I will now relate as a fitting end to these long reminiscences what I witnessed forty years ago in the island of Mauritius, when death was having a fine harvest by the ravages of a plague, and how a hurricane—terrific in even that so-called focus of hurricanes, and compared with which the storms we occasionally encounter in Merrie England are but gentle zephyrs—obliterated all the germs of infection.
It was in ’67 that a terrible epidemic—new to science—burst without warning on the beautiful island of Mauritius. Its very symptoms were unfamiliar to the faculty, and so, for a better name, it was called jungle fever. Fever and ague were its chief characteristics, followed by absolute prostration, and death with alarming rapidity.
Like its dread ally cholera, its first appearance was irresistible; then the attack became less formidable, and as the atmosphere became saturated with its poisonous germs, every living thing suffered from exhaustion, and man and beast literally dragged one leg after another, and almost prayed for release.
The scourge, it was supposed, had been introduced by the 100,000 Madras coolies who worked on the sugar plantations under conditions as nearly approaching slavery as our beneficent Government would admit.
It was under these depressing circumstances that a British regiment, 800 strong, and in the best of health, was landed, and within a month not 100 would have been available for duty. Not daring to keep them in Port Louis, where the deaths were some 400 a day, the regiment was split into fragments and billeted wherever an empty outhouse or a few obsolete tents could afford temporary shelter. But the ingenuity of the inefficient staff in no way averted the danger, and within a month a dozen minor centres were created, where British soldiers succumbed and died who ought never to have been disembarked.
Not an officer who was sufficiently well but had to read the burial service almost daily over Protestant and Catholic comrades, and not a drum was heard whilst the scant ceremony was being repeated and repeated in its terrible monotony.
To make matters worse quinine, which ordinarily costs a few pence, was selling at auction at £30 per ounce. Then the supply ran out, and so valuable did the drug become that the dose a dying man’s stomach could not retain was carefully bottled up for the next urgent case.
Soon the very wood for coffins ran short, and the carpenters who made the ghastly necessaries were themselves dead or dying, so long trenches were improvised in which the dead were laid in rows.
Every house bewailed a departed relative, for there was no pitying angel to sprinkle the door-posts in that remote isle of the sea, and the sound of wailing went up from Indian compound and European cantonment alike as, smiting their breasts, the cry ascended to Brahmah and the God of the Christians to stay the hand of the destroying angel.
Truly the grasshopper had become a burden and desire failed, when a change as sudden as the arrival of the terrible scourge ensued, and a hurricane, unprecedented in its violence, swept over the island for days.