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.
CHAPTER XII.
THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.