their private boats; thereby grieving these "holy men" most of
all, if we may believe the old chronicles, because they could have no
share in the rich plunder loaded upon their own backs.

The second day after our arrival in Vera Cruz a fellow-passenger, who
had been sick all the voyage, died of the yellow fever, which he had
contracted at New Orleans, or on the Mississippi; which was probably
the first time that a person ever died in Vera Cruz of vomito that had
been contracted in the United States.

THE VOMITO.

This is a fitting place to speak of this disease and of its ravages,
which we witnessed before leaving New Orleans. It was the time for the
frosts to make their appearance when I left New York, and with the
expectation of seeing the ground covered with this antidote to the
fever, crowds were returning from the north, though the marks of the
pestilence were still visible along our route. It had followed the main
stream of travel far northward, and now, as we ventured upon its track,
it seemed like traversing the valley of the shadow of death. Terror had
committed greater ravages than the pestilence; the villages and cities
on our route were half deserted; stagnation was visible in all
commercial places; and when we reached New Orleans this strange state
of things was doubly intensified: it looked more like a city of the
dead, or a city depopulated, than the emporium of the Mississippi
valley. A stranger might have supposed that a great funeral service had
just been performed, in which all of the inhabitants remaining in town
had acted the part of mourners. The city itself had been so thoroughly
cleansed, that it might challenge comparison with one of the most
cleanly villages of Holland, while its footways seemed almost too pure
to be trod upon. Nothing appears half so gloomy as such a place when
deserted of its principal inhabitants.

This disease was unknown in America until the opening of the African
slave-trade. It is an African disease, intensified and aggravated by
the rottenness and filthy habits of the human cargoes that brought it
to America. It was entirely unknown at Vera Cruz until brought there in
the slave-ship of 1699.[3] In like manner it was carried to all the
West India islands. When the negro insurrection in San Domingo drove
the white population into exile, the disease was carried by the
immigrants to all the cities of the United States, and even to the most
healthy localities in the