Chapter LX: The Yellow Fever

The heat of the atmosphere was now so great, that one might have imagined, as Cranky said, "that there was only a sheet of paper between the _Adder's_ cabin and _another_ place."

As the months of May, June, July, and August, are the most fatal for the yellow fever, it now broke out on board; the sick-bay was soon full; many officers were confined to their cabins, and a day seldom passed without some one being sent to his long home at the bottom of the great deep, with a thirty-two pound shot at his heels; and ere long I bade fair to become one of its victims.

The excitement so long and so recently undergone,--the sudden change of food, raiment, and quarters, after the total alteration of my system and habits, during the time that I had lived like Nebuchadnezzar on the Isle of Tortoises.--now began to tell fearfully upon me; and I was assailed by that scourge of the Antilles, the yellow fever. When the conviction of this came over me, I had but one emotion,--devout thankfulness that it had _not_ fallen upon me while lonely and desolate, helpless and friendless, on the island.

On the third day after we bore up for Guadaloupe, I was seated at mess in the ward-room of the frigate, enjoying the tempered atmosphere of the evening as it passed the open ports, through which we could see the waves of the blue sea as the _Adder_ sped on, with the wind upon her quarter, when first the symptoms of the dread pest assailed me; and from all I knew of it, I made up my mind to prepare for the worst.

A wine-glass dropped from my hand and shivered on the deck, as the general premonition, a cold and violent fit of shivering, came suddenly over me. Then I remember Percival, the first lieutenant, starting up, and exclaiming,--

"The fever, by Jove! Sentry, pass the word for the doctor--quick, the yellow admiral is here!"

In ten minutes after I was undressed and in bed, ill with the confirmed pestilence. How long and weary were its hours of agony, thirst, and lassitude, which followed that fatal evening!

After the shivering fit, there usually succeeds a violent fever, with acute pains in the head, back, and limbs; an intense dejection of mind; an agonizing thirst, with a tongue so dry, that it rattles in one's jaws like a kernel in a shell; and then comes the frightful _yellowness_ of complexion, from which the fever takes its name.

Though I have seen some who, after it abated, became cold as ice, and remained thus, with a tolerably sedate mind, and expired after twelve hours or so,--others who died after violent bleeding from the nose,--others who departed raving mad,--in me it took the form of continued delirium, in which, as I was afterwards told, I raved of the lonely island, renewed my struggle with Knuckleduster, and nearly killed a poor marine, who acted as my servant; then I laboured to raise the wreck of a treasure-ship, and believed myself again and again to be in a great cavern, till total prostration of mind and body succeeded, and a long stupor came over me.

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A sea-going frigate of the year 1794 was somewhat different in many respects from a ship of similar rank in the present age of rifled cannon and screw-propellers; and hence the odours that came from the ship's stores, the bilge, the sick-bay, and the cockpit, when a fierce West-Indian sun was blazing overhead, making the pitch boil between the planks of the main deck, were anything but consolatory or refreshing to the unfortunates on whom the grim pestilence had laid his yellow and shrivelled hand.

When awaking, as it were, from a long lethargy, I found myself slung in a hammock near an open port, through which the blessed breeze of Heaven, as it came over the dancing waves, blew upon my wan and fevered cheek, and refreshed me.

A marine, who had charge of me, now placed a pewter flagon, filled with water-gruel, in my trembling hand. I drank thirstily, and then sank back with a sigh of mingled weakness and satisfaction. Youth made the elements of life strong within me; and _hope_ returned with consciousness, though twice or thrice daily I saw a dark object fall heavily and endlong past the open port--plash into the sunlit sea and disappear!

Then would I close my eyes, and strive to pray, and to remember some of the little lessons my mother taught in purer and happier times; for these dark objects were the bodies of my fellow-sufferers, who were thus consigned to the waters from the deck above.

Ere long I was able to ask the marine whereabout we were, and he said,--

"The isle of Nevis bears about ten miles distant on our lee bow,--the top of the hill (for the island is only a great conical hill) is in sight."

"Then how far are we from Guadaloupe?"

"Ten miles from Nevis, sir, will make us one hundred and forty from Guadaloupe," replied my accurate informant.

As health returned, I longed for the shore, and for active life. The dull routine of days and nights of sickness anywhere, soon palls upon the excited senses; but nowhere so soon as in the narrow limits of a little cabin. The sea is certainly an everchanging and beautiful object; but when the port-lid was closed, my eyes had nothing to rest on but a 24-pound carronade slued alongside, and then it seemed as if every avenue to nature was closed too.

I had nothing near or around me to give pleasure or suggest pleasing thoughts; and then it is in such a mental and bodily prison, that "the small still voice" comes home to the heart and soul, and we seem to think, reflect, and feel, all the more deeply and earnestly, because soul and heart are both thrust back upon themselves.

The breeze which had hitherto been fair, now freshened and blew right ahead; so we had to beat to windward against it, and four days after, when becoming convalescent, I heard the booming of the _Adder's_ guns, as she saluted the flag of Admiral Sir John Jervis, when, under a press of canvas, we ran into the roadstead of Basse Terre, in the island of Guadaloupe.