“The dysentery, or flux, so fatal to this worthy person, is commonly termed the country disease; and well it may, for it reigns nowhere so epidemically as in Ireland; tainting strangers as well as natives. But whether it proceeds from the peculiar disposition of the air, errour in diet, the laxity and waterishness of the meat, or some occult cause, no venomous creature living there to suck that which may be thought (in other countries) well distributed amongst reptilious animals, I shall not determine, though each of these circumstances may well conduce to its strength and vigour. Certain it is that regular diet preserves most from the violence, and many from the infection of this disease; yet as that which is thought very soveraign—I must say that the stronger cordial liquors (viz. brandy, usquebeh, treacle and Mithridate waters) are very proper, or the electuaries themselves, and the like[419].”
From the Restoration to the Revolution little is known of epidemics in Ireland. It is probable that Dublin and the other considerable towns fared much the same as English towns. A Dublin physician writing to Robert Boyle on 27 February, 1682, speaks of a petechial fever, marked by leaping of the tendons, which had been fatal to very many in that city for these twelve or fourteen months[420]. With the Revolution the troubles of the country begin again, and enter on their peculiarly modern phase. For our history, two characteristic incidents come at the very beginning of the new period of disorder among the Irish—the sicknesses of the siege of Londonderry and the unparalleled havoc of disease among the troops of Schomberg in the camp of Dundalk. In both, the old “country disease,” which had affected Cromwell’s troops, was the primary malady, occurring, of course, in circumstances special enough to have bred it anywhere; in both, the dysentery was attended or followed by typhus fever, the old “Irish ague;” and although the epidemics of Londonderry and Dundalk in 1689 are properly examples of war sickness, yet the circumstances of each may help to realize the connexion between dysentery and typhus in the ordinary history of the Irish.
Dysentery and Fever at Londonderry and Dundalk, 1689.
The siege of Londonderry[421] by the Catholic Irish army of James II. began in April and ended on 28 July, having lasted 105 days. On 19 April the garrison numbered 7020 men, and the total of men, women and children in the town was estimated at 30,000, a number which included refugees from the neighbouring country and would have been more but for many Protestants at the beginning of the siege leaving the city and taking “protection” at the hands of the besiegers. On 21 May, a collection was made for the poor, who began to be in want. Sickness is heard of on 5 June, when several that were sick were killed in their beds by the enemy’s bombs. The dread of the bombs in the houses caused the people to lie about the walls or in places remote from the houses all night, so that many of them, especially the women and children, caught cold, which along with the want of rest and failing food, threw them into fluxes and fevers. The pinch of hunger began to be felt before the middle of June, about which time and for six weeks after the fluxes and fevers were rife. A great mortality spread through the garrison as well as the inhabitants; fifteen captains and lieutenants died in one day, and it was estimated that ten thousand died during the siege, “besides those who died soon after.” The want, the dysentery, the fever and the vast numbers of dead every day must have produced a horrible state of things; when, on 2 July, five hundred useless persons were put outside the walls, to disperse as they best could, the besiegers are said to have recognized them when they met them “by the smell.”
About the middle of June large quantities of provisions were found in cellars and places of concealment under ground; after that the garrison had always bread, although the allowance was small. An ingenious man discovered how to make pancakes of starch and tallow, of which articles there was no lack; the pancakes not only proved nutritious, but are said to have been an infallible cure of the flux, or preservative from it. At length, on 28 July some of the victuallers and ships of war which had been in Lough Foyle since the 15th of June, sailed up to the head of the Lough on the evening flood tide, finding little resistance from the enemy’s batteries and none from “what was left of” the tide-tossed boom of logs across the mouth of the river. Provisions poured in, and the siege was raised; but it is clear that the infection continued for some time after, having been found among such of the released garrison as repaired to Schomberg’s camp at Dundalk.
The Catholic army is said (by the Protestants) to have lost 8000 or 9000 before the walls of Londonderry, “most by the sword, the rest of fever and flux, and the French pox, which was very remarkable on the bodies of several of the dead officers and soldiers[422].”
Not far off, at Dundalk, there began, a few weeks after, an extraordinary outbreak of war-sickness, which, unlike the pestilence in Londonderry, was altogether inglorious in its circumstances. In many respects it resembled the disaster to Cromwell’s troops at the first occupying of Jamaica in 1655-56[423]; but it was worse than that, and it is probably unexampled in the military annals of Britain[424].
Supplies had been voted in Parliament for quelling the Catholic rebellion in Ireland, and an expedition was got together under the illustrious Marshal, Duke of Schomberg. The force consisted of some ten thousand foot, most of them raw levies from the English peasantry, with one regiment of seasoned Dutch troops (“the blue Dutch”), and cavalry. While the bulk of the force was undisciplined, their clothes, food, tents and other munitions of war were bad or insufficient through the fraud of contractors. The expedition embarked at Hoylake on the Dee and landed on the 15th of August, 1689, nearly three weeks after the relief of Londonderry, at Bangor, on the south side of Belfast Lough. Schomberg took Carrickfergus, and began to advance on Dublin; but finding the towns burned and the country turned into a desert, he threw himself into an entrenched camp around the head of Dundalk Bay, nearly a mile from the town of Dundalk. His camp was on a low moist bottom at the foot of the hills. The Irish Catholic army took up a position among the hills “on high sound ground,” not more than two miles distant from the English lines, and, being in superior force, in due time they offered battle, which was declined. Schomberg, who had been joined by the Enniskillen regiments of dragoons and by men from Londonderry, had under him some 2000 horse and not less than 12,000 foot at the time when James II. offered battle. The undisciplined state of his English troops and the suspected treachery of a body of French Protestants were among the causes that held Schomberg back; but he had to reckon also with sickness almost from the moment of sitting down at Dundalk. At a muster on 25 September, several of the regiments were grown thin “by reason of the distemper then beginning to seize our men.” The distemper was dysentery and fever. The two maladies were mixed up, as they usually are in war and famines, the flux commonly preceding the fever, and perhaps affording the virulent matters in the soil and in the air upon which the epidemic prevalence of the fever depends. It was easy to account for the dysentery among the troops at Dundalk; but as to the fever, there was an ambiguity at the outset which Story is careful to note: “And yet I cannot but think that the feaver was partly brought to our camp by some of those people that came from Derry; for it was observable that after some of them were come amongst us, it was presently spread over the whole army, yet I did not find many of themselves died of it.” Where the cause of death is specially named, it is fever, as in the cases of Sir Thomas Gower, Colonel Wharton and other officers on the 28th and 29th October. The fever was a most malignant form of typhus, marked by the worst of all symptoms, gangrene of the extremities, so that the toes or a whole foot would fall off when the surgeon was applying a dressing[425].
It seems probable that most of the enormous mortality was caused by infection, and not by dysentery due to primary exciting causes.