At this time the number of sick on board amounted to forty, and the rest of the ship's company were in a very feeble condition. Every individual had been sick except the sail-maker, an old man between seventy and eighty years of age; and it is very remarkable, that this old man, during our stay at this place, was constantly drunk every day:[128] We had buried seven, the surgeon, three seamen, Mr Green's servant, Tupia, and Tayeto, his boy. All but Tupia fell a sacrifice to the unwholesome, stagnant, putrid air of the country, and he who, from his birth, had been used to subsist chiefly upon vegetable food, particularly ripe fruit, soon contracted all the disorders that are incident to a sea life, and would probably have sunk under them before we could have completed our voyage, if we had not been obliged to go to Batavia to refit.
[Footnote 128: Cases similar to this are of constant occurrence, and are familiarly known to medical men who have a principle to account for it. The continual operation of exciting causes so as to produce a certain degree of action of the system, will prevent, as well as remedy, diseases of debility. The plague has been kept off by a like treatment on the same principle, and so has the ague, an intermitting fever so formidable in some countries. Giving over or abating of this stimulating treatment, however, if other circumstances remain the same, will, of course, render the person as obnoxious as ever to attack, or rather more so. It is evident that at times this cure is as bad as the disease; for scarcely any state of health is more deplorably fatal than constant drunkenness.--E.]
SECTION XXXVIII.
Some Account of Batavia, and the adjacent Country; with their Fruits, Flowers, and other Productions.
Batavia, the capital of the Dutch dominions in India, and generally supposed to have no equal among all the possessions of the Europeans in Asia, is situated on the north side of the island of Java, in a low fenny plain, where several small rivers, which take their rise in the mountains called Blaeuwen Berg, about forty miles up the country, empty themselves into the sea, and where the coast forms a large bay, called the Bay of Batavia, at the distance of about eight leagues from the streight of Sunda. It lies in latitude 6° 10' S., and longitude 106° 50' E. from the meridian of Greenwich, as appears from astronomical observations made upon the spot, by the Rev. Mr Mohr, who has built an elegant observatory, which is as well furnished with instruments as most in Europe.[129]
[Footnote 129: Batavia, called by some writers, the Queen of the East, on account of its wealth and the beauty of its buildings, is situate very near the sea, in a fertile plain, watered by the river Jaccatra, which divides the town. The sea-shore is on the north of the city; and on the south the land rises with a very gentle slope to the mountains, which are about fifteen leagues inland. One of these is of great height, and is called the Blue Mountain. The early history of this city is given in the tenth volume of the Modern Universal History, to which the reader is referred for information which it would perhaps be tedious to detail in this place. Batavia, the reader will easily imagine, has been much impaired by the calamities of her European parent; but, indeed, for some considerable time before they commenced, she had very materially declined in consequence and power.--E.]
The Dutch seem to have pitched upon this spot for the convenience of water-carriage, and in that it is indeed a second Holland, and superior to every other place in the world. There are very few streets that have not a canal of considerable breadth running through them, or rather stagnating in them, and continued for several miles in almost every direction beyond the town, which is also intersected by five or six rivers, some of which are navigable thirty or forty miles up the country.[130] As the houses are large, and the streets wide, it takes up a much greater extent, in proportion to the number of houses it contains, than any city in Europe. Valentyn, who wrote an account of it about the year 1726, says, that in his time there were, within the walls, 1242 Dutch houses, and 1200 Chinese; and without the walls, 1066 Dutch, and 1240 Chinese, besides 12 arrack houses, making in all 4760: But this account appeared to us to be greatly exaggerated, especially with respect to the number of houses within the walls.
[Footnote 130: The river Jaccatra, as has been mentioned, runs through the city, viz. from south to north, and having three bridges, one near the castle, at the lower end, another at the upper end, and the third about the centre of the town. It is from 160 to 180 feet broad, within the city, and is fortified, though indifferently, at its mouth, which, however, is of less importance, as a continually increasing bar renders access to the city by it impracticable for large vessels.--E.]
The streets are spacious and handsome, and the banks of the canals are planted with rows of trees, that make a very pleasing appearance; but the trees concur with the canals to make the situation unwholesome.[131] The stagnant canals in the dry season exhale an intolerable stench, and the trees impede the course of the air, by which, in some degree, the putrid effluvia would be dissipated. In the wet season the inconvenience is equal, for then these reservoirs of corrupted water overflow their banks in the lower part of the town, especially in the neighbourhood of the hotel, and fill the lower stories of the houses, where they leave behind them an inconceivable quantity of slime and filth: Yet these canals are sometimes cleaned; but the cleaning them is so managed as to become as great a nuisance as the foulness of the water; for the black mud that is taken from the bottom is suffered to lie upon the banks, that is, in the middle of the street, till it has acquired a sufficient degree of hardness to be made the lading of a boat, and carried away. As this mud consists chiefly of human ordure, which is regularly thrown into the canals every morning, there not being a necessary-house in the whole town, it poisons the air while it is drying, to a considerable extent. Even the running streams become nuisances in their turn, by the nastiness or negligence of the people; for every now and then a dead hog, or a dead horse, is stranded upon the shallow parts, and it being the business of no particular person to remove the nuisance, it is negligently left to time and accident. While we were here, a dead buffalo lay upon the shoal of a river that ran through one of the principal streets, above a week, and at last was carried away by a flood.[132]
[Footnote 131: Some of the streets are paved, but they consist of a hard clay which allows of being made plain and smooth; and within the city there are stone foot paths along their sides.--E.]