[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501.
[1127] Sir James Stephen’s Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, pop. ed. p. 125.
[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99.
[1129] The famous figure in Paradise Lost (IV. 159) is taken from the route to India passing within Madagascar—a poetic colouring of dreary and painful realities:—
As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the blest; with such delay
Well pleas’d they slack their course, and many a league
Cheer’d with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles:
[1130] The World Encompassed &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and Hakluyt, III. 740.
[1131] A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage begun in the year 1585. Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes.
[1132] Mr Froude (History, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy in his bold guess of “yellow fever.” At the same time the enthymeme by which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in assuming that the infection “broke out” after the capture of Cartagena, ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed as an infection there in the 16th century.
[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot ‘Duck’ in Drake’s expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593 (Purchas, IV. 1368):
These islands are “one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months’ sickness, with no small hazard of life.” He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, “coming cold and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature, and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health.” This seems to refer to the epidemic in Drake’s fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill.