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.
The first accounts of Sea Scurvy.
The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the sequel have been taken.
In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, “by reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger.” Nineteen men, as well as a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some twenty-five or thirty others were sick, “so that there was in a manner none without some disease[1121].”
There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and 1587 (in which last he got to 73° N.) are as nearly as possible free from records of sickness.
Jacques Cartier’s second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their number from “pestilence.”
“The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet; then did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, arms, and neck; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole; so that one could not help the other.... There were already 8 dead and more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery.” The body of one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of red water about it[1123]; his liver was indifferent fair; but his lungs black and mortified ... his milt toward the back was somewhat perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone.
“From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four; then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself! for it was a singular remedy against that disease.” The Indian’s advice was “to take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the legs that is sick.”...
“It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used of it, by the grace of God recovered their health.”
In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, issued from La Rochelle[1124]. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter: “In the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their lymmes: and there died about fiftie.”