Remarkable Epidemic in Drake’s Fleet 1585-6.
Drake’s next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585, with six Queen’s ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300 men. A large number of private adventurers had a money interest in the enterprise, which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in the West Indies and the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at the isthmus of Panama on its way to Spain. The fleet experienced one of the most remarkable epidemics in the whole history of sickness[1131].
Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the island of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16. More than a thousand men were landed, and were marched up the steep and broken ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which stood in a narrow valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and the Atlantic open before it at some distance on the south. The place was surrounded by a wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass ordnance; but no resistance was offered, and the English marched in to find the inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November, the town was quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which remained there for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent dates), taking such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and “trash” of the Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when no one had come to ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men to the village or town of St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the hope of finding the governor and the bishop; but, finding no one, he marched his men back again the same evening. On November 26 the whole force was re-embarked, all the houses in the capital as well as in the country round were set fire to, the port of Playa, a few miles to the westward, was also burned, and on the same night the ships weighed anchor from the latter, and stood away to the south-west. They had filled their water-casks from a pool, near the seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through the capital and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of sickness during the occupation of St Jago; there seems to have been some lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition), which Drake quickly remedied.
The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to Dominica, a distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that quick sailing along the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the steady north-east trade wind behind them, the season the beginning of December and the climate the most delightful and most refreshing on the globe, the ships were visited suddenly with the fury of a deadly pestilential fever, of which the following is the account by a captain of the land-forces on board:
“We were not many days at sea but there began among our people such mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three hundred men. And until some seven or eight days after our coming from St Jago there had not died any one man of sickness in all the fleet. The sickness showed not his infection wherewith so many were stroken until we were departed thence; and then seized our people with extreme hot burning and continual agues whereof very few escaped with life, and yet those for the most part not without great alteration and decay of their wits and strength for a long time after. In some that died were plainly showed the small spots which are often found upon those that be infected with the plague.”
From Dominica the ships sailed to St Christopher, on which island Drake disembarked his whole force, and cleaned and aired his ships, according to an excellent practice which he had followed also in his great circumnavigation. Some days of Christmas having been thus spent ashore, “to refresh our sick people,” the voyage was resumed to Hispaniola. Deaths continued to occur, from the same disease as at first, both among officers and men, and so continued for many weeks. However, they were able to land some 1000 or 1200 men on Hispaniola, and to carry the city of San Domingo by assault. The fleet then sailed southwards along the coast of the mainland to Cartagena, which was captured in turn, and in like manner held to ransom.
It is at this part of the narrative that we next hear of the infection in the fleet:
“We stayed here six weeks [from middle of January to end of February, 1586], and the sickness with mortality, before spoken of, still continued among us, though not with the same fury as at the first. And such as were touched with the said sickness, escaping death, very few or almost none could recover their strength; yea, many of them were much decayed in their memory, insomuch that it was grown an ordinary judgment, when one was heard to speak foolishly, to say he had been sick of the calentura, which is the Spanish name of that burning ague; for, as I told you before, it is a very burning and pestilent ague.”
Then follows the Spanish theory of the calentura, which may or may not be rightly applied to the deadly epidemic that broke out suddenly in the English ships in mid ocean:
“The original cause thereof is imputed to the evening or first night air, which they term la serena, wherein they say, and hold very firm opinion, that whoso is then abroad in the open air shall certainly be infected to the death, not being of the Indian or natural race of those country people. By holding their watch our men were thus subjected to the infectious air, which at St Jago was most dangerous and deadly of all other places. With the inconvenience of continual mortality, we were forced to give over our intended enterprize, etc.”
The land-captains having been consulted by Drake, on February 27, 1586, advised that the expedition should go home from Cartagena, instead of attempting to capture the treasure at Panama. In their memorandum they wrote: “And being further advised of the slenderness of our strength, whereunto we be now reduced, as well in respect of the small number of able bodies, as also not a little in regard of the slack disposition of the greater part of those which remain, very many of the better minds and men being either consumed by death, or weakened by sickness and hurts, etc.” The voyage to England was accordingly begun; St Augustine in Florida was captured by the way, and the struggling colony in Virginia, the first sent out by Raleigh, was taken up and brought back, and Portsmouth reached on July 28. “We lost some 750 men in the voyage, above three parts of them only by sickness.” The names are given of eight captains, four lieutenants, and seven masters, who had died; and there were some other officers dead unnamed. When the ransoms of San Domingo and Cartagena came to be divided, the venture must have been found as unprofitable to the shareholders as it had been disastrous to officers and men.
The Spanish name calentura, by which the fever in the fleet is described, was probably used generically for various kinds of fever in the tropics. But of this fever in particular, we have some details not without diagnostic value. It was doubtless contracted at St Jago in the Cape de Verde islands; it broke out suddenly in mid ocean after some seven or eight days sailing before the wind, in a delightful climate, which points to the regular incubation of an infective virus, received by hundreds of men when they were last ashore; the mortality was enormous; the symptoms were those of a burning fever; and in some cases there were small spots or petechiae like those often seen in the plague. It was clearly a febrile form of pestilential infection, and, as few recovered, it must be considered to have had a death-rate such as typhus has rarely had, and such as yellow fever has commonly had. Nothing is said of the black vomit, the haemorrhages, and the saffron colour of skin and eyes, which are distinctive of yellow fever[1132]. On the other hand there is a remarkable after-effect mentioned in both the passages quoted, the loss of memory, impairment of wits, and appearance of foolishness, which made “the calenture” a bye-word in the fleet. I shall not venture to say what the infection was; but it seems tolerably certain that it was contracted by the English during their occupation of the capital town of St Jago. More recent visitors to the Cape de Verde islands have remarked upon their towns and villages as fever-traps, and have pointed to the source of the fever; it is not malaria, or the mere climatic influence, but a pestilential emanation from spots of soil long inhabited by mankind, both black and white, and so situated in cups of the hills as to retain and multiply the filth-ferment in them. According to all analogy, the emanations from such a soil would be felt most by strangers not inured to them, and most of all by men of another stock and from other latitudes[1133].