^94< ' STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF THE 



first step toward sickness, and indeed the foundation of all the 

 dreadful calamities which followed. The disorder, which 

 broke out among them, soon began to rage with fury; the 

 number of sick encreased daily, in fact hourly, occasioned by 

 their being allowed to remain in the barracks with the healthy 

 men; their surgeons were panic struck; an epidemic fever ran 

 through the soldiery like wild-fire; already were there a 

 thousand of them confined. In this posture of afiairs, the 

 Batavian government should have issued out good and whole- 

 some rations, wine and other nutritious restoratives, and 

 exerted themselves to have encreased the comforts of their 

 troops ; but it was ordained otherwise, and though fifteen or 

 twenty died every day, the number of patients still encreased. 

 To behold as I have done, dozens of human carcases ex- 

 posed for hours to the sun on the hospital wharf in La- 

 bourgade, and in open boats waiting for coffins, and after- 

 wards to have seen them packed three in a coffin, would make 

 any body shudder. The deaths soon after encreased to such a 

 degree, that there was no possibility of being supplied either 

 with coffins, or even with graves. The burial ground was 

 already made impassable from the stench created by so many 

 bodies being interred in so short a space of time, frequently 

 not more than three feet under the earth, so that it was at last 

 determined to roll them up in their blankets, and send them 

 outside the river's mouth in punts, or flat bottomed boats, and 

 there commit them to the deep. Colonel Du Melle, who 



