Ship-Fever in the Seven Years’ War and American War.

Ship-fever would appear to have been at its worst after the middle of the 18th century. Dr James Lind joined Haslar Hospital in 1758, and brought to the naval medical service the same high qualities which Pringle and Monro brought to that of the army[194]. The smaller ships, such as the ‘Saltash’ sloop, the ‘Richmond’ frigate, and the ‘Infernal’ bomb were full of fever of the most malignant kind; of 120 men in the ‘Saltash,’ 80 were infected with a contagion much more virulent and dangerous than that in the guard-ships. The explanation was that the smaller ships were receiving vessels for the larger ships, and were manned from the gaols; drafts from them carried the infection to the guard-ships and to the ships fitting out for foreign service. Malignant fever also arose on the voyage home from America[195]. In September and October 1758, after the reduction of Louisburg, several of the ships arriving at Spithead were infected with a malignant fever; three hundred men were received from them at Haslar Hospital (some with scurvy), of whom twenty-eight died. The ‘Edgar,’ having been manned at the Nore from gaols, sailed for the Mediterranean, and lost sixty men from fever and scurvy. The ‘Loestoffe,’ having lain in the St Lawrence for eight months in perfect health, took on board six convalescent men from Point Levi Hospital before sailing for home; in forty-eight hours, fifty out of her two hundred men were seized with fevers and fluxes, and six died on the voyage home. The ‘Dublin’ on the homeward voyage from Quebec buried nineteen, and on her arrival reported ninety men sick of fever, fluxes and scurvy. The ‘Neptune’ was said to have lost one hundred and sixty men in a few months, and reported 136 sick. The ‘Cambridge,’ with 650 men in health, sent three of her crew to the ‘Neptune’ laid up, to prepare her for the dock; of these three, one on the fifth day became spotted and died, and another narrowly escaped with life. The ‘Diana’ developed fever during a rough passage home from America. The ‘St George,’ having sailed from Spithead in 1760, met with rough weather and had to return on account of sickness. On the other hand, Hawke’s fleet of twenty ships of the line with fourteen thousand men, which defeated the French in November 1759, kept the Bay of Biscay for four months in the most perfect health.

From 1 July, 1758, to 1 July, 1760, there were 5743 admissions to Haslar Hospital, the chief diseases being as follows:

Fevers 2174
Scurvy 1146
Consumption 360
Rheumatism 350
Fluxes 245

Of the fevers some were of an intermittent type, but by far the most were continued ship-typhus. Relapses were common, even to the sixth or seventh time. The fever varied a good deal in malignity, but never produced buboes, livid blotches or mortifications, and seldom parotids. Twenty-four men received from January to March 1760 out of the ‘Garland’ had most of them petechial spots accompanied with other symptoms of malignity, and of these, five died or 20 per cent. But of 105 received during the same months from the ‘Postilion’ and ‘Liverpool’ only eight died, and those mostly of a flux. The infection had little tendency to spread among the attendants at Haslar. In the first six months only one nurse died; in 1759, two labourers and two nurses died, one of the nurses by infection, having concealed some infected shirts under her bed, the other by decay of nature. Of more than a hundred persons employed in various offices about the sick there died only those five in the course of eighteen months.

Although Lind’s account of ship-fever in the British navy is bad enough, he has collected some far worse particulars of foreign ships. Febrile contagion destroyed two-thirds of the men in the Duc d’Anville’s fleet at Chebucto (now Halifax), in 1746, the complete destruction of which was afterwards accomplished by the scurvy. It was ship-fever which ravaged the Marquis d’Antin’s squadron in 1741, the Count de Roquesevel’s in 1744, and the Toulon squadron in 1747. He takes the following from Poissonnier’s Traité de Maladies des Gens de Mer: The fleet commanded by M. Dubois de la Mothe sailed in 1757 from Rochefort for Louisburg, Canada, having some men sickly. The ships touched at Brest, and sent 400 ashore sick. They sailed from Brest on 3 May, and arrived at Louisburg on 28 June. There was then sickness in only two ships, but in a short time it appeared in all the fleet. On 14 October the fleet sailed from Louisburg for home, embarking one thousand sick, and leaving four hundred supposed dying. In less than six days from sailing most of the thousand sick were dead. When the fleet arrived at Brest on 22 November there were few seamen well enough to navigate the ships; 4000 men were ill, the holds and decks being crowded with the sick. The hospitals at Brest were already occupied, two ships from Quebec shortly before having sent a thousand men to them. Fifteen hospitals were soon filled, attended by five physicians and one hundred and fifty surgeons. Two hundred almoners and nurses fell victims. The infection passed to the lower class of the citizens, the havoc became general, and houses everywhere were filled with the dying and the dead. At length it got among the prisoners in the hulks. This dreadful infection began to abate in March, 1758, and ceased in April, having carried off in less than five months upwards of 10,000 people in the hospitals alone, besides a great number of the Brest townspeople. The stench was intolerable. No person could enter the hospitals without being immediately seized with headache; and every kind of indisposition quickly turned to fatal fever, as in the old plague times. The state of the bodies showed the degree of malignity that had been engendered: the lungs were engorged with blood, and looked gangrenous; the intestines often contained a green offensive liquor, and sometimes worms. Lind’s other instances are chiefly of the Dutch East Indiamen that anchored at Spithead with fever on board. In Nov., 1770, the ‘Yselmonde’ bound to Batavia, came to anchor at Spithead, and buried a number of men every day; two custom-house officers caught the fever and died. He gives two other instances of Dutch ships bound to Batavia, which came in to Portsmouth with fever[196]. The Dutch were said to send annually 2000 soldiers to Batavia, and to lose three-fourths of them by the ship-fever before they arrived. In 1769 Lind saw ship-fever in the Russian fleet at Spithead.

Brownrigg, of Whitehaven, gives a good instance of the diffusion of typhus in a newly-commissioned ship of war, and thence to the civil population, which bears out Lind’s favourite notion that the gaols and the press-gang had far-reaching effects. In the year 1757 a sloop of war had been hastily manned at the Nore to protect the shipping between the Irish and Cumberland ports. She reached Whitehaven in May, with fever on board. The men were landed and lodged in small houses. Brownrigg found about forty lying on the floor of three small rooms, very close together, many of them in a dying state; seven days after he was himself seized with fever, and had a narrow escape with life. The ship’s surgeon died of it, his mate recovered with difficulty, two surgeons of the town died of it, and two more in Cockermouth. The contagion spread widely among the inhabitants of Whitehaven, Cockermouth and Workington[197].

Lind showed to Howard in one of the wards of Haslar Hospital a number of sailors ill of the gaol fever; it had been brought on board their ship by a man who had been discharged from a prison in London, and it spread so much that the ship had to be laid up[198].

With the outbreak of the American War we begin to hear of still more disastrous epidemics of fever in the English fleets. Some instances from Robertson’s full collection must suffice[199]. The ‘Nonsuch’ left England in March, 1777, and fifty of her men were carried off by fever before December; in that month, the ‘Nonsuch,’ ‘Raisonable’ and ‘Somerset’ had each from 130 to 150 men on the sick list, chiefly fever in the ‘Somerset,’ and scurvy in the other two. In April, 1778, the ‘Venus,’ with a crew of 240, was at Rhode Island very sickly; the surgeon told Robertson that they had lost about fifty men of fever, which still continued to rage on board: they became sickly from being crowded with prisoners and cruising with them on board in bad weather. The ‘Somerset’ had buried 90 men of the fever since she left England, 70 of them being of the best seamen. On arriving at Spithead in October, 1779, Robertson found much fever in the Channel Fleet which had lately come in, especially in the ‘Canada,’ ‘Intrepid,’ ‘Shrewsbury,’ ‘London’ and ‘Namur,’ three or four of which were put past service, so much were they disabled by sickness. At Gibraltar Hospital from 12 January to 31 March, 1780, there were admitted 570 men from twenty-seven ships, of whom 57 died; of 110 sick from the ‘Ajax,’ 18 died; of 437 Spanish prisoners, 37 died. Next year, in May, 1781, at Gibraltar, the ‘Bellona’ had buried 27 men since she left England, and had 108 on the sick list. The ‘Cumberland’ had buried 15; of the ‘Marlborough’s’ men, 40 had died at the hospital. Robertson had to purchase at his own expense vegetable acids, fruit and vegetables for the sick.

Some statistics remain of the loss of men in the navy by sickness in the Seven Years’ War (1756-62) and in the American War[200]. The House of Commons had ordered a return of the number of seamen and marines raised and lost in the former; but the return was too general to be of much use, the number “lost” having included all those men who had been sent to hospital and never returned to their ships, all those who had been discharged as unserviceable, and all deserters. The number raised was 184,899, and the number “lost” 133,708, besides 1512 killed. The Return by the Navy Board for the period of the American War was more specific, showing only the number of the dead and killed.

Seamen and Marines raised, dead or killed, during the American War, 29 Sept., 1774, to 29 Sept., 1780:

Year Raised Dead Killed
1774 345 — —
1775 4,735 — —
1776 21,565 1679 105
1777 37,457 3247 40
1778 31,847 4801 254
1779 41,831 4726 551
1780 28,210 4092 293
175,990 18,545 1243

Fully a tenth part of the men raised were lost by sickness. Fever was the chief sickness, and as it happened rarely that more than one in ten cases of fever died, it will be easy to form an approximate estimate of the proportion of all the men raised for the ships that were on the sick list at one time or another with fever—nearly the whole, one might guess.

During the three last years of the period Haslar Hospital was constantly full of typhus fever. Admiral Keppel’s fleet arrived at Spithead on 26 October, 1778, and soon began to be infected with contagious fever; before the end of December, 3600 men had been sent to Haslar, which could make up at a pinch 1800 beds. But the great epidemic at Portsmouth was the next year, 1779, when the very large Channel Fleet under Sir Charles Hardy came in. During the month of September, 2500 men were received into hospital, and more than 1000 ill of fevers remained on board for want of room in the hospitals. In the last four months of 1779, 6064 sick were sent to Haslar, which had 2443 patients on 1 January, 1780. There was an additional hospital at Foston, holding 200, as well as two hospital ships holding 600. The infection was virulent during the winter, when Portsmouth was crowded with ships; and in the first five months of 1780, when 3751 cases of fever were admitted during the decline of the epidemic, one in eight died. The following shows how much fever preponderated at Haslar Hospital in 1780. In 8143 admissions on the medical side, the chief forms of sickness were as follows[201]:

Continued Fevers 5539
Scurvy 1457
Rheumatism 327
Flux 240
Consumption 218
Smallpox 42

Blane gives the instance of the ‘Intrepid,’ one of the Channel Fleet under Hardy in 1779: “Almost the whole of her crew either died at sea or were sent to the hospital upon arriving at Portsmouth. This ship, after refitting, was pretty healthy for a little time; but probably from the operation of the old adhering infection, she became extremely sickly immediately after joining our fleet and sent 200 men to the hospital after arriving in the West Indies. Most of these were ill of dysentery[202].” During a voyage of three weeks of the ‘Alcide’ and ‘Torbay’ from the Windward Islands to New York in September, 1780, nearly a half of the men were unfit. In the ‘Alcide’ it was a fever that raged, in the ‘Torbay’ it was a dysentery[203].

These experiences of fever in the ships of the Royal navy continued to the end of the 18th century. In Trotter’s time, as in Lind’s, receiving ships were a source of contagion to others, one ship of the kind, the ‘Cambridge’ having diffused fever among many ships of the Channel Fleet by men drafted from her[204].

Ship typhus was also an incident of the voyages of the East India Company’s ships, which nearly always carried troops. In the voyage of the ‘Talbot,’ 22 March—25 August, 1768, with 240 persons on board, “towards the end of July a fever of a very bad kind made its appearance, attended with delirium, low pulse, petechiae or livid vibices and hæmorrhages from the nose, of which one died and three or four escaped hard.” The sick were isolated, and the infection did not spread. Such outbreaks of typhus were not uncommon at sea, although the loss of life from them was small beside that from the fevers of Madagascar, Sumatra, Batavia and Bengal. The ship typhus usually began on board among the soldiers. The most notable point is that relapses were common, as Lind also observed at Haslar Hospital; some on board the ‘Lascelles’ in 1783 (150 attacks among 151 soldiers) had relapsed seven times. It does not appear, however, that the best class of merchantmen suffered greatly from fevers. Dr Clark, who compiled a report of the practice in fevers in the ships of the East India Company from 1770 to 1785, had reason to congratulate the Company on the general healthiness of their fleet:

“When ships set out at a proper season, when they are not too much crowded, when the weather is favourable, and no mismanagement appears, fewer lives are lost in these long voyages than in the most healthy country villages. And in perusing the medical journals I have the peculiar pleasure of finding that many ships have arrived in India without the loss of a single life by disease,” e.g. the ‘Valentine’ in 1784, seven months out, with 300 souls, no deaths, and the ‘Barrington’ in 1789, no deaths outward bound[205].

On the other hand, these English reports give incidentally the most unfavourable accounts of the Dutch East Indian ships. Three Dutch ships, then in Praya Bay, St Jago (Cape de Verde Islands), had buried 70 to 80 men each, and had some hundreds of sick on board. Another report says: “Before we left Table Bay several Dutch ships arrived, some of which had buried 80 people in the voyage from Holland. None lost less than 40 men. I am informed that some of their ships last year buried 200 men”—the causes of the sickness being overcrowding, filth, and the slowness of the voyages. One experience of the very worst kind happened to an English expedition consisting of the 100th regiment, the 98th regiment, the second battalion of the 42nd, and four additional companies. They had formed part of the force for the reduction of the Cape of Good Hope, whence they re-embarked for Bombay. During the voyage from Saldanha Bay a contagious fever and scurvy broke out among the troops, who were crowded and badly clothed; dead men were thrown overboard by dozens, and the regiments were reduced to a third of their original numbers. Six officers of the 100th regiment died, and an equal if not greater proportion of those of the 98th and 42nd.

The other chief occasion of ship typhus was the emigration to the American and West Indian colonies from Britain and Ireland. The Irish emigration was especially active from the beginning of the 18th century, owing to rack-renting and other causes. Madden[206] professed to know that one-third of the Irish who went to the West Indies (perhaps he should have included Carolina) perished either on the voyage or by diseases caught in the first weeks after landing; and as we know that typhus attended the Irish emigration in the 19th century, we may infer that the same was the cause of mortality in the 18th.

The trouble from ship-fever in the navy was so great all through the 18th century that many ingenious shifts were tried to overcome it. Towards the end of the century, the favourite device was fumigation with the vapour of mineral acids; one such plan, for which the Admiralty paid a good sum, ended in the burning of several ships to the water’s edge. An earlier plan was ventilation of the hold and ’tween decks by means of Sutton’s pipes[207], which found a strong advocate in the Rev. Stephen Hales, of the Royal Society[208].

Twice in the course of a paper to that learned body[209] he asserts that the noxious, putrid, close, confined, pestilential air of ships’ holds and ’tween decks “has destroyed millions of mankind”; on the other hand, according to the testimony of a captain of the navy, Sutton’s pipes had kept his ship free from fever. Lind caps this with the case of H.M.S. ‘Sheerness,’ bound to the East Indies. She was fitted with Sutton’s pipes, the dietary being at the same time so arranged that the men had salt meat only once a week. After a very long passage of five months and some days she arrived at the Cape of Good Hope without having had one man sick. “As the use of Sutton’s pipes had been then newly introduced into the king’s ships, the captain was willing to ascribe part of such an uncommon healthfulness in so long a run to their beneficial effects; but it was soon discovered that, by the neglect of the carpenter, the cock of the pipes had been all this while kept shut[210].”

Ship-fever was at length got rid of by more homely and more radical means than scientific ingenuity. Lind had shown one root of the evil to lie in the pressing of men just out of gaol. Admiral Boscawen, by his unaided wits, discovered another means of checking it. He avoided the mixing of fresh hands with crews seasoned to their ships, unless when some evident utility or necessity of service made it proper; “and upon this principle he used to resist the solicitation of captains, when they requested to carry men from one ship to another when changing their command[211].” Towards the end of the 18th century many reforms were made in the naval service—in the dietary, in the allowance of soap, in keeping the bilges clean, in the use of iron and lead instead of timber; so that Blane dates from the year 1796 a new era in the health of the navy[212].