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.