Dr. Mac CuUoch on Malaria on Ship-board, 59 



commanders, will easily answer this question as it regards their 

 own profits and losses ; though the readers of" this paper would 

 scarcely even conjecture the answer, or might pass the whole 

 subject with little notice. The very insurers at Lloyds can 

 often answer it; for they know well how often the disability 

 of a crew through ill health, through fevers, in fact, has been 

 the cause of averages or losses, which they would gladly have 

 prevented had they known how, and which it is no small part 

 of the object of this essay to diminish or control. And I 

 cannot help thinking, that even that great and respectable body 

 of merchants will, before long, see their own interests in this 

 matter — while not less open, as their history has proved, to the 

 claims of humanity ; and that whenever conviction shall reach 

 them, ihey will, through the well-known means lodged in their 

 hands, promulgate, or even compel a system of regulations for 

 insured ships, analogous to those which I shall hereafter pro- 

 pose as to the naval service. 



As to that service, in the case of the periods of war in par- 

 ticular, the inconveniences of bad health amongst the crews 

 are matters of history ; and no small volume, while a most ter- 

 rific one, might be produced to show what have been the con* 

 sequences of bad health in the navy. And this bad health, 

 to use the popular term, is fever ; or it is, at least, that in 

 general : a sickly ship, in sea phraseology, is a ship with fevers. 

 Formerly, the scurvy was an additional evil, now happily 

 quelled. The history of the Havannah expedition, as given by 

 Smollett, is one of those fearful records, of which naval history 

 could furnish many more, if none perhaps so striking ; and even 

 the readers of Roderick Random may, from this tale, form a 

 sufficient idea of what they have not consulted in the serious 

 memoir of the same unhappy adventure. 



If the miseries of Anson's most romantic and almost incre- 

 dible expedition were not the exact consequences of fever, they 

 will, at least, serve to prove what sickness can effect as to the 

 service of the navy ; and when the writer of this paper knew 

 one instance of a merchant vessel, steered, heaven knows 

 how, into the Havannah, by the captain, lashed to the helm by 

 himself, in a fever, with part of his crew sick and dead below, 

 and the remainder delirious and rioting on the deck ; when an 



