2 EARLY QUARANTINE ARRANGEMENTS OF SALEM. 



infected vessel was discharged under orders from our 

 selectmen, on one or another of the islands at the mouth 

 of our harbor; now and then an infected ship's company 

 has been forbidden to go at large and been lodged in some 

 isolated house or barn impressed for the service, or, later, 

 in one or another of the pest-houses or inoculation hospi- 

 tals provided b}^ the town. But there has been, until 

 lately, no established quarantine system, — nothing in the 

 treatment of foreign disease, essentially differing from 

 that of disorders of indigenous growth. Until 1799, we 

 had no Board of Health, and no permanent Quarantine 

 Ordinances of our own, but only temporary regulations. 



Nor was this state of things due at all to exemption 

 from exposure. On the contrary, we have been a com- 

 mercial people from the start, and wherever there is 

 water- traffic there is exposure. Indeed, the very epi- 

 demic which depopulated this coast in 1612-17, and 

 which, by weakening the native tribes, may be said to 

 have rendered possible the precarious maintenance of 

 the settlement of 1624-6, — for before its ravages the Pen- 

 tucket tribes could muster three thousand braves, and 

 afterwards some Sagamores had not a dozen men, — this 

 deadly epidemic is thought to have been the small-pox, 

 and to have been contracted by the natives from inter- 

 course with the French fishermen who then frequented 

 the Bay. And the first large European reinforcement 

 which reached us, in 1629, came stricken on the voj^age 

 with this same distemper, which proved fatal at sea to the 

 child of their chronicler, the Elder Higginson, among 

 others, and which, introduced by their arrival into the in- 

 fant colony of some tw^o hundred souls, reduced its num- 

 bers about one-half in a single winter. 



Salem was, from the first, a seafaring town. Pos- 

 sessed of one of the few good harbors between Portland 



