PART I.] Speculations as to the Cause of the Outbreak. 325 



the coolies, further inquiries were not made. Notes were not made at the time, and 

 the special facts regarding the deaths cannot now be recollected. On the return of 

 the vessel, inquiries were made, but the Native Doctor had left her, and the Captain 

 recollected little about the case except that he was ill for two or three days. The case 

 was associated, to the best of the recollection of the Port Surgeon, with fever." The 

 Committee are, however, of opinion that a " certain amount of suspicion must be at- 

 tached " to this case. Why, it is rather difPxCult to understand, seeing that, if there 

 be one disease which a Native Doctor, or indeed any other native of India, can readily 

 distinguish, it is cholera. Not the faintest suspicion of anything of the kind had been 

 entertained until so long after the event that minute details of the illness had escaped 

 the recollection of everybody who could be questioned as to them. 



14. The subsequent history of the vessel in the voyage to Jeddah and the return 

 voyage to Bombay also goes to show that this case had nothing to do with the cases 

 of cholera which afterwards happened at Aden, and, in fact, to exonerate her entirely 

 from all connection with the cholera outbreak at this settlement; for not only during 

 her stay of a whole week in port was there " no sickness amongst the crew, nor amongst 

 the pilgrims on board either before or after the lower hatches had been taken up for 

 the purpose of discharging cargo," but she disembarked the pilgrims at Jeddah without 

 having had any cholera, and called again at Aden on her return journey to Bombay 

 equally free from suspicion. As the Aden Committee remark : " during her voyage 

 to Jeddah and during her return voyage to Bombay there was no sickness on board." 



15. The probability is that the disease had been acquired on shore, rather than 

 on board ship. It is true that the earlier cases of the disease which were reported 

 were almost entirely restricted to coolies who had been working on board the steamer ; 

 and it is not impossible that the hard labour involved in discharging cargo, especially 

 in the case of fasting coolies, may have expedited the manifestation of the already 

 latent disease amongst them ; but further than this nothing can be said. Any other 

 hard labour at this particular time would probably have acted in the same way. The 

 fact that, of the 50 or 60 coolies collected from various parts of the harbour, the first 

 cases of the disease were strictly confined to men residing in one particular locality, 

 points most assuredly to the conclusion that the disease itself was acquired in the 

 locality where these particular persons dwelt rather than on a ship in which coolies 

 from various parts of the Settlement had chanced to spend a few hours together. It 

 is mentioned in the Committee's report that the men, " after finishing their work, 

 went to their houses at Tawahi or Maala ; " but none of the coolies from Maala or other 

 parts of the Settlement were attacked for some weeks subsequently, and of those who 

 were attacked, it is not known that any one of them had been on board the Columhian. 

 Moreover, as has already been mentioned, one of the earlier cases of the disease occurred 

 in a woman who resided in the same locality as the persons first affected, but who had 

 neither been on board the ship, nor had she associated with those coolies. 



16. As to the question of the vitality and transportability of the supposed cholera 



