Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/484

426 carried between Madagascar and Java to make the brown, long-haired people of the latter speak a language similar to that of the black, woolly-headed natives of the other, is, I confess, far beyond my comprehension: unless the Egyptian learning running in two courses, one through Africa, the other through Asia, might introduce the same words, and, what is still more probable, numerical terms into the languages of people who never had communicated with each other. But this point, requiring a depth of knowledge of antiquities, I must leave to antiquarians to discuss.

14th January. Weighed; our breeze, though favourable, was, however, so slack, that by night we had got no further than abreast of the town, where we anchored.

20th. Myself, who had begun with the bark yesterday, missed my fever to-day; the people, however, in general grew worse, and many had now the dysentery or bloody flux.

22nd. Almost all the ship's company were now ill, either with fluxes or severe purgings; myself far from well, Mr. Sporing very ill, and Mr. Parkinson very little better: his complaint was a slow fever.

23rd. Myself was too ill to-day to do anything—one of our people died of the flux in the evening.

24th. My distemper this day turned out to be a flux, attended (as that disease always is) with excruciating pains in my bowels, on which I took to my bed: in the evening Mr. Sporing died.

25th. One more of the people died to-day. Myself endured the pain of the damned almost. The surgeon of the ship thought proper to order me the hot bath, into which I went four times at the intervals of two hours and felt great relief.

26th. Though better than yesterday my pains were still almost intolerable. In the evening Mr. Parkinson died, and one more of the ship's crew.

28th. This day Mr. Green, our astronomer, and two of the people died, all of the very same complaint as I laboured under, no very encouraging circumstance.