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].