[416] Ireland’s Natural History, &c. Written by Gerard Boate, late Doctor of Physick to the State in Ireland. And now published by Samuel Hartlib, Esquire. Lond. 1652. The author died at Dublin, shortly after his arrival there, on 9/19 January 1650/49. His information would seem to have come in part from his brother Arnold Boate, resident in Ireland.
[417] Hardiman, History of Galway, p. 126 seq. The plague from July 1649 to Lady Day 1650 is said to have swept away 3700 of the inhabitants, including 210 of the most respectable burgesses and freemen, with their families. The capitulation on 5 April, 1652, was followed by famine throughout the country, and by a revival of plague for two years, “during which upwards of one-third of the population of the province was swept away.”
[418] Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, II. 55, 77.
[419] Edmund Borlase, History of the Reduction of Ireland to the Crown of England. 1675, p. 172.
[420] Boyle’s Works, fol. Lond. 1744, V. 92.
[421] The war-pestilence at Londonderry in 1689 is the third recorded epidemic of the kind there, not including what may have happened in the capture of the town by the Catholics in O’Neill’s rebellion, when Derry was destroyed, to be rebuilt in 1613 by the London Companies with a new charter under the name of Londonderry. The first historical occasion of sickness was in 1566. The troops of Elizabeth were landed on Loch Foyle in October and built their huts on the site of the old monastery. In the course of the winter the greater part of a force of 1100 men perished by dysentery and the infection which it breeds (see former volume, p. 372). On 12 Dec. 1642, a year after the outbreak of the Rebellion of Confederate Catholics, a petition of the agents of the distressed city of Londonderry to the Commons represented that there were 6059 persons in the city, whereof 5123 were women and children, or sick, aged or impotent; only 2000 were inhabitants of the city, the rest having fled there for safety. Spotted fever had broken out. (Hist. MSS. Comis. V. “MSS. of the House of Lords.”)
[422] With the exception of the last quoted piece of information, the most minute particulars of the siege of Londonderry are in an essay by an army chaplain, John Mackenzie, A Narrative of the Siege of Londonderry, London, 1690, which was written to correct and augment A True Account of the Siege of Londonderry by the Rev. Mr George Walker, rector of Donoghmoore in the county of Tyrone, and late Governor of Derry. London, 1689.
[423] See former volume, pp. 634-43.
[424] Minute particulars of it are given in An Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland [1689-1692]. By George Story, Chaplain to Sir Thomas Gower’s Regiment. London, 1693. Part I.
[425] Gangrene of the extremities was one of the symptoms of the “plague of Athens” as described by Thucydides. There is no need to invoke ergotism for an explanation of it, as some have done.