(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 colonies, concerned with British enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of other nations.