A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) / From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague

None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed prevalence, after a year’s interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647 to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of Leicestershire.

Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War. Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]:

The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths, beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646, and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same household are buried in one day, one is “buried in the field,” another “in his croft.” The vicar sums up the mortality thus: “There dyed in the towne of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and nineteen.” The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine, and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded 159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle.

Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in 1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an epidemic in the town of Stafford.

One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, “suspected she died of the plague.” A leaf of the register has the following: “From December 6, 1646, till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262 persons”—a number greater than the register shows in detail. The stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after another. In November or December, 1645, Goring’s Royalist cavalry, to the number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000, and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of November, 1645. “By reason of the season,” says Rushworth, “and want of accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax’s army,” and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January 8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them; what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history. Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous.

Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at Reading[1099], which affected “a great number of poor people,” and the other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an outbreak of plague in 1646 credible.

Carlisle suffered much from the war for a series of years. In July, 1644, it was seized for the Royalists, and was besieged by Lesley in October, the siege lasting many months. It had a garrison of about 700, including some of the townsfolk armed. About the end of February, 1645, all the corn in the town was seized to be served out on short allowance; on June 5, “hempseed, dogs and rats were eaten.” The surrender was on June 25, and the place was held by a Scots garrison until December, 1646. It was again seized for the Royalists in April, 1648, was recaptured by Cromwell in October, and held by a strong garrison of 800 foot and a regiment of horse, besides dragoons to keep the borders. All Cumberland was in such a state of destitution that the Parliament ordered a collection for its relief; numbers of the poor are said to have died in the highways, and 30,000 families were in want of bread[1101].

Plague in Scotland during the Civil Wars.

Connecting with plagues in the north of England, there was a great prevalence of the infection in Scotland. After the storming of Newcastle by the Scots Covenanters in October, 1644, the plague appeared in Edinburgh, Kelso, Borrowstownness, Perth and other places. On April 1, 1645, Kelso was burned down, the fire having originated in a house that was being “clengit” or disinfected after plague in it. At Edinburgh the plague-stricken were housed in huts in the King’s park below Salisbury Crags. Collections were made for the relief of people in Leith impoverished by the plague. The epidemic in and around Perth is said to have given rise to the story of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who fled from the plague-tainted ground and built themselves a bower by a burn side[1102]. At Glasgow the infection was severe in the end of 1646, and did not cease entirely until the autumn of 1648. There are numerous references to it in the letters of principal Baillie of Glasgow University, of which the following are the most important[1103].

On September 5, 1645, he writes that the pest has laid Leith and Edinburgh desolate, and rages in many more places: never such a pest seen in Scotland (in his time, perhaps). About January, 1646, he writes of “the crushing of our nation by pestilence and Montrose’s victories.” At the end of that year, the plague was in Glasgow: on January 26, 1647, during winter cold, “all that may are fled out of it.” On June 2, the plague had scattered the St Andrews’ students, the principal of St Leonard’s College was dead of it, and it was killing many in the north. The same summer, principal Baillie was shut up in the town of Kilwinning, cut off, with all the inhabitants, from communication with the outer world owing to a suspicion of plague in the place. Edinburgh and Leith, which had suffered earliest, were almost free in the autumn of 1647, but “Aberdeen, Brechin and other parts of the north are miserably wasted; the schools and colleges now in all Scotland, but Edinburgh, are scattered.” Glasgow had its worst experience of plague in the summer and autumn of 1648, which were wet seasons: on August 23, “our condition for the time is sad; the plague is also in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.... At this time I grieved for the state of Glasgow.... My brother’s son’s house was infected; my brother’s house enclosed many in danger; one night near a dozen died of the sickness.... The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate famine; but these three days past there is also a great change of weather; the Lord continue it.” The infection which began at Glasgow in January, 1647, reached Aberdeen in April, having been carried, it was said, by a woman from Brechin. It was still raging at Aberdeen in September, and there were straggling cases as late as November of the following year (1648). The deaths from plague are put down at 1600, besides 140 in the adjacent fishing villages of Futtie and Torrie on either side of the Dee mouth. This enormous mortality ensued despite the usual rigorous measures—the removal of the infected to huts on the Links and Woolmanhill, a cordon of soldiers to shut them in, a gibbet for the disobedient, and “clengers” for the infected houses[1104]. This disastrous epidemic of 1647-1648 is the last that is heard of plague in Scotland.

Plague in Chester &c. and in Ireland, 1647-1650.

The two remaining English plagues of those years were both in cities that had suffered much from plague before, and were in a constant state of turmoil during the war, namely Chester and Shrewsbury. Chester was held for the king, and surrendered to the Parliament on February 3, 1646, after a siege of twenty weeks, during the latter part of which there was famine within the walls. It was not until 1647 that plague broke out. From June 22 until April 20, 1648, the numbers that died of plague are stated in the MS. of Dr Cowper to have been 2099; all business was suspended, and cabins for the plague-stricken were built outside the town[1105].

The Shrewsbury plague of 1650, like that of Chester, is described as having been dreadful in its effects upon the town. It broke out during the occupation by the Parliament’s troops, on June 12, 1650, in a house in Frankwell, and continued until January, 1651. Only one parish, St Chad’s, appears to have kept account of the plague-deaths: in that register from June 12 to January 16, there are entered 277 burials, whereof of the plague 250, the highest monthly mortality (76) being in August, 1650. Of these 250 deaths, 123 took place in the pest-houses. A letter of August 21 says that 153 died in two months, and that there were near 3000 people in the town dependent upon common charity[1106]. On November 21, there were still 200 cases in the pest-houses, most of them being in the way to recover, as usually happened towards the end of an epidemic through the greater readiness of the buboes to suppurate.

From the small number of burials due to ordinary causes in the St Chad’s register, it would appear that many citizens had fled. The severity of incidence upon certain houses appears from the fact that five servants in Mr Rowley’s house died of it; and that 15 out of 21 burials in St Julian’s parish came from four families[1107]. These are incidents like those of the great plague of London in 1665, which is the next in time in the English annals after Shrewsbury’s visitation in 1650.

The plague in Ireland in 1649-50 was connected, directly and indirectly, with the military operations under Ireton and Cromwell. The previous year, 1648, had been one of famine: at the attack on Kildare by the rebels in the spring, both the English garrison in the town and the attacking Irish were half-starved, and there was a great mortality on both sides, as well as a murrain of cattle. On May 4, corn in all the rebel quarters is said to be at the incredible price of £8 the quarter, both men and cattle dying in large numbers[1108]. In 1649 the plague broke out in Kilkenny, obliging the supreme council of Confederate Catholics to remove to Ennis. Ireton, “thinking he ought not to meddle with what the Lord had so visibly taken into his hands, has declined taking Kilkenny into his own.” But Cromwell besieged it on March 23, 1650, by which time the garrison of 200 horse and 1,000 foot had been reduced to 300 men through the ravages of the plague, the inhabitants having also suffered heavily[1109].

The Royalist letters from the Hague speak of the plague in the summer of 1650 as disastrous in Ireland, particularly in Dublin[1110]. On August ⁵⁄15: “Lady Inchiquin came hither last night; those with her report that the plague will devour what the sword has not in Ireland.” On September ²⁄12: “All I hear out of Ireland is that the plague has made a horrid devastation there; 1100 in a week died in Dublin”—an improbable estimate[1111]. The ranks of the rebels were so thinned by the sword and pestilence that “not above 200 suffered by the hands of the executioner,” after trial at the high court of justice held in County Cork in 1651[1112]. The epidemic appears to have ceased in the autumn of 1650, when the Council of State, in a despatch to the Lord Deputy, take notice of the goodness of God in stopping the plague[1113].

Fever in England, 1651-2.

Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore.

There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and 1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly comes[1114].

Whitmore refers to something that he had written, “for my private use,” on the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales:

Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast of Ireland had given rise to a minor and “more remiss” contagion along the coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory, it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the country villages.

We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to Edward Moore:

On what evidence this country epidemic is called “the plague” by the antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore’s reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659.

Fever and Influenza, 1657-9.

The account by Willis of three consecutive epidemics in the autumn of 1657, the spring of 1658, and the autumn of 1658, is of peculiar interest for the reason that it is the first systematic piece of epidemiology written in England, and that the middle epidemic of the three was one of influenza[1116]. On reading the narrative of events by Willis, we can understand how it was that the physicians of that period were so impressed by the doctrine of an epidemic constitution of the season, and by its counterpart doctrine of a seasonal predisposition in the human constitution. That teaching was afterwards expounded in successive essays by Sydenham; but it was held generally in those times, and Willis found apt illustrations of it in the three epidemics one after the other in 1657-58. Let us follow his narrative, and add to it some particulars from Whitmore.

The spring and summer of 1657 were extremely dry and hot; but especially after the summer solstice the heats were so intense for many weeks following that, day and night, there was none that did not complain of the heat of the air, and were almost in a continual sweat and were not able to breathe freely. About the calends of July, the fever which was at first sporadic and particular, began to break forth in some places, perhaps two or three cases in the same city or village. The fever fits at this period occurred every other day, but there was no cold fit or rigor preceding, as in an ordinary ague, the heat being intense from the outset. Vomiting and bilious stools occurred plentifully to most, with sweat succeeding, not however an easy, uninterrupted and critical sweat. The remission of the fever fit was rarely complete in the intermediate day, weakness, languor, thirst and restlessness always remaining. In some the type improved after three or four of these quasi-tertian paroxysms; the later fits were ushered in with a rigor and a cold stage, so that the fever became an exact tertian intermittent. But in most the type became worse, which may have been due to errors of regimen and physicking. The fever became, indeed, a continued one, and might end in nervous symptoms—lethargy, delirium, cramps or convulsions.

In August it was spreading far and near, so that in every region or village round Oxford, many were sick of it; but it was much more frequent in the country cottages and in the smaller villages than in cities or towns. It was called “the new disease,” as the war-typhus of 1643 had been called, and other epidemics both earlier and later.

Willis continues: It crept from house to house, infecting most of the same family, and especially those in familiar converse with the sick. “Yea old men, and men of ripe age, it ordinarily took away.” It lasted many days in an individual, nay even months, attended with much evacuation and almost daily vomits and sweats. “Scarce one in a thousand died of it, which I never knew in an epidemical synochus.” This singular malady, which differed from ague not only in its want of clear intervals between the fits of fever, but also in being propagated by contagion, raged throughout all England in the autumn of 1657. Only in some few limited localities, and in these only in some cases, was it accompanied by true dysentery. Willis is not satisfied with the facile explanation of an infection of the air, “the little bodies of which infections, being admitted within, did ferment with the blood and humours.” There must have been something equally general in the human body, a predisposition to be so acted upon; and of that proneness to fever he finds the cause in the intemperance of the year, namely the great heat of the summer and autumn.

But the most remarkable illustration of these doctrines was the epidemic of the following spring, which was a pure and unmistakeable epidemic of influenza-cold. After the very hot summer and autumn, there was a long winter of intense frost. From the ides of December to the vernal equinox the earth was covered with snow, the wind blowing steadily from the north. The state of health through the winter was fairly good. The north wind continued until June. “About the middle of April, suddenly a distemper arose as if sent by some blast of the stars, which laid hold of very many together; and in some towns in the space of a week above a thousand fell sick together.” They had a troublesome cough, great spitting, and catarrh “falling down on the palate, throat, and nostrils.” The illness approached with fever, thirst, want of appetite, weariness, grievous pains in the head, back, loins and limbs, and heat in the praecordia. Some were very ill in bed, with hoarseness and almost continual coughing; others had bleeding at the nose, bloody spittle or bloody flux. Not a few old and infirm died, but the more strong, and almost all the healthy constitutions recovered. Those that died “wasted leisurely,” like persons sick of a hectic fever. About the third part of mankind was distempered in a month. Willis’s explanation of it is that the constant north wind checked the natural action of the blood in spring. The spring blood is more lively, like the juices of vegetables. The catarrhal fever was a disorder of the spring blood, like new wine close shut up in bottles.

This outbreak about the middle of April is evidently described for Oxford and the country around. Willis then describes his third epidemic, that of the summer and autumn of 1658, which was the same type of fever as in the summer and autumn of 1657. The vernal fever of 1658 did not last longer than six weeks. The wind continued still north, until the summer solstice; a little before the beginning of July there was a most fierce heat for a few days, and when the dog-days were begun, the air grew most cruelly hot, so that one could scarce endure it in the open. The new fever arose mostly about the end of August, and began to spread through whole regions about us (at Oxford), and chiefly, like that of 1657, in country houses and villages; but in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick. The symptoms were much the same as in the previous autumn. The fever was continual in some; in others it was of an intermitting type at first; but very many were ill “in their brain and nervous stock,” with cruel headache, noises in the ears, dullness of hearing, stupor, vertigo, waking, and delirium. In some, on the first or second day, “little broad and red spots like to the measles have leisurely broken forth in the whole body, which being shortly vanished, the fever and headache became worse.” The patients lay for a few days as if dying, without speaking or knowing their friends, after which came lethargy and delirium. The young men mostly recovered, the old men died. In the fits of old men, the heat was not very sharp, but there were restlessness, tossing about, idle and random talking, with dryness of the mouth, surfiness of the tongue, and viscous sordes. Usually the pulse was strong and equal; a weak, unequal and intermittent pulse, with contractures of the tendons and convulsive motions in the wrists, was an omen of death. Those who died passed away in a stupor, without consciousness to dispose of their goods; the recovery of others was long and doubtful. One notable thing in this fever was the exanthem, which reminds one more of the rash of sweating sickness or dengue (breakbone fever), than of the spots of typhus.

Willis ends his book on fevers with that account of the autumnal epidemic of 1658, “taken the 13th of September,” his work having been published at the Hague in 1659. Whitmore, whose short essay is dated from London, November, 1659, begins with the autumnal epidemic of 1658, which is the last of Willis’s three; and, strangely enough, he also has a vernal epidemic of influenza to describe—an epidemic clearly belonging to the spring of 1659. Unless there be some error in Whitmore’s dates, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the second autumnal fever, that of 1658, was followed by a spring influenza, just as the first, of 1657, had been.

Whitmore’s account of the autumnal fever of 1658 agrees in the main with that given by Willis. He defines it as “a putrid continued and malignant fever containing in it the seeds of contagion.” It raged in the last autumn through all England, “and now begins again,” (his preface being dated November, 1659), seizing on all sorts of people of different nature, which shows that it is epidemic. The part affected is chiefly the heart, and therefore some call it cordis morbus.

Letters of 1658 from London bear out the prevalence of autumnal sickness. On August 3, one writes that the weather is hot and dry, the town extremely empty, and the flux beginning. On January 4, 1659, there is much sickness, especially fevers, agues and the smallpox.

A good deal of the interest of Whitmore’s essay lies in his arguments against blood letting in this fever; but that is part of a history which will have to be dealt with as a whole at a later stage.

Whitmore then proceeds to the vernal epidemic of 1659, just as Willis had done to that of 1658. His words are (4 Nov. 1659):

Assuming an affinity to the autumnal epidemic of 1658, he proceeds to state the circumstance of a reappearance in the spring of 1659: “Upon this hush it lay all the winter, until the Easter week, and then in two or three warm days broke loose, having had no warm weather all before, but a rainy and black week, the sun not appearing for five or six days together just before the holiday; when on a sudden that warm weather breaking forth, the citizens in their summer pomp, being thinner clothed many of them than before (like bees on a glorious day) swarmed abroad, and the pores etc.”

Both Willis and Whitmore incline to the view that the catarrhal fever of the spring was akin to the strange fever of the autumn, the differentia of each being appropriate to the season. Willis, however, keeps the two types more apart than Whitmore. The latter speaks of both fevers as “this Protean-like distemper,” whose various shapes “render it such a hocus pocus to the amazed and perplexed people, they being held after most strange and diverse ways with it.” It is “so prodigious in its alterations that it seems to outvie even Proteus himself.” Thus the strangest part of these narratives is not the catarrhal influenza, which has so often reappeared as to be familiar, but the prevalence of anomalous fevers, in some respects like intermittents without the clear interval between the fits, but in respect of contagion, spots, pains and other symptoms, like typhus—a volatile typhus of the country and of the towns. Although this epidemiological phenomenon be a strange one, there is no reason to question the correctness of Willis’s observations, corroborated as they are by those of Whitmore. But there are, indeed, many more experiences of the like kind in the years to follow, which fall without the limits of the present volume. One only of these later observers need be mentioned here. The third of the famous trio with Sydenham and Willis was Morton. He had a long experience in London of fever and smallpox, which he made the subject of a book in 1692-4[1117]. His history goes as far back as 1658—“historia febris συνεχὴς ab anno 1658 ad annum 1691.” Of the year 1658 he says the fever was everywhere through England and refers to Willis; the only facts of his own being that Oliver Cromwell and his (Morton’s) father were carried off by it in September of that year, that he had it himself (aged 20) and was three months in recovering, and that the whole household (in Suffolk) were infected. Cromwell’s attack came upon him at Hampton Court on August 21; but it was not the first sickness of the kind that he had suffered. He was only fifty-nine, but worn out with many cares, and at that time distressed by the death of his favourite daughter, Lady Claypole, under his roof on August 6, from some painful internal female trouble. The Lord Protector’s fever was called a “bastard tertian,” which might have been a name for the fever described by Willis. He was removed on the 24th August to Whitehall, where the air was thought to be more wholesome; and died between three and four in the afternoon of September 3, the anniversary at once of “Dunbar field and Worcester’s laureat wreath.”

This prevalence of fevers, Protean in their varying types, all over England in 1657-59 corresponds to the fever period of 1623-24. In each case the fever was a minor plague, and in each case it was followed by a revival of the plague proper, which had been dormant all over the country for a dozen or fifteen years. The principal difference is that the fever-period of 1623-24 was followed by the plague in 1625, whereas the fever-period of 1657-59 was followed by several years not free from fever and then by the plague in 1665. It is clear that the fevers of 1657-59 made a great impression all over England, and were afterwards popularly spoken of as a warning of the Great Plague itself. In the parish register of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, there is inserted a poem on the Great Plague of 1665, which has the following verses[1118]:

“Seven years since a little plague God sent,
He shook his rod to move us to repent.
Not long before that time a dearth of corn
Was sent to us to see if we would turn.”

In Short’s abstracts of parish registers, the years preceding 1665 stand out as sickly in country districts, according to the following figures:

Periods as unhealthy as 1657-59 do not occur again until 1667-71, and 1679-84.

Willis says, of the autumnal epidemic of 1658: “But in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick.” That is confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: “A world of sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the wholesomest place;” but on January 4, 1659: “There is much sickness in the town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox[1119].” In Short’s tables, the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in 1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes.

A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. The largest number of deaths from fever was in the year of the plague itself, when the bills of mortality returned them as 5257 (without much certainty, however, owing to the confusion of the plague). The next highest figures had been in 1661, when the fever deaths were 3490. We get a glimpse of that epidemic from Pepys; on August 16, 1661, he writes: “But it is such a sickly time both in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was heard of almost, unless it was in plague-time. Among others, the famous Tom Fuller is dead of it, and Dr Nicholls [Nicholas], dean of St Paul’s, and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill.” On August 31 he enters in his diary: “The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal fevers.” The same diarist, on October 20, 1663, has an entry that the queen is ill of a spotted fever and that “she is as full of spots as a leopard;” on the 24th the queen was in a good way to recovery.

It is at this period that Sydenham’s famous observations of the seasons and the public health in London begin. The autumnal intermittents, he says, which had been prevalent some years before, came back in 1661 with new strength, about the beginning of July, being mostly tertians of a bad type: they increased so much in August as to sweep away families almost entirely, but declined with the winter cold coming on. He then draws the distinction between them and ordinary tertians. In the same years, 1661-2-3-4, a continued fever is described at great length, and then he comes to the “pestilential fever” and the plague itself of 1665 and 1666[1120]. Taking from Sydenham the single fact, for the present, that an unusual amount of pestilential fever led up to the plague of 1665 (which he did not stay in London to witness), we shall proceed in the next chapter but one to that crowning epidemic of the present section of our history. Something more remains to be said of the fevers of 1661 (specially described by Willis as a fever of the brain and nervous stock, but called “the new disease” in its turn); but as it is the first of Sydenham’s “epidemic constitutions,” and as these are recorded continuously to 1685, when there was another “new fever,” it will be convenient to end the detailed history of fevers for the present with the remarkable epidemics of 1657-59.

CHAPTER XI.

This history divides itself at once into several branches. There are the disease-incidents of ocean voyages, irregular at first but becoming somewhat uniform after the East India Company’s start in 1601, chief among them being scurvy. There are next the early discouragements from sickness, both on the voyage and after landing, in the planting of colonies in Virginia, New England and the West Indies, among which the troubles of Jamaica were on a sufficiently great scale to deserve minute study. Lastly, among the larger sections of this chapter, we have to notice the beginnings and circumstances of the terrible and long-enduring scourge of West Indian colonies—yellow fever. While we are mainly, in this record of the sicknesses of voyages and of new colonies, concerned with British enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of other nations.

The first accounts of Sea Scurvy.

The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the sequel have been taken.

In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, “by reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over their teeth that they died miserably for hunger.” Nineteen men, as well as a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some twenty-five or thirty others were sick, “so that there was in a manner none without some disease[1121].”

There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and 1587 (in which last he got to 73° N.) are as nearly as possible free from records of sickness.

Jacques Cartier’s second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their number from “pestilence.”