset modern bacteriology by the casual uncritical chronicles of the Middle Ages. Leaving this debatable ground for more pleasant and profitable regions, it may be said that much novel information will be found in the historical account of the Black Death. The author, for instance (p. 200) opposes to Hecker's statement that the Black Death was succeeded by a greater fecundity in women much interesting statistical and other information. The description of the symptoms of the epidemic on page 119 is most valuable and minute. The state- A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN Honbon: C. J. CLAY and SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AND H. K. LEWIS, 136, GOWER STREET, W.C. ffiamlmUcte: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. ILcipjig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. iJkfo ffiorls: MACMILLAN AND CO. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES. PAGE The plague of 664-684 described by Beda, and its probable relation to the plague of Justinian's reign, 5424 Other medieval epidemics not from famine 9 Chronology of Famine Sicknesses, with full accounts of those of 1 194-7, 1257-9, and 1315-16 15 Few traces of epidemics of Ergotism ; reason of England's immunity from ignis sacer 52 Generalities on medieval famines in England . . . . . 65 CHAPTER II. LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. Medieval meanings of lepra . 69 Biblical associations of Leprosy 79 Medieval religious sentiment towards lepers . . . . . 81 Leprosy-prevalence judged by the leper-houses, — their number in England, special destination, and duration 86 Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland ...... 99 The prejudice against lepers . . . . . . . 100 Laws against lepers . . . . . . . . . . 106 Things favouring Leprosy in the manner of life — Modern analogy of Pellagra 107 CHAPTER III. THE BLACK DEATH OF 1 348-9. Arrival of the Black Death, and progress through Britain, with contemporary English and Irish notices of the symptoms . . 114 Inquiry into the extent of the mortality 123 Antecedents of the Black Death in the East — Overland China trade — Favouring conditions in China 142 The Theory of Bubo-Plague . . . . . . . . 156 Illustrations from modern times 163 Summary of causes, and of European favouring conditions . . 173 Contents. CHAPTER IV. ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO 1485. Efforts to renew the war with France Direct social and economic consequences in town and country More lasting effects on farming, industries and population Epidemics following the Black Death . Medieval English MSS. on Plague The 14th century chronology continued The public health in the 15th century Chronology of Plagues, 15th century . Plague &c. in Scotland and Ireland, 1 349-1475 CHAPTER V. THE SWEATING SICKNESS, 1485-1551 The First invasion of the Sweat in 1485 The Second outbreak in 1508 The Third Sweat in 15 17 The Fourth Sweat in 1528 . Extension of the Fourth Sweat to the Continent in 15 The Fifth Sweat in 155 1 Antecedents of the English Sweat Endemic Sweat of Normandy Theory of the English Sweat Extinction of the Sweat in England CHAPTER VI. PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. Chronology of the outbreaks of Plague in London, provincial towns, and the country generally, from 1485 to 1556 The London Plague of 1563 .... Preventive practice in Plague-time under the Tudors Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times The disposal of the dead Chronology of Plague 1 564-1 592 — Vital statistics of London 15781583 The London Plague of 1 592-1 593 . Plague in the Provinces, 1 592-1 598 Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603 — Skene on the Plague (1568) Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period .... Contents. xi CHAPTER VII. GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. PAGE 375 376 383 387 397 The Black Assizes of Cambridge, 1522 .... Oxford Black Assizes, 1577 . ...... Exeter Black Assizes, 1586 Increase of Pauperism, Vagrancy, &c. in the Tudor period Influenzas and other "strange fevers" and fluxes, 1 540-1 597 CHAPTER VIII. THE FRENCH POX. Meagreness of English records 414 Evidence of its invasion of Scotland and England, in 1497 and subsequent years . 417 English writings on the Pox in the Elizabethan period, with some notices for the Stuart period 423 The circumstances of the great European outbreak in 1494 — Invasion of Italy by Charles VIII 429 CHAPTER IX. SMALLPOX AND MEASLES. First accounts of Smallpox in Arabic writings — Nature of the disease 439 European Smallpox in the Middle Ages .' . . . . . 445 Measles in medieval writings — Origin of the names "measles" and "pocks" 448 First English notices of Smallpox in the Tudor period . . . 456 Great increase of Smallpox in the Stuart period .... 463 Smallpox in Continental writings of the 16th century . . . . 467 CHAPTER X. PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION. Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart periods . . . . 471 The London Plague of 1603 . . . . . . . . 474 Annual Plague in London after 1603 493 Plague in the Provinces, Ireland and Scotland, in 1603 and following years . 496 Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625 ..... 504 xii Contents. PAGE The London Plague of 1625 507 Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years .... 520 The London Plague of 1636 529 Fever in London and in England generally to 1643 .... 532 War Typhus in Oxfordshire &c. and at Tiverton, 1643-44 . . 547 Plague in the Provinces, Scotland and Ireland during the Civil Wars 555 Fever in England 1651-52 ......... 566 The Influenzas or Fevers of 1657-59 . . . . . . . 568 CHAPTER XI. SICKNESSES OF EARLY VOYAGES AND COLONIES. Scurvy in the early voyages, north and south . . . . . 579 The remarkable epidemic of Fever in Drake's expedition of 1585-6 to the Spanish Main . . . . . . . . . 585 Other instances of ship-fevers, flux, scurvy, &c. . . . . . 590 Scurvy &c. in the East India Company's ships : the treatment . . 599 Sickness of Virginian and New England voyages and colonies . . 609 Early West Indian epidemics, including the first of Yellow Fever — The Slave Trade 613 The epidemic of 1655-6 at the first planting of Jamaica . . . 634 CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND. Literature of the Great Plague 646 Antecedents, beginnings and progress of the London Plague of 1665 651 Mortality and incidents of the Great Plague — Characters of the disease 660 Plague near London and in the Provinces, 1665-66 .... 679 The Plague at Eyam 1665-66 682 The Plague at Colchester, 1665-66, and the last of Plague in England 688 ERRATA. At p. 28 line 4, for " for " read " at." At p. 126 line 2 for " 1351 " read " 1350;" same change at p. 130, lines 6 and 9. At p. 185 note 1 read " Ochenkowski." At p. 264 line 18, and at p. 554 line 11 from bottom, read " pathognomonicum" At p. 401, note 3 for " 1658" read " 1558." At p. 420, line 17, for " Henry IV.," read "Henry V." At p. 474, line 4, for "more" read "less." At p. 649 line 22 omit " I lancock."