INDEX. (continued 3)

[905] Sir Tobie Matthews’ Letters (1577-1655), London, 1660. (1) Donne to Mrs Cockaine, p. 342; (2) Donne to Sir R. D——, both without date.

[906] Court and Times of James I.

[907] Court and Times of Charles I. (Chamberlain to Carleton), I. 28.

[908] Anthony Wood.

[909] For Chester also, in the parish register of Trinity Church (Harl. MS. 2177) there is a note opposite 1636: “for this two or three years divers children died of smallpox in Chester.”

[910] Cal. State Papers.

[911] Ibid.

[912] Hist. MSS. Commission, V. 146, 151, 156, 168, 174, 201. See also the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn.

[913] Natural History of Oxfordshire. Oxford, 1677, p. 23.

[914] De contagione et contagiosis morbis, etc. Venet. 1546.

[915] Titles in Häser, III. 383.

[916] Opus de peste ... necnon de variolis, Neap. 1577.

[917] Les œuvres de M. Ambroise Paré. 5th ed., Paris, 1598, Books XIX. and XX. The chapters on Plague, Smallpox, etc., were originally published, according to Häser, in 1568.

[918] See Purchas, Pilgrimes, III. 996, where syphilis and smallpox are included together as “infectious or pestilentiall pocks,” Ramusio being given as the authority for the smallpox and Oviedo for the great pox.

[919] For details of the increase of London population, with the sources of evidence, I beg to refer to my essay, “The Population of Old London,” Blackwood’s Magazine, April, 1891.

[920] Broadside in the Guildhall Library, bound up in a volume labelled Political Tracts, 1680.

[921] “The time when it began in the City of Westminster and these places following:

“Buried in Westminster from 14 July to 20 October, in the whole number 832, whereof of the plague 723. Buried in the Savoy from the 1st of June to the 20th of October, in the whole number 182, whereof of the plague, 171. Buried in the parish of Stepney from the 25th of March to the 20th of October, in all 1978, whereof of the plague, 1871. Buried at Newington-buts from the 14th of June to the 20th of October, in all 626, whereof of the plague, 562. Buried at Islington 201 in all, 170 of plague; at Lambeth 373 in all, 362 of plague; at Hackney 192 in all, 169 of plague. Buried in all within the 7 several places last aforenamed 4378, whereof of the plague, 3997. The whole number that hath been buried in all [to 20th October], both within London and the Liberties, and the 7 other severall places last before mentioned is 39,380, whereof of the number of the plague, 32,609.”

From the parish registers the burials for the whole year are known: Stepney, 2257; Lambeth, 566; Islington, 322; Hackney, 321 (of plague 269).

In Stow’s Annales, the mortality of 1603 is given as follows:—“There died in London and the liberties thereof from the xxiii day of December 1602 unto the xxii day of December 1603, of all diseases 38,244, whereof of the plague 30,578.”

[922] Baddeley, l. c.

[923] A short Dialogue concerning the Plague Infection. Published to preserue Bloud through the blessing of God. London, 1603.

[924] The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sicke of the Plague. London, 1603.

[925] In his Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) he returns to the mode of burial in the plague: “All ceremonial due to them was taken away, they were launched ten in one heap, twenty in another, the gallant and the beggar together, the husband saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he hated within a pair of sheets.” As an after effect of this mode of interment, “What rotten stenches and contagious damps would strike up into thy nostrils!”

[926] A Treatise of the Plague. By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke. London, 1603. It has been reprinted, among Lodge’s other works, by the Hunterian Club of Glasgow, 1880.

[927] The opinion of Peter Turner, Doctor in Physicke, concerning Amulets or Plague-Cakes, whereof perhaps some hold too much and some too little. London, 1603, p. 10. Turner held high offices at the College of Physicians, and died in 1614. There was another physician of the name, also a dignitary of the College, Dr George Turner, whose widow was the notorious Mrs Anne Turner, executed for having been an instrument in the poisoning of Sir T. Overbury. Scott has drawn from her the character of Mrs Suddlechop, in The Fortunes of Nigel, a work invaluable for realizing the London of King James. The reference in the Earl of Northumberland’s accounts, under date Feb. 6, 1607, to a Dr Turner, who was paid ten shillings for a “pomander” against the plague, would suit either Dr Peter or Dr George (Hist. MSS. Commis. VI. 2, 29).

[928] A letter from Hampstead, August 27, 1603, speaks of “the imprudent exposure of infected beds in the streets.” (Cal. State Papers.)

[929] A New Treatise of the Pestilence, etc. the like not before this time published, and therefore necessarie for all manner of persons in this time of contagion. By S. H. Studious in Phisicke. London, 1603.

[930] This mystification was pointed out in a note to “Thayre” (the 1625 edition) in the printed Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society.

[931] An Epistle discoursing upon the present Pestilence, teaching what it is and how the people of God should carrie themselves towards God and their neighbours therein. Reprinted, with some Additions, by Henoch Clapham. London, 1603.

[932] A Short Dialogue, etc., ut supra.

[933] In a volume with other pieces. London, 1605.

[934] But several warders in the Tower died of it. (Cal. State Papers, Sept. 16, 1603.)

[935] In Lysons, Environs of London.

[936] Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4, p. 5.

[937] E.g. plague at Datchet (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. VI. 217).

[938] John Bell, London’s Remembrancer. London, 1665 [1666].

[939] Extracts from Harrison’s MS. Chronologie by Furnivall in Appendix (p. 268) to Elizabethan England. Camelot Series, 1890.

[940] A Sermon preached at Powles Crosse, etc. London, 1578.

[941] Remembrancia (numerous extracts from the City records, under “Plays”).

[942] Cal. State Papers, Addenda, James I. p. 534.

[943] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524. The mortality is stated on the authority of the parish registers of St George’s and St Michael’s, the dead having been “buried at the cabbin of Whitefryers.”

[944] There is An Account of the Plague at Oxford, 1603, in the Sloane MS. No. 4376 (14), extracted from the register of Merton College, which had also been the source of Anthony Wood’s account, as summarised in the text.

[945] Cal. State Papers. Addenda, 1580-1625.

[946] Hist. MSS. Commis. IX. 160.

[947] Izacke’s ‘Memorials of Exeter’ (in N. and Q., 3rd ser. VI. 217).

[948] Bailey, Transcripts from the MS. Archives of Winchester, 1856, p. 109.

[949] Cromwell.

[950] Hist. MSS. Commis. IX.

[951] Ibid. X. pt. I, p. 89.

[952] Thompson’s Boston.

[953] Hist. MSS. Com. IX.

[954] Archæologia, VI. 80.

[955] Rogers’ MS. in Hemingway’s Hist. of Chester. Harl. MS. 2177.

[956] Earwaker, East Cheshire, II. 471; I. 406.

[957] Bridges and Whalley, II. 53; I. 124.

[958] Drake’s Eboracum. Lond. 1736, p. 121.

[959] Sykes, Local Records of Northumberland and Durham.

[960] Phillips, Owen and Blakeway.

[961] Cal. State Papers. Addenda, 1580-1625.

[962] Parish Register (in a local history).

[963] Notes and Queries, 6th ser. II. 390.

[964] Ib.

[965] Ib.

[966] Ib.

[967] Cal. State Papers, 1608-9.

[968] Hemingway.

[969] Cal. S. P.

[970] Hist. MSS. Com. V. 570.

[971] Archæologia, VI. 80.

[972] Blomefield.

[973] Sykes.

[974] Nichols, III. 892-3.

[975] Nichols (parish registers); Kelly, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 1877, VI. 395.

[976] Sykes.

[977] Hemingway.

[978] May, Hist. of Evesham, 1845; p. 371.

[979] Add. MS. 29,975. f. 25.

[980] Hist. MSS. Com. IX. 162.

[981] Ib. I. 101.

[982] Beesley, Hist. of Banbury.

[983] Dean Butler’s notes to Clyn’s and Dowling’s Annals.

[984] Smith’s Cork, from MS. Annals.

[985] Chambers, Domestic Annals.

[986] Cal. State Papers.

[987] Chambers.

[988] Cal. State Papers.

[989] Balfour’s Annals of Scotland (in Chambers, I. 399).

[990] Ibid.

[991] Chambers.

[992] Aberdeen Burgh Records.

[993] Chambers.

[994] Chron. of Perth.

[995] Chambers.

[996] Ibid.

[997] The invaluable letters of Chamberlain, as well as those of Mead (of Cambridge) and others, were collected by Dr Thomas Birch in the last century, and printed in 1848 under the titles The Court and Times of James I., and C. and T. Charles I., without an index but with some useful notes.

[998] Chamberlain to Carleton, C. and T. James I., II. 504.

[999] Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, etc. 2 vols. Lond. 1749, I. 306:—“This fever began, and raged terribly in England in 1623; was little, if at all, short of the plague.”

[1000] Chamberlain to Carleton, in Court and Times of Charles I., I. 28.

[1001] Salvetti’s Diary, in Hist. MSS. Com. XI. pt. I, p. 26.

[1002] Cal. S. P. 15 Sept.

[1003] Holland.

[1004] Bell, London’s Remembrancer.

[1005] C. and T. Charles I., letter of 2 July, 1625.

[1006] In a volume of Topographical Papers in the British Museum, 1298, m (18).

[1007] W. Heberden, Junr., Increase and Decrease of Diseases. Lond. 1801, p. 66. He gives no authority; “1626” is clearly a misprint.

[1008] Calendar of State Papers, 1625-26, p. 184.

[1009] The Red Crosse (broadside). London, 1625.

[1010] Parish Histories, and in Lysons’ Environs of London.

[1011] Britain’s Remembrancer, containing a Narrative of the Plague lately past. London, 1628.

[1012] The Fearfull Summer, or London’s Calamitie. Printed at Oxford, 1625 (reprinted with additions, Lond. 1636).

[1013] Holland’s Posthuma. Cantab. 1626.

[1014] The Weeping Lady, or London like Ninivie in Sackcloth. By T. B. London, 1625.

[1015] Hist. MSS. Commission, XI. pt. I, p. 6.

[1016] Bradwell’s book, to be mentioned in the sequel, was written for practice during the plague. There is a reference to something of Sir Theodore Mayerne’s on the plague of 1625, which I have not succeeded in finding. His Opera Medica contain ordinary cases treated by him in London in December, 1625, but there is no mention of plague-cases. Woodall’s essay on plague, published in 1639, thus refers to his experience in the epidemic of 1625: “In anno 1625 we had many signes contrarie to the plagues in other times; yea, and many did dye dayly without any signes or markes on their bodies at all.”

[1017] C. and T. Charles I. I. 48.

[1018] A Watchman for the Pest, teaching the true Rules of Preservation from the Pestilent Contagion, at this time fearfully overflowing this famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the best authors, mixed with auncient experience, and moulded into a new and most plaine method. By Steven Bradwell, of London, Physition. 1625.

[1019] Cal. State Papers.

[1020] Ib.

[1021] Th. Locke to Carleton, Cal. S. P., 14 Aug.

[1022] Salvetti.

[1023] Locke to Carleton, 27 Aug.

[1024] Cal. S. P.

[1025] Mead, letter in C. and T. Ch. I. I. 43.

[1026] Cal. S. P.

[1027] Ibid.

[1028] Mostly from parish registers in Lysons’ Environs of London.

[1029] Winchester was probably a fair sample. In the city archives under the year 1625 there is this entry: “Item, it is also agreed that the decayed cottage where Lenord Andrews did dwell, he lately dying of the plague, shall be burned to the grounde for fear of the daunger of infection that might ensue if it should stande.” (Bailey, Transcripts, etc. Winchester, 1856, p. 110.) In a petition relating to Farnham, Jan. 1628, the town is described as being “impoverished through the plague and many charges,” which may mean that plague had been diffused in Surrey and Hampshire.

[1030] Cal. State Papers.

[1031] Cal. State Papers.

[1032] MSS. of the Corporation of Plymouth. Hist. MSS. Commis. IX. 278. Accounts are given (p. 280) of the monies collected for the relief of the poor and sick people of Plymouth “in the time of the infection of the pestilence from Sept. 29, 1625, to that day A.D. 1627.” But that does not imply that the infection lasted all that time. The civic year began with September 29, and the accounts are those that fall within two complete financial years.

[1033] Cal. State Papers.

[1034] Notes and Queries, 6 ser. III. 477.

[1035] Cal. S. P.

[1036] Ib.

[1037] Cal. S. P.

[1038] Ib.

[1039] Cal. S. P.

[1040] Letter from Mead in C. and T. Charles I. I. 51.

[1041] Blomefield.

[1042] At Coventry in 1626, £20 was paid to the poor in lieu of a feast at Lammas, by reason of the infection. (Dugdale, Warwickshire.)

[1043] The following curious extract was sent by J. A. Picton to Notes and Queries, 6th ser. I. 314 from the parish register of Malpas, Cheshire, 1625:

“Richard Dawson (brother of the above-named Thomas Dawson of Bradley) being sick of the plague and perceiving he must die, at that time arose out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew John Dawson to cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and laid him down in the said grave and caused clothes to be laid upon, and so departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man and heavier than his said nephew and another wench were able to bury. He died about the 24th of August. Thus much was I credibly tould. He died 1625.

“John Dawson, son of the above-mentioned Thomas, came unto his father when his father sent for him being sick, and having laid him down in a ditch died in it the 29th day of August, 1625, in the night.

“Rose Smyth, servant of the above-named Thomas Dawson, and last of that household, died of the plague and was buried by Wm. Cooke the 5th day of September, 1625, near unto the said house.”

[1044] Memoranda of Rev. Thomas Archer, of Houghton Conquest. MSS. Addit. Brit. Museum.

[1045] Blomefield.

[1046] Phillips’ Hist. of Shrewsbury. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4. p. 498.

[1047] Hist. MSS. Com. II. 258.

[1048] Hist. of County of Lincoln, II. 187. Notitiae Ludae, p. 41.

[1049] Tickell’s Hist. of Kingston-upon-Hull. Hull, 1798.

[1050] Gawdy MSS. (Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 2), various letters from Sept. 14, 1636, to Nov. 26, 1638, relating chiefly to Norwich.

[1051] Boys, Hist. of Sandwich, pp. 707-8.

[1052] R. Jenison, D.D., Newcastle’s Call to her Neighbor and Sister Towns. London, 1637.

[1053] Heberden says that it began in Whitechapel, but does not say where he got the information.

[1054] Middlesex County Records, III. 62.

[1055] Ibid.

[1056] The College of Physicians reported also in May, 1637, on the causes of plague—overcrowding, nuisances, &c.; among the causes assigned the following is noteworthy: Those who died of the plague were buried within the City, and some of the graveyards were so full that partially decomposed bodies were taken up to make room for fresh interments. (Cited by S. R. Gardiner, History, &c., VIII. 237-9, from the State Papers.)

[1057] Natural and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality. London, 1662.

[1058] Cal. State Papers.

[1059] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey of London.

[1060] Rendle (Old Southwark, 1878, p. 96) quotes the following from a letter written in 1618 by Geoffrey Mynshall from the King’s Bench prison: “As to health, it hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest-house in the plague time ... stinks more than the Lord Mayor’s dog-house or Paris Garden in August ... three men in one bed.”

[1061] Cal. S. P. 1601-3, p. 209.

[1062] Middlesex County Records, II.

[1063] Cited by Gardiner, History, VIII. 289.

[1064] Calendar of State Papers.

[1065] Cal. S. P.

[1066] Ibid.

[1067] Ibid. The coexistence of malignant fever with plague at Northampton in 1638 is decisively shown by particulars of cases published by Woodall, Op. cit. 1639. See also Freeman, Hist. of Northampton, p. 75 (but under the year 1637).

[1068] Ibid.

[1069] Ibid.

[1070] Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gough, II. 244.

[1071] Notes and Queries, 6th series, IV. 199.

[1072] Hist. MSS. Com. V. 173.

[1073] Diatribae duae de Fermentatione et de Febribus. Hagae, 1659.

[1074] Morbus Epidemicus anni 1643; or the New Disease. Published by command of his Majesty. Oxford, 1643.

[1075] From Rushworth.

[1076] “The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex: making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day, September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid the dark rain, ‘on the top of Presbury Hill;’—and understand that they shall live and not die. The King ‘fired his huts,’ and marched off without delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war.... The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man.” Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Cromwell.

[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681.

[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469.

[1079] Dunsford’s Histor. Mem. of Tiverton, p. 184.

[1080] The military events from Rushworth.

[1081] Dunsford, Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton. Harding, Hist. of Tiverton.

[1082] Rushworth. Moore, Hist. of Devonshire, I. 149.

[1083] Beesley’s Hist. of Banbury, p. 387.

[1084] In Somers’s Tracts. Scott’s ed. V. 294.

[1085] Sykes.

[1086] Clarendon, referring to a proposed Royal visit to Bristol in April says: “The plague began to break out there very much for the time of the year.”

[1087] Cal. State Papers.

[1088] Rushworth.

[1089] Letters and Speeches, I.

[1090] Seyer’s Memorials of Bristol, II. 466.

[1091] Whitaker, History of Leeds, p. 75.

[1092] Harwood, Hist. of Lichfield, p. 306.

[1093] Pordage’s translation of Willis’s Remaining Works, p. 131.

[1094] Nichols, III. 893.

[1095] Cornelius Brown, Annals of Newark. London, 1879, p. 164.

[1096] Ibid.

[1097] Notes and Queries, 6th ser., III. 477.

[1098] Rushworth.

[1099] Histor. MSS. Com. XI. 7, p. 190.

[1100] Ibid. IX. 1, p. 201.

[1101] Hist. of Carlisle, 1838.

[1102] Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland.

[1103] Baillie’s Letters. 3 vols. Edited by D. Laing for the Bannatyne Club.

[1104] Kennedy, Annals of Aberdeen, I. 270 (expenses of the epidemic from the Council Register, vol. LIII. p. 130).

[1105] Hemingway, Ormerod. The Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission (V. 339) notes that Dr Cowper’s MS. contains details of 2,099 deaths, but reproduces none of them.

[1106] Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 342.

[1107] Owen and Blakeway.

[1108] Rushworth, Pt. 4, vol. II., pp. 1100, 1109.

[1109] Annals of Ireland by Clyn and Dowling, Dean Butler’s notes pp. 64, 65 (ref. to Carte’s Life of the Duke of Ormonde).

[1110] Cal. State Papers.

[1111] The weekly bills of mortality for Dublin, July 20—Aug. 2, 1662, showed only 14 baptisms and 20 burials in ten parishes; but these can hardly have been all the births and deaths in the city.

[1112] Smith’s Cork, vol. II. from Cox MSS.

[1113] Cal. S. P. Sept. 21, 1650.

[1114] H. Whitmore, M.D. Febris Anomala; or the New Disease that now rageth throughout England, with a brief description of the Disease which this Spring most infested London. London, 1659 (4 November).

[1115] Hist. MSS. Commission, X. pt. 4, p. 106.

[1116] Willis, Diatribae duae. Hagae, 1659.

[1117] Pyretologia. 2 vols. London, 1692-4. Appendix to 1st volume, p. 415.

[1118] Sent to Notes and Queries, 1st ser. XII. 281, by Mr H. Hucks Gibbs.

[1119] Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 146 (Sutherland letters).

[1120] Greenhill’s edition (Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 37, 93, 95-98.

[1121] Purchas, His Pilgrimes. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. I. Book II. p. 36.

[1122] Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599, III. 225-6.

[1123] Pericarditis scorbutica—a condition which has been observed mostly in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis.

[1124] Hakluyt, III. 241.

[1125] Hakluyt, II. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48.

[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501.

[1127] Sir James Stephen’s Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, pop. ed. p. 125.

[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99.

[1129] The famous figure in Paradise Lost (IV. 159) is taken from the route to India passing within Madagascar—a poetic colouring of dreary and painful realities:—

[1130] The World Encompassed &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and Hakluyt, III. 740.

[1131] A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage begun in the year 1585. Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes.

[1132] Mr Froude (History, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy in his bold guess of “yellow fever.” At the same time the enthymeme by which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in assuming that the infection “broke out” after the capture of Cartagena, ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed as an infection there in the 16th century.

[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot ‘Duck’ in Drake’s expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593 (Purchas, IV. 1368):

These islands are “one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months’ sickness, with no small hazard of life.” He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, “coming cold and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature, and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health.” This seems to refer to the epidemic in Drake’s fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill.

Darwin (Naturalist’s Voyage in the Beagle, p. 366) says: “The island of St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy.” But the Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun.

[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286.

[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in Society in the Elizabethan Age. London, 1886, p. 120.

[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583.

[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp. 809, 810.

[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52.

[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins’s own narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author’s death in 1622).

[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (Dict. of National Biography. Art. “Hawkins, Sir Richard”) points out that Hawkins’s narrative of the ‘Daintie’s’ voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in Drake’s fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy.

[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877.

[1142] Ibid. p. 1623.

[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his Surgeon’s Mate, published in 1617.

[1144] Purchas, III. 847.

[1145] The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies. Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, II. pt. 2, p. 102.

[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the season.

[1147] Purchas, I. 147.

[1148] Calendar of State Papers. East Indies (under the respective dates).

[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as “to lie in cold obstruction and to rot” (Meas. for Meas. III. 1), and to have been kept up therein after the faculty had dropped it—if indeed Byron’s line, “Where cold Obstruction’s apathy” be a survival of medical terminology. There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of “scorbutic;” at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of theory) in many forms, and we find in the Pickwick Papers a late reminiscence of that singular dogma in the “young gentleman with the scorbutic countenance.”

[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later from the Cal. State Papers, East Indies.

[1151] Cal. S. P. Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628.

[1152] Ibid. Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146.

[1153] William Hedges’ Diary. Hakluyt Society, 1887, I. 24, 54.

[1154] A Letter of M. Gabriel Archar, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1733; Smith’s Virginia, in Pinkerton, XIII. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1753.

[1155] Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare brings into the Tempest.

[1156] Purchas, IV. p. 1762.

[1157] Cal. S. P. America and West Indies.

[1158] Dermer, in Purchas, IV. p. 1778: Belknap’s American Biography (“Life of Gorges”), I. 355.

[1159] John Winthrop’s Journal, p. 11.

[1160] Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123.

[1161] Ibid. II. 310.

[1162] Refs. in Noah Webster’s Hist. of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases. Hartford, 1799, I. 189, 191, 193.

[1163] Letter of Norris, in Hist. of S. Carolina, I. 142.

[1164] Saco, History of African Slavery in the New World (Spanish). Barcelona, 1879.

[1165] Oviedo, in Purchas, III. 996:—“Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo:—‘I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and second voyages of Columbus; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, so that many died.’... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. Our author (l. c. civ.), and Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks (those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases.”

[1166] Calendar of State Papers. Amer. & W. I., I. 57.

[1167] Ibid.

[1168] Cal. S. P. Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates.

[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre’s Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François, 4 vols., Paris, 1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654.

[1170] Cal. S. P. Amer. & W. I., II. 529.

[1171] Ligon, Hist. of Barbadoes. London, 1657.

[1172] Winthrop’s Journal, II. 312.

[1173] Dutertre, Hist. gen. des Antilles habitées par les François. 4 vols. Paris, 1667-1671.

[1174] Cal. State Papers, Amer. and W. I., I. 301.

[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order.

[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the Climate of the West Indies, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476.

[1177] Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados. London, 1750, p. 37.

[1178] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I., under the dates.

[1179] In Sir John Hawkins’ second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his “lean negroes,” which were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had been tedious, and the supply of water short “for so great a company of negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never suffereth His Elect to perish,” etc. Hakluyt, III. 501.

[1180] Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to Pitt:—

“Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ.” (p. 273.)

[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum. London, 1729, p. 107.

[1182] Gillespie, Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.’s Squadron on the Leeward Island Station in 1794-6. Lond. 1800.

[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of Treasure Island.

[1184] Thurloe’s State Papers, III. IV. and V.; Harl. Miscell. III. 513; Long’s History of Jamaica, 3 vols. London, 1774; Cal. S. P., Amer. and W. I.

[1185] Harl. Miscel. l. c.

[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, “we have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place.” Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (History of Jamaica, 1774, II. 221) states the case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables in 1655: “The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like calamitous situation.”

[1187] MS. State Papers, Colonial (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57 (1660).

[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., Discourse of the State of Health in Jamaica. Lond. 1679.

[1189] Moseley, op. cit. p. 421, without reasons given; followed by Hirsch. Geog. and Hist. Pathol. (English transl.), I. 318.

[1190] Hist. of Jamaica, III. 615.

[1191] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I.

[1192] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, § 144.

[1193] Ibid. § 264, III.

[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning “The reprinting of these sad sheets.” Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company.

[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley’s edition of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.

[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. Λοιμογραφια, or, An experimental Relation of the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in the City of London, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles’ in the Fields. London, 1666.

[1197] Reprinted in A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in the year 1665. London, 1721.

[1198] Λοιμολογια. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720.

[1199] Λοιμοτομια, or, the Pest Anatomized. By George Thomson, M.D. London, 1666.

[1200] London, 1667.

[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in 1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe’s book also) was one by Richard Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on The Plague of Marseilles. Also Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician, who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno 1665. London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five minutes’ research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed to be distinctive signs of plague—extraordinary inward heat, difficulty of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep, frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate, and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst’s third chapter is occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same. However, Defoe would have seen Bradley’s title-page, and might have inquired after the Sloane MS.

[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles’s-in-the-Fields.

[1203] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks.

[1204] Ed. cit. Chap. XIV. p. 131:—“Diseases which seem to be nearest like its (plague’s) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and malignant; for ’tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a pestilential fever.”

[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, Hist. MSS. Commis. X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: “There is a strange opinion here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be the infection.”

[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent’s book.

[1207] Cal. State Papers.

[1208] Ibid.

[1209] Evans, l. c.

[1210] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, II. 1. 2.

[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the lines in the 9th book:

An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than—

Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, II. 708-11

Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which startled the licenser;” those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the figure of the sun’s eclipse, which

[1212] Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 4376 (8). “Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague,” from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665.

[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and re-interred. (Notes and Queries, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary’s Spital outside Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665.

[1214] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1665, p. 579.

[1215] Reliquiae Hearnianae. Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of Jan. 21, 1721).

[1216] The City Remembrancer. London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon Harvey’s notes).

[1217] Procopius (De Bello Persico, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: “ut vere quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec postea clarius patuerunt.” On this Gibbon remarks: “Philosophy must disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;” and most men will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity (and Boghurst’s testimony is a little weakened by his deference to Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds.

[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited by Heberden, Increase and Decrease of Diseases. London, 1801. Woodall, writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603, 1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much in individuals and in seasons.

[1219] Cal. State Papers. Hist. MSS. Com. IX. 321.

[1220] Cal. State Papers. Cal. Le Fleming MSS. p. 37 (also for Cockermouth).

[1221] Ibid.

[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in 1665.

[1223] Cal. S. P.

[1224] Hist. MSS. Com. II. 115.

[1225] The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666. By William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions. Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall, William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in the Book of Golden Deeds.

[1226] Bacon (Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. X. § 912. Spedding II. 643) says: “The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths.”

[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Castle of Health (1541), says that “infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened, has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died.” (Cited by Brasbridge, Poor Man’s Jewel, 1578, Chapter VIII.)

[1228] Milner’s Hist. of Winchester.

[1229] The City Remembrancer, Lond. 1769, vol. I.—an account of the plague, fire, storm of 1703, etc., said to have been “collected from curious and authentic papers originally compiled by the late learned Dr [Gideon] Harvey.” But the section on the plague is almost purely Defoe and Vincent, with a few things from Mead.

[1230] These figures, with the two oaths, had been copied by the antiquary Morant for his History of Essex, and are preserved in No. 87. ff. 55 and 56, of the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum, where Mr J. A. Herbert, of the Manuscript Department, pointed them out to me. In his printed History Morant has summarized the plague-deaths in monthly periods.

The Bearers’ Oath, fol. 57:—

“Ye shall swear, that ye shall bear to the ground and bury the bodys of all such persons as, during these infectious times, shall dye of the pestilence within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them as ye shall have notice of, and may be permitted to bury, carrying them to burials always in the night time, unless it be otherwise ordered by the Mayor of this Towne; And ye shall be always in readiness for that purpose at your abode, where you shall be appointed, keeping apart from your families together with the searchers, and not to be absent from thence more than your office of Bearers requires. Ye shall always in your walk, as much as may be, avoid the society of people, keeping as far distant from them as may bee, and carrying openly in your hands a white wand, by which people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And shall do all other things belonging to the office of Bearers, and therein shall demean yourselves honestly and faithfully, discharging a good conscience; So etc.

August 1665. James Barton and John Cooke:—sworn, who are to have for their pains 10 sh. a week a piece; and 2d for every one to be buried, taking the 2d out of the estate of the deceased. If there be not wherewithal, the parish to bear it.

Oath 6. p. 44.

The Oath for the Searchers of the Plague, 1665.

“Yee and either of You shall sweare, that ye shall diligently view and search the corps of all such persons, as during these infectious times, shall dye within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them as you shall or may have access unto, or have notice of; And shall according to the best of your skill, determine of what disease every such dead corps came to its death. And shall immediately give your judgment thereof to the Constables of the parish where such corps shall be found, and to the Bearers appointed for the burial of such infected corps. You shall not make report of the cause of any one’s death better or worse than the nature of the disease shall deserve. Yee shall live together where you shall be appointed, and not walk abroad more than necessity requires, and that only in the execution of your office of Searchers. Ye shall decline and absent yourselves from your families, and always avoid the society of people. And in your walk shall keep as far distant from men as may be, always carrying in your hands a white wand, by which the people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And ye shall well and truly do all other things belonging to the office of Searchers, according to the best of your skill, wisdom, knowledge, and power, in all things dealing faithfully, honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help” etc.

[1231] Morant, Hist. of Essex, I. 74.

[1232] Deering, Nottingham, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. Copied in Thoresby’s edition of Thoroton’s History of Nottingham, II. 60.