being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the storm “some
lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their yards; the seas
over-raking our ships, much of our provision was spoiled, our fleet
separated, and our men sick, and many died; and in this miserable state we
arrived at Virginia.” The ‘Blessing,’ on board which was Gabriel Archer,
the principal narrator of events, seems to have fared better than the
rest: “The ‘Unity’ was sore distressed when she came up with us; for, of
seventy landmen [emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen
were down, but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we
relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King’s River [James
River] haply the 11th of August.” They found the colony “all in health
(for the most part).” There were fourscore living 20 miles from the Fort,
who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks’ space. “After our four ships
had been in harbour a few days, came in the vice-admiral, having cut her
mainmast overboard, and had many of her men very sick and weak.” This was
the ship that was said to have the plague in her. The admiral and his
ship’s company, wrecked on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the
whole number of 150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only
60 remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the other
ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but probably the
most of it after landing; Jamestown “is in a marish ground, low, flat to
the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town, but what we
drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river
oozing into it, from whence I verily believe the chief causes have
proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our
people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues.” Lord De
La Warre, one of the early governors, had a succession of illnesses--hot
and violent ague, followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a
month, “then the flux surprised me and kept me many days,” then the cramp,
with strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy--which
last, however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said to
have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western Islands, and by
the voyage thither[1156].
Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was really due
to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates; but a great
deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the “tainted air” of
“foreign climes” was mere confusion of ideas. A more correct view of
events was that of the Governor and Council of Virginia, in a letter of
January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in London:
“The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly
caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with
musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained
of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four
butts of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies
and empty their purses[1157].”
The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down great
numbers “since their last.” According to Purchas, the emigration to
Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the years 1619, 1620
and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42 ships. Overcrowding, we may
be sure, was the rule. We shall find particular evidence of it in speaking
of West Indian colonization in the sequel; and for the present, it may
suffice to quote a document of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers
for New England per ‘Confidence’ of 200 tons.
If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler
followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who
were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same
beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay
settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and
failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by
no means clear of it. The first voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620,
carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a
place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along
the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had
to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause
also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast
from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614
and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in
1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic
particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the
‘Arbella,’ under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal:
“This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and
slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly and
noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the
health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took order, and
appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room clean for three
days, and then four others should succeed them, and so forth on.”
Nothing more is said of the health on board the ‘Arbella.’ The ‘Mayflower’
and ‘Whale’ had their passengers all in health, but most of their cattle
and horses dead. The ‘Success’ lost -- goats, and many of her passengers
were near starved. The ‘Talbot’ lost fourteen passengers. The colony had
various experiences of sickness in due course. In 1633, smallpox proved
fatal to whole settlements of Indians: “the English came daily and
ministered to them; and yet few, only two families, took any infection by
it[1160].” In 1646 an epidemic of influenza went among the Indians,
English, French and Dutch, “not a family, nor but few persons, escaping
it;” few died, not above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at
Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was appointed by
the government of Connecticut, one reason among others being “the
mortality which had been among the people of Massachusetts.” In 1655 there
was another influenza, in 1658 “great sickness and mortality throughout
New England,” in 1659 “cynanche trachealis,” croup perhaps, and in 1662
again general sickness, which, along with drought, called for a day of
thanksgiving on their cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose
to follow the epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the
subject, the following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699,
will suffice to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed
long after the first voyages: “Arrived the ‘Britannia’ from Liverpool,
which had been 13 weeks on her passage; she had 200 passengers on
board,--had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly[1163].”
West Indian Colonization: Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade.
The other field of English colonial enterprise that concerns us is the
West Indies. The West Indian colonies of Britain play a great part in the
commercial history, in the naval history, and in the legislative history
in connexion with the negro slave-trade and the institution of negro
slavery. From the very first they play a great part, also, in the history
of epidemic sickness; they and the Spanish, French and other colonies
there were the peculiar home of yellow fever for two centuries, having
shared that unenviable distinction, after a generation or two, with
certain ports of the North American continent. The larger part of the
history of yellow-fever epidemics falls outside the period to which I here
limit myself. But the beginnings fall within it; and as the beginnings
raise the whole question of causation, this part of the subject resolves
itself into a somewhat comprehensive discussion of the circumstances of
yellow fever as illustrated by the first English colonizations in the
Caribbean Sea, and the tradings connected therewith.
By far the most important disease-producing conditions in the West Indies
arose out of the Guinea slave-trade. But, so that we may set down to that
no more than it deserves, we shall have to review also the earlier
experiences of English and French emigrants, both on the voyage and in
their settlements in Barbados and St Christopher, and, at greatest length,
the disastrous first occupation of Jamaica in 1655 by the army of the
Commonwealth. It will be convenient to begin the history, in which there
is so much to disentangle, with a few facts about the negro labour-traffic
to the New World previous to the time when the demands of the
sugar-plantations caused it to be established on a great scale.
African negroes were brought first to the West Indies by the Spaniards to
work in the mines of Hispaniola. They are heard of as early as 1501, and
are much in evidence after that date. The Christian conscience appears to
have been at first tender. It was the high purpose of Isabella of Spain to
convert the Indies to the Christian faith; and the cruelties of the negro
importation and of the forced labour in the mines were obviously
inconsistent with the humanitarian teaching of the Gospels. The
remonstrances of missionaries were listened to at the Spanish Court, and
licences to trade in negroes were either granted under strict conditions
or withheld altogether. However, there were rapacious pro-consuls to deal
with as well as monarchs at home, and cargoes of slaves found their way
to Cuba, to Hispaniola (St Domingo), and at length to the Spanish Main.
Each importation as late as 1518 was still regulated by special licence;
but soon after that date a powerful minister sold the privilege to the
Genoese, so that it passed somewhat beyond control of the Spanish
Court[1164]. Connected with these importations in the first quarter of the
16th century, were the disastrous epidemics of two diseases with somewhat
similar names and inextricably confused in the records--the great pox and
the small pox; it is not easy to say which did the most harm among the
native population of the islands and mainland occupied by Spain; but it is
said that by disease of one kind or another Mexicans and Caribs on the
main, in Hispaniola, and in Cuba, came near to being exterminated[1165].
The first English share in the negro traffic over sea fell to John Hawkins
and partners, who had not even the excuse of an open market for their
wares in the Spanish colonies, and had sometimes to dispose of their
negroes by stealth. It would appear that it was still in part for the
mines that African negroes were in request. In Richard Hawkins’ account of
his voyage to the Pacific in 1593, he mentions that he captured a
Portuguese ship of 100 tons shortly after leaving the coast of Brazil;
she was bound for Angola to load negroes to be carried to and sold in the
River Plate: “It is a trade of great profit and much used. The negroes are
carried to work in the mines of Potosi.”
It is not until a generation after that we hear of the English as
slave-owners. On February 16, 1624, there were 22 negroes on the English
settlements in Virginia, the whites numbering 1253[1166]. In somewhat
greater numbers, negroes are next heard of in English possession in the
Bahamas; but, from the correspondence between the Company of Providence
Island in London and their agents in the colonies, it would appear that
the policy of using forced labour was by no means admitted by all, or free
from difficulties. Thus in 1635 the Company condemned as indiscreet and
injurious Mr Rushworth’s behaviour concerning the negroes who ran away,
“arising, as it seems, from a groundless opinion [of Rushworth] that
Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude
during their strangeness from Christianity[1167].”
Whatever negroes the English colonists possessed at this time they got
either by capture or purchase from Dutch and other foreign traders. Thus,
in the instructions to a shipmaster sailing from London, dated March 19,
1636, captured negroes were to be conveyed to the Somers Islands, those
who can dive for pearls to be employed at Providence. Again, the
instructions to the captain of the ‘Mary Hope,’ bound for the West Indies,
January 20, 1637, refer to the distribution of negroes “if a prize be
taken.” And, on June 7, 1643, the earl of Warwick instructs the captain of
the ‘Elias,’ 400 tons, that captured negroes are “to be left at my island
of Trinidad[1168].” The negro carrying-trade was in those years mostly in
the hands of the Dutch, who not only stocked their own colony of Surinam
on the mainland but used their small island of Curaçoa as a slave-depot
for the supply of colonies belonging to other nations. Thus the governor
of Antigua, which had then no negroes, says in a despatch of about the
year 1670: “At Curaçoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to
the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready
pieces-of-eight carried thence great store. They intend to settle a mart
for negroes at Tortola to engross the trade of Porto Rico.”
The direct share of England in the negro carrying-trade arose out of the
monopoly of the Guinea Company. The history of English interests in Guinea
and “Binney” need not detain us. When the first patent for sole trade was
granted in 1624, it was felt to be a grievance, as “many had been there
almost for fifty years since.” The charter was renewed on November 22,
1631; but in course of time, some who had been ousted from their original
share in the monopoly traded on their own account, the rivalries at home
being aggravated by conflicts with Swedes (in 1653) and Dutch at the
factories on the coast. The trade was ostensibly for gold dust and ivory,
but live freight soon found a place in English bottoms as well as in
Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others. We may now
return to our proper subject--the state of health in the first English and
French plantations in the West Indies.
The English and French arrived in the West Indies almost at the same
moment. Their experiences were probably not very different, but it happens
that it is of the French emigrants that we have particulars, which it is
important to introduce here.
In the year 1625, a Norman adventurer of good family, D’Enambuc, sailed
from Dieppe in a brigantine armed with four pieces and manned with 35 or
40 men, on a roving cruise to the West Indies[1169]. Having been battered
by a Spanish galleon at the Kaymans, D’Enambuc made the island of St
Christopher. He found it occupied by the native Caribs and a few stranded
Frenchmen, who were on good terms with the natives. Shortly after, an
English captain (“Waërnard”) appears upon the scene, who joined D’Enambuc
in the alleged murdering and poisoning of the natives and the plundering
of the island. Loaded with his Carib spoils and a quantity of tobacco,
D’Enambuc set sail for France, and having sold his tobacco and other
things in Normandy, entered Paris with a fine equipage, thus giving
evidence to all men of the fortunes that awaited them in the Indies. In a
short time he had an audience of Richelieu, and on the 31st October 1626
the charter was signed of the Compagnie des Isles, granting a monopoly of
trade with “les isles situées à l’entreé du Perou”--namely St Christopher
and Barbados. The Company raised 45,000 livres, of which capital Richelieu
held 10,000 livres in his own name. The money was spent in fitting out and
furnishing with stores three ships--the ‘Catholique’ at Havre, a craft of
250 tons, and the ‘Cardinal’ and ‘Victoire’ at St Malo, two much smaller
vessels. Numerous poor peasants and artisans from Brittany and Normandy
were induced to go out as colonists, the ‘Catholique’ (250 tons) carrying
322 souls, the ‘Cardinal’ 70, and the ‘Victoire’ 140. The two last sailed
from St Malo on February 24, 1627 under the command of Du Rossey. The
passage was long, the provisions both bad and insufficient, and the
mortality terrible. When the ‘Cardinal’ arrived at the Pointe de Sable of
St Christopher on May 8, only 16 of her 70 souls remained alive, and these
were sick. In the other ships, also, “most of the people died on the
passage out.”
The English experience can hardly have been so bad as that. When the
French colonists landed, they found four hundred Englishmen settled near
the chief anchorage, hale and strong and well stocked with provisions,
having lately come out under Lord Carlisle’s patent. Cordial to each other
at first, the two nationalities soon fell out. The French had rather the
worst of it, having lost many of their number by sickness, while the
English kept their health. Help came to the former from home, and a
victory over the English is claimed for them. But they had also a Spanish
fleet to reckon with, and eventually the French colony fell into disorder
and escaped to Antigua, while its leader, Du Rossey, went home to France
and was thrown into the Bastille by Richelieu, one of the largest
shareholders. The refugees to Antigua soon returned to St Christopher,
again suffered from famine, and had the mortification of seeing all the
profits of their monopoly swallowed up by unlicensed Dutch traders. In
1635 they obtained a new charter; at the same time a fortunate capture of
a ship-load of negroes from the Spaniards gave them a supply of labour so
that “the island began to change its face.” English usurpation was kept
within limits, and the French colony grew daily, by addition of European
settlers and of “Moorish slaves whom the French and Dutch ships go to buy
in Guinea, or capture from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil.” The
French on St Christopher were now strong enough to send branch colonies to
Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635). It was then the turn of the English to
have disastrous sickness among their immigrants. Sir Thomas Warner, who
had planted the English colonies in Barbados and St Christopher, and was
now governor of the latter, went to England in 1636 to bring over new
settlers. On his arrival out on 10 September, he wrote home that one of
his two ships, the ‘Plough,’ was given up for lost, and that in his own
ship there had been “great sickness and mortality, not 20 out of 200
having escaped and 40 having died, some near to him in blood and many of
especial quality and use.”
Meanwhile Barbados had been the chief scene of English enterprise, from a
date (1624-26) almost the same as that of the joint occupation of St
Christopher by French and English. Its earliest annals contain little else
than the accounts of rivalries under Lord Carlisle’s patent and other
patents. So far as regards sickness, the annals were probably uneventful.
In 1643 the island had plantations stocked with no fewer than 6400 negro
slaves, and its prosperity advanced so steadily, that by the year 1666,
the slaves in the island numbered some 50,000: “The buildings in 1643 were
mean; but in 1666 [when Bridgetown was burned], plate, jewels and
household stuff were estimated at £500,000[1170].” It is a date
intermediate between those two that directly concerns us--the year 1647.
In that year, Ligon, the historian of the colony, arrived out from England
about the beginning of September[1171]. The ship in which he came to
Barbados was consigned thence to Cutchew, on the African coast, to trade
for negroes. On their arrival they found twenty-two good ships at anchor
in Carlisle Bay (Bridgetown), a brisk trade going on, and plantations
visible all along the shore. A plantation of 500 acres had 96 negroes and
28 Christians; some plantations contained 10,000 acres. The population was
difficult to estimate, so many ships were arriving with passengers daily;
and Ligon’s estimate of 50,000, “besides negroes,” is doubtless too much.
About one hundred sail visit the island every year; they bring “servants”
and negro slaves, both men and women. The servants are bound for five
years, and are worse treated than the negroes. The negroes are more than
double the number of the Christians; they come from different parts of
Africa--Bonny, Cutchew, Angola and Gambia--and do not understand each
other’s language. They are bought out of the ship naked, being chosen as
horses are in a market, the strongest, youthfullest and most beautiful
yielding the highest price (man £30, woman £25 to £27, children at easier
rates).
We have to note, also, Ligon’s account of the colony’s chief
harbour--Bridgetown. The whole of Carlisle Bay is environed by high
ground. Bridgetown is so-called “for that a long bridge was made at first
over a little nook of the sea, which was rather a bog than sea.” The
stream which discharges there into the bay is like a lake for want of
outfall. The spring tides fill it, but during the neap tides the salt
water is kept stagnant behind the sea-banks, making a small lagoon. The
spring tides seldom rise above four or five feet, but high enough to flow
over the low ground in front of the houses, making the flat a kind of bog,
which vents out a loathsome savour.
Ligon landed at Bridgetown about the beginning of September, 1647, in time
to witness the ravages of a deadly epidemic:
“Yet, notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the inhabitants of
the island, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with the
plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired after
our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead. Whether it
was brought thither by shipping, (for in long voyages diseases grow at
sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove
contagious), or by the distemper of the people of the island”--he
leaves uncertain. For one woman that died, there were ten men. The
ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were, for the most part, infected with
this disease.
What was the disease? How came it there? What sort of origin did its
characters, symptoms, or type suggest? On these questions we have some
light thrown by other writings besides Ligon’s, relating to the same
epidemic.
John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, writes in his journal, under
the year 1647[1172]:
“It pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other
islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the
commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as
sugar, cotton, tobacco and indigo, were a good help to discharge our
engagements in England. And this summer there was so great a drouth as
their potatoes and corn, etc. were burnt up; and divers London ships
which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had
not supplied them, they could not have returned home.... After the
great dearth of victuals in these islands followed presently a great
mortality (whether it were the plague, or pestilent fever, it killed
in three days), that in Barbados there died six thousand, and in
Christophers, of English and French, near as many, and in other
islands proportionable.”
The mention of the French on St Christopher brings us to the third source
of information, the Jesuit father Dutertre, who was an eye-witness[1173]:
“During this same year, 1648, the plague (la peste), hitherto unknown
in the islands since they were inhabited by the French, was brought
thither by certain ships. It began in St Christopher, and in the
eighteen months that it lasted, it carried off nearly one-third of the
inhabitants.” This plague, or peste, was marked by violent pain in the
head, general debility of all the muscles, and continual vomiting. It
was contagious. A ship, the ‘Bœuf’ of Rochelle, carried it to
Guadeloupe, the sailors and passengers dying on board of her. A priest
went on board to administer the sacraments, and caught the infection;
he recovered, but [had a relapse and] died on August 4. It was
contagious at Guadeloupe also, and lasted twenty months.
This testimony of Dutertre is important for several things. He had arrived
at Guadeloupe in 1640 in a small vessel of 100 to 120 tons, crowded with
stores and carrying besides, 200 souls of both sexes and all ages. Much
distress and sickness followed their arrival; he mentions nearly 100 sick
in the quarters of M. de la Vernade, with only the ground to sleep on;
more than three-fourths of the help for the struggling colony that arrived
from St Christopher died, perhaps by infectious disease bred by the
others. Now, with that personal experience in his mind, and with personal
experience also of the epidemic of 1647-8, he describes the latter as a
pestilence “hitherto unknown in the islands since they were inhabited by
the French.” Like Ligon and Winthrop, he is led to think of plague itself
by the rapidity and fatality of the infection; but he mentions no signs of
plague proper, and at the same time mentions continual vomiting. The
disease was, in short, the Yellow Fever; and the epidemic in the end of
1647 at Bridgetown, and shortly after at St Christopher and Guadeloupe,
was the first of it, so far as is known, in the West Indies.
But what then were the earlier epidemics spoken of by Dutertre? The branch
colony to Guadeloupe from St Christopher in 1635 had been only two months
in their new home, when, in September, their experiences of famine began.
The famine or scarcity, says Dutertre, continued for five years, and was
followed by “a mortality almost general.” It was part of that mortality
which Dutertre himself saw on his arrival at Guadeloupe in 1640. He calls
the fever _coup de barre_--a name which in the sequel was sometimes given
to yellow fever; and he mentions symptoms which agree, in part at least,
with those of yellow fever--violent pains in the head, throbbing of the
temporal arteries, great distress of breathing, lassitude, pains in the
calf of the legs, as if they had been struck by a _coup de barre_. But in
speaking of the sickness which he found prevalent on landing in 1640, he
does not mention the irrepressible vomiting, which he puts in the first
place when he describes the other fever of 1647-8; and, to repeat, he says
that the latter was a pestilence hitherto unknown since the occupation of
the French Antilles, and as fatal as the plague. It is tolerably certain,
therefore, that the sickness on Guadeloupe sometime between 1635 and 1640,
was of the usual kind incidental to the settlement of a new colony. We
have had to notice it in Virginia (“from pestilent ships,” the governor
thought), in St Christopher, and in other new settlements. In a petition
of the Governor and Company of the Somers Islands, July 28, 1639, it is
said that about one hundred and thirty of their colonists had transplanted
themselves last year to St Lucia, where they suffered so much from
sickness that not one was in health[1174]. Any one of those epidemics
among new settlers might be diagnosed yellow fever with as much warrant as
another; but the deadly infection of 1647-8 was something special,
different from all that had preceded, and to be accounted the first
appearance of yellow fever whether in the West Indies or anywhere
else[1175].
Yellow fever received much elucidation in after years, both as regards its
symptoms and pathology, and as regards its circumstances and causation. To
get a familiar view of what the disease was like, let us take the
following graphic case recorded by Moseley at Jamaica more than a century
after the date with which we are still engaged[1176]:
“The last patient I saw, in the last stage of the yellow fever, was
Captain Mawhood of the 85th regt. at Port Royal, in Jamaica on the
24th Sept., 1780. It was on the fourth day of his illness. He had been
in the island seven weeks.
I arrived at the lodgings of this much esteemed young man about four
hours before his death. When I entered the room, he was vomiting a
black, muddy cruor; and was bleeding at the nose. A bloody ichor was
oozing from the corners of his eyes, and from his mouth and gums. His
face was besmeared with blood; and with the dulness of his eyes, it
presented a most distressing contrast to his natural visage. His
abdomen was swelled, and inflated prodigiously. His body was all over
of a deep yellow, interspersed with livid spots. His hands and feet
were of a livid hue. Every part of him was cold excepting about his
heart. He had a deep, strong hiccup, but neither delirium nor coma;
and was at my first seeing him, as I thought, in his perfect senses.
He looked at the changed appearance of his skin, and expressed, though
he could not speak, by his sad countenance, that he knew life was soon
to yield up her citadel, now abandoning the rest of his body.
Exhausted with vomiting, he at last was suffocated with the blood he
was endeavouring to bring up, and expired.”
One of the best summaries of its symptoms is that given by the Rev.
Griffith Hughes, rector of one of the Barbados parishes[1177]:
“The attack begins with a feeling of chill lasting an hour or two.
Then violent fever comes on, with excessive pain in the head, back,
and limbs, loss of strength, great dejection of spirits, insatiable
thirst, restlessness, sometimes vomiting, redness of the eyes, and
that redness in a few days turning to yellow. If the patient turn
yellow soon, he has scarce a chance for life, and, the sooner he does,
the worse. After some days the pain in the head abates, as well as the
fever. A sweat breaks out, and the patient appears to be better; but
on a narrow view a yellowness appears in his eyes and skin, and he
becomes visibly worse. About this time he sometimes spits blood, and
that by mouthfuls; as this continues, he grows cold and his pulse
abates till at last it is quite gone, and the patient becomes almost
as cold as a stone, and continues in that state with a composed sedate
mind. In this condition he may perhaps live twelve hours, without any
sensible pulse or heat, and then expire. Such were the symptoms and
progress of this fever in the year 1715.” He adds that the hæmorrhage
was sometimes from the nose or rectum. “A loose tooth being drawn from
a person who had the fever very severely, there issued out from the
hole a great quantity of black stinking blood, which still kept oozing
till the third day, on which the patient died in great agonies and
convulsions.” The symptoms were not uniform in all, nor in every
visitation. It was most commonly rife and fatal in May, June, July and
August, and then mostly among strangers, though a great many of the
inhabitants died of it in 1696 and a great many at different periods
since. (The next Barbados epidemic after 1647 was in 1671.)
Now, of that remarkable disease, a pestilent fever with hæmorrhages,
having a final stage of collapse not unlike the algid termination of
cholera, and a mortality equalled only by that of plague itself, or, in
after times, by that of cholera, it will be difficult to find instances in
any part of the world previous to the Barbados, St Christopher, and
Guadeloupe epidemics of 1647-48. Not only so, but these and other West
Indian harbours were the distinctive seats of it for long after. From
first to last yellow fever has been an infection of certain harbours--of
the shipping anchored, moored, or careened in them, and of the houses
nearest to the shore. In the Barbados epidemic of 1647, Ligon says, the
ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were for the most part infected; Dutertre
says that the crew and passengers died of it on board the ship which
brought it to Guadeloupe; he says, also, that it had come to St
Christopher with certain ships; and Ligon clearly suspects that it may
have had an origin on board ship: “for in long voyages diseases grow at
sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove contagious.”
We have had many instances of the sicknesses of voyages, not only scurvy
but also fevers. But these ship-fevers were not yellow fever; we know more
of them in later periods of the history, when they were recognized as
ship-typhus. For yellow fever we must seek something more distinctive, and
that distinctive thing we shall probably find in a kind of voyage which we
have not hitherto considered from the point of view of its sicknesses--the
Middle Passage, or the voyage with negroes from the African coast across
the tropical belt to one part or another of the New World. Let us then
take that particular kind of voyage, as we have already taken the voyages
of the East India Company’s ships, the voyages of emigrant ships from
England to the North-American Colonies, and those from France and England
to the West Indies.
Dutertre, our authority for the first yellow fever in St Christopher, is
also a witness to the sicknesses and mortality of the Middle Passage. Of
the negroes, he says, more die on the passage than land. He has known
captains who have taken on board up to 700 in one ship and landed only
200; they died of misery and hunger, and the stifling monotony of tropical
calms. Some of the slaves are of high degree; there was one negress, in
particular, whom all the rest looked up to as a princess.
The African slave-trade was not altogether so reputable as to have had the
incidents of the voyages recorded with anything approaching to scientific
fulness. But within the period that now occupies us, there are four
notices of arrivals of slavers in the West Indies from Guinea, in which
the health of the voyage had called for remark[1178]. In a letter from
Barbados, March 20, 1664, it is said that the ‘Speedwell’ has arrived with
282 negroes, who have greatly lost in value owing to smallpox breaking out
amongst them; the ‘Success’ brought 193 blacks; the ‘Susan’ 230, which
were not allowed to be landed until the officers of the ship had proved
that they had not collected them within the Royal African Company’s
limits. Another Barbados letter of March 31, 1664, says that “there has
been a great mortality amongst the negroes [? on St Christopher and Nevis]
which the African Company’s physician at Barbados, De La Rouse, assures
them is through a malignant distemper contracted, they think, through so
many sick and decaying negroes being thronged together, and perhaps
furthered by the smallpox in Captain Carteret’s ships. Most men refused to
receive any of them, and Philip Fusseires, a surgeon, to whom they sold
twenty at a low rate, lost every one.” This is a confused letter, but the
reference to “sick and decaying negroes thronged together,” appears to
mean, not a sharp sickness soon over, but a general sickly state and loss
of condition, which had come upon them during the voyage[1179]. The third
letter is from Barbados, June 25, 1667: from Guinea are arrived four
ships, two of the African Company’s, and two private; in which had
happened a great mortality of negroes and of the ships’ companies. Once
more, to bring out the long imprisonment of negroes under decks while the
slaver was filling up on the coast, T. Barrett writing from Port Royal on
October 17, 1672, to James Littleton, “has heard that Capt. James Tallers
bought the negroes for Littleton from another ship in Guinea which had
them three months aboard, and that they were almost all starved and
surfeycatted [surfeit had come to mean dysentery], he having fed them with
little else but musty corn. There must have been something extraordinary
that so many of them died.”
In one of the letters we hear of sickness and mortality not only of slaves
on the passage but also of the ships’ companies. Long after, Clarkson
showed from the muster-rolls of Liverpool slave-ships that the
slave-trade, instead of being a “nursery” of British sailors, was their
grave[1180]. There are, however, few medical particulars; doubtless many
of the deaths among the crews occurred on the coast, from fever, dysentery
and the like brought on by debauchery and during trading excursions up the
rivers in the long-boat; but from the third of the letters quoted it
appears that there had been also deaths on the voyage. Of the sicknesses
among the negroes, more is said of smallpox than of any other malady in
the foregoing records. But smallpox was not in ordinary circumstances a
very fatal or very severe disease among negroes, although it was very
common. An early medical writer on the diseases of the Guinea Coast, both
of white men and negroes, Dr Aubrey, “who resided many years on the coast
of Guinea,” may pass as a credible witness in the matter, the more so as
his book shows him to have been competent in his profession[1181].
“Measles and smallpox,” he says, “are no ways dangerous, nor so
troublesome as in cold climates, neither are they so very sick e’er they
come out, nor remains there any great sign of them after they recover.
Abundance of these poor creatures are lost on board ships, to the great
prejudice of the owners and scandal of the surgeon, merely through the
surgeon’s ignorance; because he knows not what they are afflicted with,
but supposing it to be a fever, bleeds and purges or vomits them into an
incurable diarrhœa, and in a very few days they become a feast for some
hungry shark. When they are in the woods sick of these diseases, they take
nothing but cold water, and suck oranges, and yet recover, as I myself
have been an eyewitness many a time; and the grandy-men’s children are
treated no otherwise in their sickness, and are very well of the smallpox
in less than half a moon,” etc. It is conceivable, however, that smallpox
left to itself would not have run so favourable a course in the hold of a
slaver as in the native huts of the negroes. On board ship the subjects of
smallpox died from a complication of diarrhœa; and, according to the same
writer, diarrhœa or dysentery was the grand cause of mortality on the
voyage, the most inveterate form of it, (according to his fixed belief),
occurring in those who had been constitutionally affected by yaws: “This
(the yawey flux) is the mortal disease that cuts off three parts in four
of the negroes that are commonly lost on board ships.” But the same writer
reveals enough to let us understand the prevalence of flux as a primary
malady. The food of the slaves on board ship, to say nothing of the
regimen, was distasteful to them. They missed their palm oil and other
accustomed articles of diet. They were fed, morning and evening, on pease,
beans, and the like, mixed with “rotten salt herrings,” with an occasional
meal of salt beef or salt pork, and a stinted allowance of water.
“These are foods that very few of them will eat. Very often they are
abused by sailors, who beat and kick them to that degree that
sometimes they never recover; and then the surgeon is blamed for
letting the slaves die, when they are murthered, partly by strokes and
partly famished; for if they do not eat such salt things as are enough
to destroy them, they must fast till supper; and then they lose their
appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly through fasting and partly
with grief to see themselves so treated; and if once they take
anything to heart, all the surgeon’s art will never keep them alive;
for they never eat anything by fair means or foul, because they choose
rather to die than be ill-treated.... When they are costive and griped
[by the salt food], they stay betwixt decks and will eat nothing; but
cry _yarry, yarry_, and perhaps creep under one of the platforms and
hide themselves, and die there, and the surgeon can’t think what is
the meaning on’t..., I am very sensible that it is impossible to
maintain the slaves on board, after one quits the Coast, without salt
provisions; but then care might be taken to water the beef and pork
ere it be boiled, and also to bring a cruce of palm-oil round the deck
from mess to mess, and also pepper, and let everyone take as he
pleaseth.... Another principal cause of their destruction is forcing
them into a tub of cold water every day, and pouring the water on
their heads by buckets-full”--doubtless for the sake of cleanliness,
although they were too ill to stand such washings.
Whatever else the negroes died of on the voyage from Guinea, they did not
die of yellow fever: there is hardly another generality of pathology so
well based as that Africans of pure blood have been found immune from that
infection in all circumstances ashore or afloat--protected not by
acclimatisation but by some strange privilege of their race. And yet we
have to think of yellow fever as somehow related to the over-sea traffic
in negroes. Two instances from the later history will serve to bring the
problem concretely before us. In 1815, a British transport, the ‘Regalia,’
was employed in carrying recruits from the West Coast of Africa to the
black regiments in the West Indies. The health of the ship when on the
African coast had been good; but on the voyage across with the
newly-enlisted negroes, much sickness, chiefly dysenteric, occurred among
the latter, whereupon yellow fever broke out with great malignancy,
attacking all on board except the black soldiers, who were from first to
last untouched by it. From such experiences as that, Sir Gilbert Blane
formulated a somewhat vague doctrine that the causes which produced
dysentery in the negro produced yellow fever in the white race. But it is
more probable that the dysenteric matters of the negroes had themselves in
turn bred an infection of yellow fever for the whites. To take another
case: In 1795, after the capture of Martinique from the French, one of the
frigates ‘La Pique,’ was manned by a British crew and sent to Barbados. On
the voyage they rescued two hundred negroes from a ship which was about
foundering. The negroes were confined in the hold of ‘La Pique;’ and in a
short time yellow fever broke out among her English crew, killing one
hundred and fifty of them, although it was not prevalent among the blacks
at all. “Such a mixture of men,” says Gillespie, “strangers to each other,
has been often found to occasion sickness in ships; and, together with
other causes, fatally operated here before the arrival of the ship at
Barbados.... This is a melancholy instance of the generation of a fatal
epidemic on board ship at a time when the inhabitants of Barbados and the
crews of the other ships in company remained free from any such
disease[1182].”
But such instances are comparatively rare, while epidemics of yellow fever
on shore, or among the shipping in an anchorage, have been common. It is
possible that the yellow fever experiences of the ‘Regalia’ and ‘La Pique’
had happened often to the white crews of slavers; we shall never know.
What we do know is that the ports of debarkation of the slave-trade
became the endemic seats of yellow fever. The theory is that the matters
productive of yellow fever were brought to the West Indian harbours,
deposited there, left to ferment and accumulate, and so to taint the soil,
the mud and the water as to become an enduring source of poisonous
miasmata. The facts in support of that view are not far to seek.
Let us come back to the circumstances of Bridgetown, Barbados, when the
yellow fever broke out first in 1647. A good many slavers had landed their
cargoes at Bridgetown in the years preceding (in 1643 the island had at
least 6400 negroes), and each of them had left behind a material quantity
of the filth of the voyage, having probably been careened for the purpose
of cleaning out and overhauling. There are traditions still extant that
the cleaning of a slave-ship after a voyage from Africa was an exceptional
task, to which Kroomen used to be set. Be that as it may, it needs only a
little reflection to see that a crowd of some hundreds of negroes under
gratings in the hold or ’tween decks of a brig or schooner, suffering at
first from sickness of the sea and, as the voyage across the tropic belt
progressed, from the more distressing flux, must have set all rules of
cleanliness at defiance. The ship’s bilges and ballast would be foul
beyond measure: and it was just the contents of her bilges, with or
without the ballast itself, that would be pumped out or thrown out when
the ship was moored in the harbour or careened on the mud. At Bridgetown
there were no plunging tides, such as we watch on our own shores, to carry
the filth out to sea. The spring tides, says Ligon, rose only four or five
feet; the flood tide carried the water over the banks into the lagoon, and
the ebb carried it off; but at neap tides a quantity of water remained
stagnant behind the sea-banks, according to the familiar experience in
such circumstances. The flat shore, says Ligon, became “a kind of bog,
which vents out so loathsome a savour as cannot but breed ill blood, and
is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.” A
brackish estuary, with an impeded outfall, will often smell badly, from
rotting sea-wrack or other decomposing matters; but we have yet to learn
that any so commonplace conditions can breed a deadly pestilence such as
arose at Bridgetown for the first time in the autumn of 1647. Carlisle
Bay was doubtless a leeward harbour, with high land all round it and a
sluggish ebb and flow of the tide, subject to calms and a scorching sun;
but besides all that, the careenage at the head of the bay was the regular
receptacle of the ordure of slave-ships year after year. Travellers and
imaginative writers have sometimes pictured the bays and creeks of the
islands and main of the Caribbean Sea as if the mere decay of tropical
vegetation had made them pestilential[1183]. Risk, of course, there is in
such situations, but chiefly when men are exposed by turns to the noonday
heat and the nocturnal chill. The ill repute of West Indian harbours, with
their sweltering mud, mangrove swamps, and lazy tides, is a composite and
confused idea. It is not so much Nature that has made them unwholesome, as
man. Yellow fever, in particular, is not a miasm of remote and primeval
bays or lagoons into which a boat’s crew may come once and again; it is
not a fever of any and every part of the coast of a tropical island; it is
a fever of only a few inhabited spots on the wide shores of the globe; and
those seats of it, so far as it has been steady or periodic in its
prevalence, are all of them harbours distinguished at one time or another
as the resort of slave-ships, and distinguished from many other ports of
either Hemisphere in no other way. Everything in the subsequent history of
yellow fever pointed to its being a poison lurking in the mud or even in
the water of slave-ports, and in the soil of their fore-shores, wharves
and houses along the beach. Miasmata rose from the ground in the latter
situations, to taint the air of the town at certain seasons; the poison
also entered the bilges of ships moored or careened in the harbour, and
rose from the holds as a noxious vapour to infect the crews. The miasmata
were deadly for the most part to new comers, especially to those from the
colder latitudes, although acclimatised residents were not exempt in a
time of epidemic; but there is very general agreement that they carried no
risk for negroes of pure blood.
What was there special in the circumstances of 1647 to give rise to the
first epidemic explosion of yellow fever? There was, in the first place,
the accretion of the peculiar fermenting filth in the mud and soil, which
had been going on for several years. Secondly, there was the brisk trade,
as indicated by the large number of ships in the harbour, a great
concourse of new arrivals having been often remarked in the later history
as one of the conditions of an outbreak. But more particularly there were
the peculiarities of the season: it was one of those seasons in which the
regular rains of June and following months had failed. What we know on
that head comes exclusively from Winthrop’s ‘Journal,’ already quoted.
There was so great a drouth, he says, that their potatoes, corn, &c., were
burnt up; and after the “great dearth of victuals in these islands
followed presently a great mortality.” But the mortality was certainly not
from famine, nor from the effects of famine. It was the parching drought
that the epidemic really followed, and not merely the scarcity, which was,
indeed, relieved by the ships from New England, and was so little felt
that Ligon does not mention it. The rainy season missed, or all but
missed, in a tropical country means a great fall of the ground water; it
means the pores of the ground filled with air to an unusual extent; and
that is a state of any soil, if it be already full of fermenting organic
matters, which breeds the most dangerous half-products of decomposition,
or, in other words, the most poisonous miasmata. There needs always some
such special determining thing to explain the epidemic outbursts of yellow
fever; in the later history we shall see that the first great epidemic of
it at Jamaica followed immediately upon the earthquake that destroyed Port
Royal.
Illustrations of the ordinary principle that seasonal and periodic
infection is dependent on the state of the ground water, are given at
greater length in the chapters upon the later epidemics of plague in
London. What applies in that respect to one soil-poison applies to
another; and it will be shown in the proper place to apply with least
ambiguity of all to Asiatic cholera, as well as to typhoid fever. Yellow
fever is, in clinical characters, allied more to typhus than to typhoid;
but it is a typhus of the soil, whereas the common and much less fatal
typhus of ordinary domestic life in colder latitudes is an infection
above ground--of the air, walls, floors and furnishings of rooms. There is
the same relation between yellow fever and ordinary typhus in that
respect, as between plague and ordinary typhus. When ordinary typhus has
passed into a soil-poison, by aggravation of conditions, as in the
experience of Arab encampments in North Africa, it has become at the same
time bubonic fever, or, approximately plague proper. Yellow fever had its
habitat essentially in the soil, from the peculiar circumstances
(importation of the crude materials of it by ships engaged in the
slave-trade); and plague in ordinary, or in European experience, had also
its habitat in the soil, from circumstances which have been elsewhere
given as its probable conditions.
It is perhaps because they are soil-poisons that those two diseases rank
so high in their fatality and quickness of execution, in which respects
they resemble Asiatic cholera, and differ from most other infections.
Winthrop says that the first yellow fever killed in three days, and was
therefore comparable to the plague. Ligon says that it was as killing a
disease as the plague (of which both he and Winthrop would have had old
experience at home), and he uses the stock phrase, that the living were
hardly able to bury the dead. Winthrop says that 6000 died in Barbados:
and one of his correspondents in the island, Vines, writes that “in our
parish there were buried twenty in a week, and many weeks together fifteen
or sixteen.” Dutertre says that nearly a third of the colonists of St
Christopher died of it, and that it lingered there for eighteen months,
and for twenty months in Guadeloupe, whither it was believed to have been
brought in the ship ‘Le Bœuf.’
Barbados, St Christopher and Guadeloupe (with minor settlements on
Martinique, Nevis, &c.) were the earliest English and French colonies in
the Caribbean Sea. The Spaniards had occupied the Greater Antilles
(Hispaniola or San Domingo, Cuba, Porto Rico and Jamaica) long before.
Nothing particular is known of the health of these colonies except for the
earlier years of the 16th century, when the native populations were
ravaged by the great pox and the smallpox. But when Jamaica was seized
from the Spaniards by the army of the Commonwealth in 1655 we begin to
have authentic information, the state of health being perhaps the most
prominent thing (although little noticed by historians) in the despatches.
That incident in the expansion of England, relating as it does to the
planting of what was for long our greatest island colony, and illustrating
the risks of those early enterprises more fully than any other of the
kind, may fitly come into this chapter and conclude it.
The Great Mortality in the occupying of Jamaica.
The Lord Protector’s design in the year 1654, to acquire one or more of
the Spanish Antilles for an English colony, was more methodically
conceived and more strenuously supported by the resources of the State
than any previous attempt at colonization. It was attended with disasters
on a proportionate scale, and at first with ignominy and failure which
must have added seriously to the burden of Cromwell’s later years. The
original design, in the admiral’s sealed orders, was to seize upon the old
Spanish colony of Hispaniola or San Domingo[1184]. A fleet had been fitted
out at Portsmouth, which sailed on 19th-21st December, 1654, carrying a
land force of three thousand men. After a favourable voyage, the fleet of
thirty sail, half of them victuallers, arrived at Barbados on February 1,
where they lay until March 31, engaging settlers for the proposed new
colony as well as campaigners, including a troop of cavalry, from the not
very choice class of English subjects in that island. Some twenty Dutch
ships were seized and made victuallers or transports. The expedition
received a draft also from Nevis, and calling at St Christopher they took
up 1300 more, making in all an addition of over 5000 colonial men, besides
women and children, to their original force. On April 13 the fleet arrived
off the harbour of St Domingo. It came out afterwards that the sight of so
many English frigates and other ships had driven the townspeople to
instantaneous flight, so that the capital would have fallen to the
English without a blow. But no landing was attempted in the harbour,
owing to difficulties about piloting, ignorance of the depth of water, and
the like. It was decided to disembark the force in a bay at the mouth of a
river some six or ten miles (two leagues) to the eastward, where Drake had
landed in 1586. Most of the ships, however, were carried past the
appointed place, and came to anchor in another bay thirty miles (ten
leagues) eastwards from St Domingo; there a multitude of some 7000
soldiers and colonials, with their women and children, were landed on the
beach with three days’ rations. Several of the ships landed their men at
the original rendezvous two leagues from St Domingo, to the number of
about 2000 in three regiments. The larger and farther-off force began to
advance on St Domingo through dense woods; their presence in the country
was soon known in all the plantations, whence the people fled to the
capital for safety, so that the San Domingans were able to extemporise a
considerable force for defence. The advance of the English was hindered by
the stifling heat; distressed by thirst, they ate immoderately of oranges
and other fruits, and in one way or another brought on dysentery. General
Venables, in a despatch to Cromwell, says that by these causes they “were
troubled with violent fluxes, hundreds of our men having dropped down by
the way, some sick, others dead.” Meanwhile the nearer and smaller force
of some 2000 had advanced on St Domingo; they got over one of the two
leagues between them and the capital, but an old fort, manned for the
occasion, barred the way, and the regiments fell back upon the river
whence they had started, and rested there five days, the main body having
meanwhile come up with them. One attempt after another was made to pass
the half-way fort, but the Spaniards held their ground, and actually
inflicted defeat in the open and a disgraceful rout upon the English, some
of whose gallant officers threw their lives away in a vain attempt to lead
their men. All the while this broken and demoralised mob was without
proper supplies from the fleet, the officers of which were either unable
to communicate with the land force or indifferent as to their duty. The
state of health on the 25th of April, some ten or twelve days after
landing, is thus described in a letter: “And the rains nightly pouring,
with fogs and dews along the river, so soaked our bodies with flux, and
none escaping that violence, that our freshment [by retreat to the river]
proved a weakening instead of support.” Another letter of two days’ later
date (April 27) says: “The rains increasing, our men weakening, all even
to death fluxing, the seamen aboard neglecting,--that forced us to eat all
our troop horses.” An attempt was made to restore discipline; an officer
of high rank was cashiered for a coward, his sword having been broken over
his head; a soldier was shot for desertion; some loose women in men’s
clothes from Barbados were chastised, and a sharp look-out kept for other
camp-followers of the kind. At length it was decided by Venables and his
council that the attempt on San Domingo must be abandoned; probably it was
seen that the Barbadian and St Christopher following was a fatal
encumbrance at that stage, the more so as the rainy season was in
progress. By the third of May the whole expedition was re-embarked, the
Spaniards making no attempt to harass the operation. The number reshipped
is said to have been seventeen hundred short of that which landed three
weeks before: a good many had fallen fighting, others were slain by the
Spaniards or negroes in the woods, and some appear to have died of the
flux. The attempt on St Domingo having failed it was decided to make a
descent on Jamaica, the least important of the Spanish Antilles. On the
passage thither, Winslow, one of the three lay commissioners or
“politicals” with the expedition, died “very suddenly of a fever.”
On May 10 the ships entered the bay of Caguya. Admiral Penn, being
resolved not to repeat the mistake they had made at St Domingo, kept sail
on the ‘Martin’ galley until she was beached under the small fort of the
Passage, at the head of the bay, so as to cover the debarkation with his
guns. However, the few Spaniards living at the shore fled, and the whole
force, to the number of some 7000, was landed by midnight. Venables then
returned to his ship for his usual repose, leaving the men under arms all
night. Not until nine next day, by which hour the cool of the morning was
lost, did the march begin to the capital, St Jago de la Vega (“St James of
the Plain”), situated on an elevation by the river Cobre, in the midst of
an alluvial plain with an amphitheatre of hills behind it, some six miles
from the place of landing. About two in the afternoon they came before the
town, and marched in that night: they found it empty, “nothing but bare
walls, bedsteads, chairs and cowhides.” The town is said to have had some
1700 houses (too many for its population), two churches, two chapels, and
an abbey; there all the Spaniards dwelt in ease and indolence, “having
their slaves at their several small plantations, who constantly brought
them store of provisions and fruits.” In this great island there were but
about 3000 inhabitants, half of them, if not more, being slaves. There
were no manufactures or native commodities, except a very little sugar and
cocoa. The four ships that came thither in a year traded generally for
hides and tallow only.
The Spanish colony had removed as much of their property as they could in
their first flight, and shortly sent their head men with their governor,
“an old decrepid seignior full of the French disease” carried by two
bearers in a hammock, to treat for their re-entry into the town. Venables
was afterwards much blamed for returning the politeness of the Spaniards;
he received their presents of fresh provisions and fruit, accepted their
promises of a steady supply for his men, and gave them the free run of
their own houses for a week or so, by which time they are said to have
carried off all their personal belongings of value. They objected to leave
the island, saying that Jamaica was their home, and that they had no
friends either in New Spain or in Old Spain. At length they left their old
settlement, with the avowed purpose of embarking for Cuba from a bay on
the same side to the west. There were divided counsels among the English
as to the treatment of the Spaniards, and Colonel Bullard was sent towards
the bay with a large force to intercept them in their flight. They had,
however, given a false direction, and had in reality crossed the mountains
northwards to the other side of the island, clearing the country as they
went of cattle and produce of every kind. Some of them, including eight
families of the upper class, at length found their way to Cuba, but the
larger number remained on the north of the island, where they were
overtaken by famine and pestilence before a few months, and nearly
exterminated. Their negroes took to the mountains, and became the
maroons, famous in the later history of Jamaica.
In pursuing the Spaniards, the English troops went roaming over the
country, destroying the hogs and cattle in mere wantonness, and leaving
their carcases to putrefy. In a short time the multitude of English at St
Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) were on short rations, and before long
“dogs and cats the best part of their diet.” The stores from the ships had
been left on the beach exposed to the weather, and soon turned mouldy, the
men refusing to carry them, in the absence of waggons, over the six miles
between the shore and the head-quarters. Two or three victuallers besides
had arrived from England within a week or two of the first landing, but,
for all that, the expedition was starving. Many of the men were suffering
from the flux which they had contracted in St Domingo. Venables, in a
private letter of May 25, or a fortnight after landing, gives the number
of the sick at near 3000; in a despatch to Cromwell, of June 4, he says:
“The want we have been in hitherto of bread (we not being able to be
suddenly supplied therewith out of the fleet, or our stores, through
want of waggons and other conveniences for the transportation
thereof), joined with the drinking of water, hath already cast both
officers and soldiers into such violent fluxes that they look more
like dead men crept out of their graves than persons living; and this
so generally that we have not above two colonels in health, three
majors, some seven field officers in all; besides many have been
already swept away with this disease. We lost Mr Winslow very
suddenly, in our sailing towards this island, of a fever.”
On June 9 there was a general muster of the land forces, “whose number was
found to be much diminished of late, not so much by any pestilential or
violent disease, as for mere want of natural sustenance; which, in common
reason, may seem strange that of all men soldiers should starve in a
cook’s shop, as the saying is[1185].”
In a despatch of June 13, Venables says that “about 2000 are sick. Our men
die daily, eating roots and fresh fish (when any food is got), without
bread or very little.” He was himself ill, having had the flux for five
weeks. Admiral Penn (father of the founder of Pennsylvania) had resolved
to go home with two-thirds of the ships, thinking that his services were
no longer needed, and having been advised that he could be of more service
to Cromwell in England. He sailed on June 21, leaving the frigates and the
Dutch prizes, under Goodson; and Venables followed in four days, with the
surviving “political,” leaving the settlement in charge of Fortescue, who
wrote home, “I am left to act without book.”
Meanwhile Cromwell had got ready reinforcements, sparing no trouble or
expense at home. The expedition in aid left Plymouth on July 11, 1655,
under the command of Sedgwick, and arrived at Barbados on August 26-31,
after a fine passage; they left again on September 7, having trimmed their
casks and taken in water with other refreshments. This force was in the
best of health until after leaving Barbados. Sedgwick writes:
“I think never so many ships sailed together with less trouble, grief
or danger than we did; only God did in a little visit us between this
[Jamaica] and Barbados with some sickness, I apprehend caused by some
distemper taken there [? yellow fever]; in which visitation, I think,
in the whole fleet we lost between 20 and 30 seamen and soldiers.”
Finding the Spanish flag flying at San Domingo, they came on to Jamaica on
October 1, and there found a calamitous state of things.
“For the army, I found them in as sad and deplorable and distracted
condition as can be thought of: commanders, some left them, some dead,
some sick, and some in indifferent health; the soldiery many dead,
their carcases lying unburied in the highways and among bushes, to and
again; many of them that were alive walked like ghosts or dead men,
who, as I went through the town, lay groaning and crying out, Bread,
for God’s sake!”
Sedgwick brought with him in four victuallers a thousand tons of
provisions, which he secured in a store built for the occasion on the
beach. Among his troops was Colonel Humphry’s regiment of 831 “lusty,
healthful, gallant men, who encouraged the whole army.” But now we begin
to see that the sickness at St Jago de la Vega had become infective or
pestilential. The new-comers, healthy and well found as they were, began
at once to sicken and to die. Of Humphry’s regiment, on November 5:
“There are at this day 50 of them dead, whereof two captains, a
lieutenant, and two ensigns, the colonel himself very weak, the
lieutenant-colonel at death’s door. Soldiers die daily, I believe 140
every week, and so have done ever since I came hither. It is strange
to see lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the
grave, snatched away in a moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and
dropsies, a confluence of many diseases. We furnished the army now
with 60 butts of Madeira wine, and to every regiment a butt of brandy,
and a hogshead or two of sweet oil. Our soldiers have destroyed all
sorts of fruits, and provisions and cattle. Nothing but ruin attends
them wherever they go.” On January 24, 1656, Sedgwick again writes to
Thurloe: “Did you but see the faces of this poor small army with us,
how like skeletons they look, it would move pity; and when I consider
the thousands laid in the dust in such a way as God hath visited, my
heart mourns. Here hath come down to us from many of the Windward
Islands divers people with intentions of sitting down with us, but at
their coming hither, either fall sick and die, or are so affrighted
and dismayed as that, although to their much impoverishing, yet will
not be persuaded to stay with us.”
The men in the fleet were in better health; but among them also “some die
and some are sick, in so much that we need a good recruit fully to man our
ships as men-of-war.” On the same date (January 24, 1656) Admiral Goodson,
writing to Thurloe, estimates the surviving officers and men at 2600,
besides women and children; and in another despatch of that date from
Sedgwick and Goodson jointly to Cromwell it is stated:
“The numbers of the army are much lessened since our last letters
[November 5]; the whole not extending to 3000, many of them sick and
weak, the best and soundest much abated of their strength and vigor,
and God goes on every day to shorten our number. We die daily, not
less than fifty every week, which is much considering our small
numbers.”
As the season advanced the health of the troops on shore improved. A
letter of March 12 says that the condition of the army is much mended; the
soldiers are far more healthful, but much dejected and averse to the
place. The fleet was in good spirits, and impatient for action; however,
there was sickness also on board the ships; they had lost some fourscore
men since the last despatch; and on April 30 the report is: “our seamen
are indifferently well in health; yet some few are sick, and God is daily
shortening them, so that our fleet will want a recruit of men.” Several of
the frigates were wormeaten, and careened for repairs. Sickness is
reported in the ships as late as October 10, 1656.
The sickness among all ranks had been so general and severe that it was
hardly possible to find senior officers to undertake the government.
Fortescue died in October, 1655, and was succeeded temporarily by D’Oyley
and others, the sole government being at length given by Cromwell to
Sedgwick, who died a few days after receiving his unwelcome commission.
Brayne, transferred from Lochaber to Jamaica, also died, and it fell at
length to D’Oyley, an effective person in whom all on the spot had
confidence, to carry the colony through its troubles. Cromwell spared no
effort at home. Immense quantities of provisions were shipped; planters,
with their families, ‘servants’ and slaves, to the number of some 1700,
were removed to Jamaica from Nevis, under Stokes, the governor of that
island; the New Englanders were also encouraged to resort to the new
colony; and a thousand or so of young men and marriageable young women
were furnished from Ireland, together with pioneers, described as of a
rougher kind, from Scotland. “And so at length,” says Carlyle, “a
West-Indian interest did take root; and bears spices and poisons, and
other produce, to this day.”
The sickness and mortality among the first English colonists of Jamaica
gave the island a bad name, and must have added not a little to the
confusion of ideas already existing as to the pestilent character of
tropical climates[1186]. The older sugar-colonies, such as Barbados, which
saw in Jamaica a formidable competitor, would appear to have encouraged
the notion that climates varied much, that of Jamaica being bad. Soon
after the Restoration, Charles II. was urged to give back Jamaica to
Spain, and is said to have seriously entertained that purpose. Among the
state papers is a document, supposed to have been written in November,
1660, which sets forth the natural advantages of Jamaica, together with
two sets of reasons why England should retain it[1187]:
“The air here is more temperate than in any of the Caribee Islands,
being more northerly and as sufferable hot as in many places.... The
winds here constantly all day blow easterly, so coolly that it renders
any labour sufferable at midday.... We find here is not such antipathy
between the constitution of the English and the climate that sickness
is not inevitable and contingent; for we have experimentally found
that persons observing a good diet and using moderate exercise, enjoy
a somewhat (?) measure of health. The said causes of the mortality of
the Army at their first arrival were want of provisions, unwillingness
to labour or exercise, and inexcusable discontent to be constrained to
stay here. The diseases that strangers are most incident to are
dropsies (occasioned often by evil diet and slothfulness), calentures
(so frequently produced of surfeit), and fevers and agues, which,
although very troublesome, are never mortal.... Cagway [Port Royal] is
the place where all the merchants reside, being the most healthy place
in the island; whither resort all the men that frequent the Indies,
which makes houses so dear that an ordinary house in this town is
worth £40 or £60 per annum. There are about 200 houses there, all
built by the English. About 50 houses have been built by the English
at the fort of the Passage [at the head of the harbour and the nearest
point to Spanish Town]; of the houses in the old capital, St Jago de
la Vega, about 800 are ruinous. As to the number of English in the
island, the relics of the six regiments do muster 2200, and it is
probable that the planters, merchants, sailors and others may be as
many.”
The above statements about the healthiness of Jamaica in 1660 were
repeated by Dr Trapham, in his work on the climate and diseases of the
colony in 1678[1188]. This earliest medical writer is, indeed, more
optimist than those who followed him, as to contagious or infective
sickness; there was no smallpox, or very rarely, saving sometimes brought
from Guinea by negroes; and “no depopulating plague that ere I have heard
of,” saving a pestilential fever brought in by the victorious fleet
returned from the signal Panama expedition in 1670. The experiences of
yellow fever at Port Royal and Kingston were mostly, if not entirely,
subsequent to these dates. But, as there had been yellow fever at
Barbados, St Christopher, and Guadeloupe as early as 1647-48, it has been
thought probable that the enormous mortality in Jamaica in 1655-56 was
from the same endemic cause[1189] Undoubtedly the epidemic at Spanish Town
became at length more than the dysentery which had been brought by some of
the troops from San Domingo, or had been induced among others of them by
bad food and water; it became a virulent specific infection, attacking the
healthy and well-found reinforcements from England and the new arrivals
from the Windward Islands, and destroying them quickly, “in three or four
days.” Fevers are specially named, as well as fluxes and dropsies; and the
question arises whether the pestilential fever was not yellow fever.
There is certainly nothing said of the striking and ghastly symptoms of
the _vomito negro_. Moreover the sickness was nearly all at the town of St
Jago de la Vega, six miles from the bay, situated on a rising of the plain
with a declivity to the Cobre river, a place which was only exceptionally
the seat of yellow fever in after-experience. Thus Judge Long, the able
historian of Jamaica, says[1190]:
“After a series of hot, dry, and calm weather, eight days of continued
rain succeeded in May, 1761. Spanish Town grew more sickly than ever I
knew it, either before or since. From that period to August there were
buried 29 white inhabitants, of whom 15 were soldiers. Their disorder
had all the appearance of being the true yellow fever, and was
supposed to have been communicated from some ship in Kingston
harbour:”
--Kingston and Port Royal, or the ships moored near to them, being the
common habitat of the disease, as in the corresponding circumstances at
other West Indian islands.
But if the infective fever at Spanish Town in 1655-56 was almost certainly
not yellow fever, it was probably allied to it in type. Dysentery had
been almost universal; there was no care of the sick, and, so far as one
hears, no medical attendance, no hospitals, no scavenging, no security
taken to keep the water-supply pure--nothing, in short, of what is now
called sanitation. Sedgwick, arriving on October 1, 1655, found even the
dead unburied by the highways and among the bushes. The correlation
between dysentery and pestilential fever is no new hypothesis: flux first
and fever afterwards has been an experience both in sieges and in ordinary
domestic famines on many occasions. The origin of the yellow fever at
Barbados and elsewhere in 1647-8, which has been outlined in this chapter,
is but a special application of the same principle, the dysenteric matters
which represent the crude source of the infection having been brought in
the bilges and ballast of slave-ships, thrown into the mud of almost
tideless harbours, left to ferment amidst the heat and moisture of the
shore, and so made into a soil-poison which, in due season, would give off
emanations, fatal especially to new-comers. Port Royal and Kingston had
full experience of that endemic influence in after-years, for the first
time in 1692, after the earthquake and disturbance of soil which destroyed
the former town and occasioned the building of the latter on the other
side of the bay. By that time there had been slavers enough in the bay to
bring all the ordure that the hypothesis requires. But, down to 1655, the
Spaniards had traded only with hides and tallow in some four ships every
year, and had the headquarters of their cultivation and stock-raising at
the town in the plain some six miles from the shore. Four or five years
after their expulsion we find the whole aspect of the port changed,
according to the description already given. It does not appear that
Cromwell looked forward to negro labour in his colony, although the Nevis
planters brought their blacks with them. Charles II. had not been many
months on the throne when James, earl of Marlborough, petitioned him to
offer inducements to the Royal African Company to make Jamaica the staple
for the sale of blacks, and to contract with that company for one hundred
negroes to be delivered at the island[1191]. Negroes did begin from that
time to arrive in Jamaica, although Port Royal was at first rather a
general centre of commerce and piracy than a slave-port like Bridgetown,
perhaps because the Windward Islands were strong enough to keep their
privileges undivided. As late as 1670 the negro slaves in Jamaica were
reckoned at no more than 2500, not counting the old Spanish maroons[1192].
On September 20 of that year, Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Jamaica,
sent to Secretary Arlington certain proposals for the improvement of the
colony, of which the following bears upon our subject[1193]:
“That they may have licence gratis or at moderate rates to trade for
negroes in Africa. Did those honourable persons, which make that Royal
[African] Company so glorious, but fall into considerations how much
more it is his Majesty’s interest to increase the number of his
subjects than bullion of gold or silver (which by law all nations may
import), they would not only freely consent to this proposal for us
but for the whole nation and foreigners also. Mankind is the
principal, gold the accessory: increase the first considerably, and
the other must follow. Barbados had never risen to its late perfection
had it not been lawful for Dutch, Hamburghers, and our whole nation,
and any other, to bring and sell their blacks or any other servants in
the colony’s infancy.”
The harbours of Port Royal and Kingston did, in the event, become the
chief resort of slave-ships in the British West Indies, slaves having been
landed there up to ten thousand in a year throughout the 18th century.
They came also to be among the chief seats of yellow fever, and continued
so until a recent date. The subsequent progress of yellow fever there, and
in other West Indian harbours as well as in the ports of some of the North
American colonies, is not the least important of the subjects that fall to
the second period of this history.