With this design and with these views, leaving my collection in the Louvre, I started with the Indians for Bruxelles, where we arrived the next evening.
We were all delighted with the appearance of Bruxelles, and the Indians in fine glee, in the fresh recollections of the honours just paid them in Paris, and the golden prospect which they considered now lay before them. But little did they dream, poor fellows! of the different fate that there awaited them. While resting a few days, preparing for the commencement of their exhibitions, they were kindly invited, with the author, to attend the soirée of the American Minister, Mr. Clemson, where they were ushered into a brilliant and numerous crowd of distinguished and fashionable people, and seemed to be the lions of the evening, admired and complimented by all, and their way was thus paved for the commencement of their exhibitions. I had in the mean time made all the preparations and the necessary outlays for their operations, which they merely began upon, when it became necessary to suspend their exhibitions, owing to one of the number having been taken sick with the small-pox.
I had at this time an audience appointed with the King, at the Palace, where I went and was most kindly received and amused in half an hour’s conversation with His Majesty about the condition and modes of the American Indians. He expressed the deepest sympathy for them and solicitude for their welfare and protection, and, a few days after my audience, transmitted to me, through one of his ministers, a beautiful gold medal, with an appropriate inscription on it.
The nature of the sickness that had now appeared amongst the Indians prevented the contemplated interview at the Palace, and also all communication with the public. It was still hoped by the physicians that a few days would remove all difficulty, but it was destined to be otherwise, for in a few days two others were attacked, and in a day or two more another and another, and at last they were in that pitiable and alarming state that seven of them were on their backs with that awful and (to them) most fatal of all diseases.
My position then, as the reader will perceive, was one of a most distressing and painful kind, with my natural sympathy for their race, and now with the whole responsibility for the expenses, lives, and welfare of these poor people on my shoulders, their only friend and protector in a foreign country, as their conductor had left them and returned to London, and my own life in imminent danger whilst I was attending on them.
One of these poor fellows died in the course of a few days in their rooms, another died in one of the hospitals to which he was removed, and a third died a few days after they reached London, though he was in good health when he travelled across the Channel.
Such were the melancholy results of this awful catastrophe, which the reader will easily see broke up all their plans of exhibitions in Belgium, and ended in the death of three of the finest men of the party.
Their sickness in Bruxelles detained me there near two months before the survivors were well enough to travel, during which gloomy time I had opportunity enough to test the fidelity of my man Daniel and his attachment to the Indians, who stayed by them night and day, fearless of his own danger, as he lifted them about in his arms in their loathsome condition both when dead and alive.
When the party were well enough to travel I went to Antwerp with them, and placed them on a steamer for London, having paid their fare and given them a little money to cover their first expenses when they should arrive there. I then took leave of them, and returned to my little family in Paris, having been absent near three months, with an expenditure of 350l.
With the poor fellows who died there seemed to be a presentiment with each, the moment he was broken out with the disease, that he was to die, and a very curious circumstance attended this conviction in each case.