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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    know, that even in England, when the temperature of the air rises above a certain point, fever and ague were and are always generated in our fenny counties. I question, if a single mountain, rising out of a marshy plain, would be quite free from the influence of the poison at even the high elevation mentioned; but as regards a range of moun¬ tains, I know that the third from the marsh, as already remarked, will prove quite healthy at a much lower eleva¬ tion than that fixed upon by Humboldt, and even if it is considerably lower than the two that intervene. The more we penetrate into a mountainous country, the more certain we are of finding a healthy locality within the tropics; and it is because, generally speaking, the islands at the entrance of the Caribbean Sea, consist of a single mountain only, with the soil that has accumulated at its base, that they still are, and ever have been so very pro¬ ductive of remittent fevers. Jamaica alone, of all the British Colonies, affords sufficient scope for finding a healthy inland station; though I am inclined to believe, there are more than one sequestered spots within the mountain range of Trinidad that the marsh-poison has never reached, though not even so elevated as the bar¬ racks of Fort George, where as was soon discovered, no white man could survive a week. If in future it should ever become necessary to fix upon a new station for our troops, or to select a fresh locality for the erection of a barrack, the first duty of an engineer will be to have the ground bored, so as to ascertain the nature of the soil, and the depth of perme¬ able strata. If sand, or gravel, prevail to the depth of ten, fifteen, or still better, twenty feet, the station will be