One of the first observations was made in the case of a Scotch vessel in the influenza of 1732-33[781]. The epidemic was earlier in Scotland than in England; it began suddenly in Edinburgh on 17 December, 1732, the horses having been attacked with running of the nose towards the end of October. About the time when the disease began among mankind, in December, a vessel, the ‘Anne and Agnes’ sailed from Leith for Holland. One sailor was sick on this voyage. She sailed on the return voyage to Leith, with the other ten of her crew in perfect health. Just as she made the English coast at Flamborough Head on the 15th of January, 1733, six of the sailors fell ill together, two more the next day, and one more on the day after that, so that when the vessel anchored in Leith Roads there was only one man well, and he fell ill on the day following the arrival. The symptoms were the common ones of the reigning epidemic. The dates are not given more precisely or fully than as above. Influenza was prevalent in Germany and Holland somewhat earlier than in Scotland or England; the men may, of course, have imbibed the infection when they were in the Dutch port, just as it is almost certain that the crews of Drake’s fleet in 1587 had received during a ten days’ stay upon the island of St Jago, of the Cape de Verde group, the miasmatic infection of which they suddenly fell sick in large numbers together in mid-Atlantic some six days after sailing to the westward.
This early case of the ‘Anne and Agnes’ in 1733 may pass as an ambiguous one. The next occasion when influenza on board ship attracted much notice was the epidemic of 1782.
On the 6th of May, Admiral Kempenfelt sailed from Spithead with seven ships of the line and a frigate, on a cruize to the westward; on the 18th May, he came into Torbay, and sailed again soon after; on the 30th May he came again into Torbay with eight sail of the line and three frigates, and on 1 June sailed again to the westward. Sometime before his squadron put into Torbay for the second time, influenza had appeared among them at sea, it is said in the ‘Goliath’ on the 29th of May[782]. A letter from Plymouth, of the 2nd June, after referring to the violence of influenza in that town, at the Dock, and on board the men-of-war lying there, says that the ‘Fortitude’ of 74 guns, and ‘Latona’ frigate came in that afternoon with 250 sick men from the fleet under Admiral Kempenfelt, mostly with fevers. Another Plymouth letter two days later (4 June) says: “Kempenfelt is returning to Torbay: he could keep the sea no longer, on account of the sickness that rages on board his fleet. More than 400 men have been brought to the hospital this morning. Our men drop down with it by scores at a time. The ‘Latona’ frigate, that sailed the other day is returned, the officers being the only hands that could work the ship[783].”
This outbreak on board ships in the Channel was fully as early as the great development of influenza in 1782 on shore, whether in London or Plymouth; but there were almost certainly cases of it at the latter port before the ‘Latona’ sailed to join Kempenfelt’s squadron. Robertson, however, who was surgeon on the ‘Romney’ in the Channel service at that time, says that “hundreds in different ships, towns, and counties, which had no communication with one another, were seized nearly as suddenly and so nigh the same instant as if they had been electrified.... The companies of many of the ships were very well at bed-time, and in the morning there were hardly enough able to do the common business of the ship[784].” This is confirmed by McNair, surgeon of the ‘Fortitude,’ who told Trotter that two hundred of her men, as she lay in Torbay, were seized in one night and were unable to come on deck in the morning[785].
There was another English fleet in the North Sea at the same time, under Lord Howe, watching the Dutch fleet or seeking to intercept the Dutch East Indiamen.
Howe sailed from St Helen’s on the 9th May, with twelve ships of the line. Towards the end of that month he had his fleet in the Texel; the men were in excellent health, “when a cutter arrived from the Admiralty, and the signal was given for an officer from each ship [to come on board the admiral]. An officer was accordingly sent with a boat’s crew from every vessel, and returned with orders, carrying with them also, however, the influenza”—which soon prostrated the crews to the same extraordinary extent as in the ships under Kempenfelt at the other end of the Channel. This was the oral account given to Professor Gregory of Edinburgh, by a lieutenant on board a sixty-four gun ship[786]. Another account says that the disorder first appeared in Howe’s fleet on the Dutch coast about the end of May, on board the ‘Ripon,’ and in two days after in the ‘Princess Amelia’; other ships of the same fleet were affected with it at different periods, some indeed, not until their return to Portsmouth about the second week of June. “This fleet, also, had no communication with the shore until their return to the Downs, on their way back to Portsmouth, towards the 3d and 4th of June[787].”
But, apart from the story of the Admiralty despatch-boat carrying the influenza to Howe’s squadron, it appears that both Kempenfelt and Howe were joined from time to time by additional ships, which might have carried an atmosphere of influenza with them[788]. Still, it was an influenza atmosphere that they had carried, and not merely so many sick persons. The doctrine of contagion from person to person would have to be so widened as to become meaningless, if all those experiences of the fleet in 1782 were to be brought within it. In the history both of sweating sickness and of influenza, there are instances of the disease breaking out suddenly in a place after someone’s arrival; but the new arrival may not have had the disease, it was enough that he came from a place where the disease was[789]. That was, perhaps, the reason why Beddoes, in his inquiry of 1803, framed one of his questions so as to elicit information about the dispersal of influenza by fomites.
It is not easy to prove that a ship may meet with an atmosphere of influenza on the high seas; but many have believed that ships have done so. Webster says: “The disease invades seamen on the ocean in the same [western] hemisphere, when a hundred leagues from land, at the same time that it invades people on shore. Of this I have certain evidence from the testimony of American captains of vessels, who have been on their passage from the continent to the West India Islands during the prevalence of this disease[790].” There are several instances of this, authenticated with times, places, and other data of credibility.
The best known of these is the voyage of the East Indiaman ‘Asia’ in September, 1780, through the China Sea from Malacca to Canton: “When the ship left Malacca, there was no epidemic disease in the place; when it arrived at Canton it was found that at the very time when they had the Influenza on board the Atlas (sic) in the China seas, it had raged at Canton with as much violence as it did in London in June, 1782, and with the very same symptoms[791].”
In the present century, the cases nearly all come from the medical reports of the navies of Great Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and they relate to ships on foreign service—in the East Indies, the Pacific, Africa, or other foreign stations. In some of the instances influenza went through a ship’s company in port or in a roadstead, others are examples of outbreaks at sea: