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A few days later, however, he reappeared with thirteen victims of yaws from his home town, having meanwhile twice covered on foot the great distance which separates Barlig from Bontoc, and assembled and brought in his fellow-sufferers.
It was a common native disease on Santa Anna, he said, as he was helped down the companion ladder, his dead arm dropping, bump-bump, from step to step. He was certainly the ghastliest guest we ever entertained, and we've had not a few lepers and elephantiasis victims on board. Martin inquired about yaws, for here was a man who ought to know.
One and all, they are afflicted with every form of malignant skin disease. Some have ringworm, others have bukua. This latter is caused by a vegetable parasite that invades the skin and eats it away. The itching is intolerable. The afflicted ones scratch until the air is filled with fine dry flakes. Then there are yaws and many other skin ulcerations.
Yaws became serious, but that was a trifle as compared with dysentery; and pleurisy, pneumonia, fever and dropsy had also to be reckoned with. About fifty of the new negroes were quartered for several years in a sort of hospital camp at Spring Garden, where the routine even for the able-bodied was much lighter than on Worthy Park. One of the new negroes died in 1792, and another in the next year.
Neither illness nor accident ever befalls them, and they grow larger and more carnivorous day by day, gnawing our finger-nails and toe-nails while we sleep. P.S. Charmian is having another bout with fever. Martin, in despair, has taken to horse-doctoring his yaws with bluestone and to blessing the Solomons.
Dr Macphail looked at the yaws from which most of the children and the young boys seemed to suffer, disfiguring sores like torpid ulcers, and his professional eyes glistened when he saw for the first time in his experience cases of elephantiasis, men going about with a huge, heavy arm or dragging along a grossly disfigured leg. Men and women wore the lava-lava.
But what did it matter? If it wasn't yaws, it was something else in the Solomons. I noticed that from this moment Martin displayed a swiftly increasing interest in his own yaws. Dosings with corrosive sublimate were more frequent, while, in conversation, he began to revert with growing enthusiasm to the clean climate of Kansas and all other things Kansan.
Endurance through generations has given the people large immunity from the effects of hook-worm and malaria, but not from the indigenous diseases, kraw-kraw, yaws and elephantiasis, nor of course from dysentery and smallpox which the Europeans introduced. Yet robust health is fairly common, and where health prevails there is generally happiness, for the negroes have that within their nature.
"He say," translated the man with the yaws, "if dem big ju-ju lib back for here, he let you go." "And if not?" The interpreter put a question, and the witch-doctor screamed out a long reply, and then stooped and felt the captive over with his fingers, as men feel cattle at a fair. "Well?" said Kettle impatiently; "if he doesn't get back the wooden god, let's hear what the game is next?"
My eyesight yaws to and again, d'ye see; then there's such a walloping and whushing in my hold smite me Lord have mercy upon us. Here, you swab, ne'er mind the glass, hand me the noggin." The latter part of this address was directed to the waiter, who had returned with a quartern of brandy, which Crowe, snatching eagerly, started into his bread-room at one cant.
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