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Updated: June 14, 2025
Percy gives a doleful picture of the wretchedness of the colony: "Our men were destroyed with cruel sickness, as swellings, fluxes, burning-fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of mere famine.... We watched every three nights, lying on the cold bare ground what weather soever came, worked all the next day, which brought our men to be most feeble wretches, our food was but a small can of barley, sod in water to five men a day, our drink but cold water taken out of the river, which was at the flood very salt, at a low tide full of shrimp and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.
The universal scarcity was followed by fluxes and malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts, so that whole villages were laid waste. If one for every house in the kingdom died and that is very probable the loss must be upward of four hundred thousand souls. If only half, a loss too great for this ill-peopled country to bear, as they are mostly working people.
After the farinaceous matter has settled to the bottom, the water is poured off, and the sago is baked into cakes, which they use as bread. The sago, which is carried from hence to other parts of the East Indies, is dried into small grains, and is used with milk of almonds as a remedy against fluxes, being of an astringent quality.
Want and misery were in every face, the roads were spread with dead and dying, there was sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave, and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished. Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying these villages waste.
Besides the scourge of small-pox, the colonists were afflicted grievously with other malignant distempers, fatal throat diseases, epidemic influenzas, putrid fevers, terrible fluxes; and as the art of sanitation was absolutely disregarded and almost unknown, as drainage there was none, and the notion of disinfection was in feeble infancy, we cannot wonder that the death-rates were high.
This was a surprising discovery, and I was exceeding glad of them; but I was warned by my experience to eat sparingly of them, remembering, that when I was ashore in Barbary, the eating of grapes killed several of our Englishmen who were slaves there, by throwing them into fluxes and fevers: but I found an excellent use for these grapes, and that was to cure or dry them in the sun, and keep them as dried grapes or raisins are kept, which I thought would be, as indeed they were, as wholesome, and as agreeable to eat, when no grapes might be had.
And observe how the good people of France are always the most enlightened and intelligent people in the universe! The speciality of Monsieur Ridoux's candidate was broken legs, girls in complaints of childhood, and fluxes of the womb.
It is also used medicinally for the same intentions with the viscous substance which the flour of wheat forms with milk, in fluxes and catarrhs, under various forms of powders, mixtures, &c. A drachm of starch, with three ounces of any agreeable simple water, and a little sugar, compose an elegant jelly, of which a spoonful may be taken every hour or two.
Prepared as tea, however, it makes a grateful diluent drink in fevers; and in this way it is commonly used, either by itself, or acidulated with the juice of lemons. Woodville's Med. Bot. p. 335, 336. MENTHA viridis. SPEAR-MINT. Leaves. In colicky pains, the gripes to which children are subject, lienteries, and other kinds of immoderate fluxes, this plant frequently does good service.
The dehydrating agents rapidly lose their efficiency on exposure to the air. It is often necessary in quantitative analysis to employ fluxes to bring into solution substances which are not dissolved by acids. The fluxes in most common use are sodium carbonate and sodium or potassium acid sulphate.
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