[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 ofTreasure Island.
[1184]Thurloe’sState Papers,III.IV.andV.;Harl. Miscell.III.513; Long’sHistory 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.â€
[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’sJournal of the Plague Year.
[1196]Sloane MS. no. 349. ΛοιμογÏαφια,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 inA 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, onThe 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.â€
[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.â€
[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 ofParadise 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:
“As one who long in populous city pent,Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breatheAmong the pleasant villages and farms,â€â€”
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—
“Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss,And all his people.â€
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
“and like a comet burn’d,That fires the length of Ophiuchus hugeIn the arctic sky, and from his horrid hairShakes pestilence and war.â€
Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which startled the licenser;†those are usually taken to have beenI.598-9, the figure of the sun’s eclipse, which
“with fear of changePerplexes monarchs.â€
[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 inA.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 villageA.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 theBook of Golden Deeds.
[1226]Bacon (Sylva Sylvarum, Cent.X.§ 912. SpeddingII.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.â€
[1227]Sir Thomas Elyot, inThe 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, ChapterVIII.)
[1228]Milner’sHist. 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 hisHistory 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 printedHistoryMorant 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 BartonandJohn 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.
August 1665.James BartonandJohn 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’sHistory of Nottingham, II. 60.