Darwin (Naturalist’s Voyage in the Beagle, p. 366) says: “The island of St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy.” But the Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun.
[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286.
[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in Society in the Elizabethan Age. London, 1886, p. 120.
[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583.
[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp. 809, 810.
[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52.
[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins’s own narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author’s death in 1622).
[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (Dict. of National Biography. Art. “Hawkins, Sir Richard”) points out that Hawkins’s narrative of the ‘Daintie’s’ voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in Drake’s fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy.
[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877.
[1142] Ibid. p. 1623.