A letter to the Right Honorable, the Secretary at War, on sickness and mortality in the West Indies; being a review of Captain Tullock's Statistical report / [Sir Andrew Halliday].

  • Halliday, Andrew, Sir, 1781-1839
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honorable, the Secretary at War, on sickness and mortality in the West Indies; being a review of Captain Tullock's Statistical report / [Sir Andrew Halliday]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    officers and privates, eleven women, and six children,—a total of 146 persons,—had 138 attacked with fever, and of these ] 00 died. The ratio of deaths annually among the white troops in British Guiana for a period of twenty years is only 59*2 in the thousand of the mean strength. In Trinidad it is 61*6, but in Tobago it is as high as 153, or, as already said, double the rate which prevails throughout the whole of the military stations in this command. Grenada and St. Vincent’s are both esteemed healthy Colonies, though occasionally fever has raged with great malignity. The mortality at Grenada has always been greater than at St. Vincent’s, in the proportion of 61 to 55 per thousand. In 387 deaths which occurred at Grenada in twenty years, 165 were from fever; while at St. Vincent’s in the same period, though there were 408 deaths, 85 only were occasioned by fever. Having had no opportunity of visiting either of these islands, I am unable to offer any positive opinion as to the probable cause of so remarkable a circumstance as the mortality from fever in these two neighbouring islands being so different. I imagine, however, that it possibly may arise from the moisture in Grenada being kept near the surface of the earth, and more powerfully acted upon by the solar heat, and that in the centre of the island there are several hill lakes. Grenada is a mass of solid rock, over which, even in its most fertile valleys, a thin stratum of earth has only as yet been spread; while the ashes and porous tuffa or lava of the still active volcano of St. Vincent’s, have covered its more solid materials to a considerable depth. In the one case, the water is rapidly called back into the atmosphere, bringing with it the