THE BLACK DEATH.,or Bubonic plague OF 1898 BOMBAY

THE BLACK DEATH,or Bubonic plague

On August 15th, 1348, which means 25th by our calendar, a
strange disease appeared at Bristol. The harvest of that year
could not be gathered for rain, and, while it lay rotting in the
fields, people were wondering how they would subsist during
the coming winter. It looked as if half the population would
not be able to find bread. It never occurred to anyone that in
a few months half the population would cease to exist. At
first people were disposed to laugh at the new importation,
and they thought little of it ; but by and bye, when a thousand
or two fell before it, unconcern gave way to the deepest anxiety
or the wildest terror. People fled from it as from a destroying
angel. The mysterious visitor which had reached our shores
was the most mortal of all epidemics, and was no other than
the black death, or Bubonic plague of the Ptolemies and of
Justinian, and carried the mind back to the emerods and rats
of Gaza and Askelon with the Ark, and the " oxen lowing as
they went " on their way to Kirjath-jearim.

The disease had
never been known in England before it appeared in Bristol in
1348, and it deserves to be noted that it remained domesticated
on the soil of England, with slight intermissions, for three
hundred years, and never left our shores until it finally took its
departure in 1666, since which date, let us thank God, it has
never returned.
It reached London on November 1st, 1348 ; but the news
of its approach by ships from the Levant and from across the
Channel had long preceded it. As the mighty wave rolled
from reahn to realm, the tidings came like the portents of a
thunderstorm. There had been mutterings from the Caspian,
the Bosphorus, and the Adriatic. Cairo, Damascus, and
Byzantium were merely the milestones of its onward journey.

Boccaccio limned it at Florence; Petrarch spoke of it as a
world's wonder ; and Laura died of it at Avignon.

It seemed to have come to a head in England when
Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury, died of it at Lambeth
on August 2Gth, 1349, one week only after his arrival at Dover,
with the fatal botch in the armpits. Long before this, thousands
had fled from the various cities of Europe and Asia. The
Bosphorus was subsidised by Constantinople, while Naples
fled to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, Rome to the Alban Hills,
Florence to the Apennines, London to Epsom or the New
Forest, and Edinburgh to the Braid Hills,

while, away over the
sea, Damascus was makinsg tracks for the Lebanon, and Cairo
for the Lybian Desert, and Delhi, under Tughlak, was being
shovelled wholesale to Dowlatabad. I stop not to inquire the
reason why. Famine was in evidence and plague in India
in 1345.

The duration of the Black Death in London was seven
to eight months, and in all England fourteen months, the
population of the city being then about 200,000. It had the
same duration as the plague of 1666, the same curve of
increase, maximum intensity, and decrease. The five highest
weeks of 1563 were successively in deaths, 1,454, 1,626, 1,372,
1,828 and 1,262 ; and 1348 resembled it.

At Avignon it was very fierce: sixty-seven Carmelite
monks were found dead in one monastery, no one outside
having heard that the plague was among them. In the English
College the whole of the monks were said to have died of it.

At first science and its students walked up boldly to it.
It was belabouring an elephant with a feather. They then
pelted it with nostrums. The Black Death would be neither
scotched nor killed, and laughed at science and empiricism.
The wisest doctors of the age in every country in which it
appeared were confounded. How and whence it came, how
long it would remain, over what area it would spread — the
Black Death was inscrutable.

The disease defied investigation
and cure. Petrarch tells us, " If you question the philosophers
they shrug their shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the
finger on the lip"; or, as Lucretius wrote in reference to the
plague in Egypt, " The healing art muttered low in voiceless
fear." All the medical records of 1348-49, if printed, would
not fill one of our daily newspapers. The sovereignty of man
lies hid in knowledge. How much do ive know about it ?



Meanwhile Kali, with her necklace of human skulls, secure
in her seat, rode on in triumph, conquering and to conquer.
You may find her footprints on the mounds of Delhi, as well as
in the ruins of Memphis, for it was she who made them both.
Everything consumable was to be burned up ; and until that
came to pass there would be no end to the great tragedy which
involved twenty-five millions of human beings.



The disease now among us in 1898 is the same as the Black
Death of 1348.


It is the same in its causes, its antecedents, and
its mortal effects. Its characteristics are mostly the same. Its
violence and rapidity are in cases as intense, though its contagious-
ness is less apparent. The exception of the general immunity
of Europeans from attack hitherto has proved a stupendous mercy
for us all. But, in its sweep, the plague of 1348 far exceeds
our own ; for it took a much more extended range, embraced
an area wide as the known earth, desolated some of its fairest
regions, and swept a majority of population from the greatest
cities of the world. Asia Minor, for example, seems never to
have recovered from its desolating effects. The two catastrophes,
as far as we know, were the same in their origin. Man, and
man alone, was responsible for them both. Man does not make
the earthquake, the cyclone, or the thunderbolt; but he makes
the pestilence. It is he, and he alone, who allows filth to
accumulate, surround and enter his dwelling, soak into the
soil, and impregnate it with its deadly poison. This is not
" the act of God or the Queen's enemies " (as the old shipping
documents express it). Frankenstein creates the monster that
destroys ' him ; or as Homer hath it, " We blame the gods for
that, of which we ourselves are the authors." We have been
seeking for its origin in many places ; and as distance lends
enchantment to the view, we have gone to Hongkong, to the
slopes of the Himalayas, the roof of the world, or the back of
the east wind. " It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the
sea, that thou shouldest say, who shall go over the sea for it and
bring it to us ? " It is verily at your own doors at Mandvie,
190 foot above the level of high tide. Volney remarks, "In
a crowded population, and under a hot sun and in a soil filled
deep with water during several months of every year, the rapid
putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and other
disease." And Creighton, a hundred years thereafter {Epidemics
of Britain, 891): "Given a soil charged with animal matter,
the risk of those living upon it is in proportion to the range of
fluctuation of the ground water."

The reader need not be reminded that a considerable portion
of Bombay is under the level of high tide,and presents obvious
difficulties to the drainage engineer. Add to this the volume
of water which is poured in day and night by the Tulsi and
Tansa aqueducts, and the fact that there are wide spaces in
Donibay where there are more people crammed within the
same area than in any city in the world.

Each of these plagueswas heralded by the same antecedents. You remember the
great rain of 1896. It rained day and night consecutively inBombay for two or three months

(eighty-seven inches) almost
without intermission.

This was in June, July and part of
August, followed, of course, by tropical heat. There were
people who remarked at the time that such an abnormal rain
would be followed by some abnormal disease. Once the word
plague " flashed across the mind it was summarily dis-
missed as unworthy of suspicion. The plague was discovered
3rd in September, 1896. This great rain had its counterpart
in Italy in 1348, where it fell almost without a
break from Michaelmas to Candlemas. Then the rats (those
awful rats which devoured Sennacherib's bowstrings) in both
cases came forth from their holes, half choked, driven to the
surface seeking for air, a ghastly premonition, staggering at
first as if drunk, and littering the alleys with their dead bodies.
Dead rats have ever been an accompaniment of the plague.

In ancient Memphis there was a statue of Horus with outstretc hed

arm, on the palm of which was a rat saltant, with this inscrip-
tion : " Look at me and learn to reverence the gods.

"

when houses were deserted or shut up, robbers went afoot to pillage them,-
People shut themselves up in country houses, and unwittingly
enclosed the enemy also within their gates, or, fleeing for very
life, went on board some old hulk ; as well get quit of their
own shadows.

The only highly-paid and fully-employed
labourer was the grave-digger, until he also toppled over.

Everything that was of use before became suddenly of no
account. "All that a man hath will he give for his life" —
money, lands, houses, furniture, plate or the costliest jewels.
Industry and trade ceased to exist. Debtor and creditor were
merely names. Ambition was a rotten virtue ; what was the
use of economy ?

" Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

Yesterday
morning a corpse was seen lying on the edge of the Queen's
road,

and to-day (March I7th) two others on the same side-
way.

These were samples — the last remains of a hundred
" unknown residents " — nondescripts who now are sowing the
earth with their ashes.

You understand the reason of what
has now ripened itself into a custom. In the darkness of the
night, and perhaps when there might be still a glimmer of light,
they had been dropped near the burning ghaut. Relatives
have, you see, no further trouble and expense. Government
cremates, and the surviving tenants are protected from evic-
tion. It is here you see the sacred relations of father and
mother, wife and children, brother and sister, which have been
established and everything comprehended in that sacred word " family," cast to the
winds, and the bonds which bind society together broken and
destroyed. Can a greater evil befall humanity than this?

Buboes in groins and arm-pit have been the concomitants
and, in each of these plagues, indications of the disease. There
was the same delirium. A man would run across the street
and fall down dead. With the dawn of day dozens of dead
bodies, nameless and unknown, were found in wells, ashpits,
dunghills, sewers and street corners. Many had been aban-
doned by their relations, and some had committed suicide
And happy was he who at sunset could say with the Emperor,
" I haye lived a day."

When the total losses of the first twelve weeks of 1898
were counted up, there had fallen 20,000,

and the plague was not stayed. I suppose that few of the great battlefields of
history have presented a more formidable list of dead and
dying than the city of Bombay in the first three months of
1898.

For some days the only traffic observable in the streets
was the wood wherewith to burn the dead. In the plague of
1348 it was the dead that menaced the living. Cremation has
happily, in part, saved us from this great catastrophe. At first
we were curious and anxious, then dull and stupid, now we are
callous and indifferent, and the daily mortuary returns of 300
to many people awaken as little interest as the figures in an
account-book or multiplication table. In the funerals that pass
I observe that the body of the deceased makes very little
appearance. The corpse, as a rule, is "unco wee," as the
Scotch would say, or bulks but little under the mortcloth ;
and this leads me to believe that the harvest of death has been
reaped among the weak and the wasted, whether from famine
or disease. The lowest stratum has been the first attacked —
those who were destitute of good food, warm clothing, or good
lodging. Those who had none at all have fallen an easy prey
to the insatiable devourer. So was it with the Black Death.
Its effects on the labouring class are displayed in the preamble
of the Statute of Labourers, November 18th, 1350. "Foras-
much as a great part of the people, principally of artisans and
labourers, is dead of the late pestilence." In the worst dens
and hovels of the disease — and some of them are several stories
high — you see to-day houses that have been unroofed to let in
the light, dislocated tiles, and rafters dirty and blackened,
cleaving the skyline,