July 17th.—On this day, having discovered a young friend ill in the Writer’s Buildings, we brought him to our house. Two days afterwards I was seized with the fever, from which I did not recover for thirteen days. My husband nursed me with great care, until he fell ill himself, and eleven of our servants were laid up with the same disorder.
The people in Calcutta have all had it; I suppose, out of the whole population, European and native, not two hundred persons have escaped; and what is singular, it has not occasioned one death amongst the adult. I was so well and strong—over night we were talking of the best means of escaping the epidemic—in the morning it came and remained thirty-six hours, then quitted me; a strong eruption came out, like the measles, and left me weak and thin. My husband’s fever left him in thirty-six hours, but he was unable to quit the house for nine days: the rash was the same. Some faces were covered with spots like those on a leopard’s skin. It was so prevalent, that the Courts of Justice, the Custom House, the Lottery Office, and almost every public department in Calcutta, were closed in consequence of the sickness. In the course of three days, three different physicians attended me, one after the other having fallen ill. It is wonderful, that a fever producing so much pain in the head and limbs, leaving the patient weak, reduced, and covered with a violent eruption, should have been so harmless; after three weeks, nobody appeared to have suffered, with the exception of two or three children, whom it attacked more violently than it did grown-up people, and carried them off.
The politicians at home have anticipated us in reckoning upon the probability of a Burmese war. We have hitherto been altogether successful. I saw yesterday a gold and a silver sword, and a very murderous looking weapon resembling a butcher’s knife, but on a larger scale. A necklace (so called from its circling the neck, for it was composed of plates of gold hammered on a silken string), and some little squab images, gods, perhaps, taken from a chief, whom Major Sale of H. M. 13th, dispatched in an attack upon a stockade, leaving the chief in exchange part of the blade of his own sword, which was broken in his skull by the force of the blow that felled him.
It is an unlucky business: the Company certainly do not require at present more territory on that side India, and the expense to which Government is put by this elegant little mill, as Pierce Egan might call it, is more than the worthies in Leadenhall-street suppose.
I see Lord Hastings is made Civil Governor of Malta! “To what base uses we may return!” I observe the motion to prevent the necessity of parents sending their sons to Haileybury has been lost. The grand object of the students should be the acquisition of the oriental languages; here nothing else tells.
If a young man gets out of college in three or four months after his arrival, which, if he crams at college in England, he may easily effect, he is considered forthwith as a brilliant character, and is sealed with the seal of genius. Likewise pockets medals and money, and this he may do without knowing any thing else.
To a person fresh from England, the number of servants attending at table is remarkable. We had only a small party of eight to dinner yesterday, including ourselves; three-and-twenty servants were in attendance! Each gentleman takes his own servant or servants, in number from one to six, and each lady her attendant or attendants, as it pleases her fancy. The Hooqŭ was very commonly smoked at that time in Calcutta: before dinner was finished, every man’s pipe was behind his chair. The tobacco was generally so well prepared, that the odour was not unpleasant, unless by chance you sat next to a man from the Mofussil, when the fume of the spices used by the up country Hooqŭ Bardārs in preparing the tobacco, rendered it oppressive and disagreeable.
Sept. 1st.—The fever has quitted Calcutta, and travelled up the country stage by stage. It was amusing to see, upon your return to the Course, the whole of the company stamped, like yourself, with the marks of the leech upon the temples. Its origin has been attributed to many causes, and it has been called by many names. The gentlemen of the lancet are greatly divided in their opinions; some attribute it to the want of rain, others to the scarcity of thunder and lightning this season. There was an instance of the same general fever prevailing in the time of Warren Hastings. Not a single instance has been heard of its having proved mortal to adults.
Extract from a homeward-bound epistle.
“The cold season is fast approaching, when every one becomes, per force, most amiable. Indeed we are all creatures of a different order during this delightful time. You in England cannot fancy the sensible feeling of actual enjoyment our bodies and minds experience from this exhilarating change. We live upon the thought of it for months; it must beat the snake casting his skin. I feel quite invigorated even at describing its effects.