If you think this elucidation of the translation of the Manuscript of Park's death sufficiently interesting to the public to deserve a place in your intelligent paper, it is very much at your service.
Professor of African Languages, and formerly British Consul and Agent for Holland, Sweden, and Denmark, at Santa Cruz, South Barbary.[234]
[Footnote 234: See BRITISH STATESMAN, May 6th, 1819.]
LETTERS RESPECTING AFRICA, FROM _J.G. JACKSON AND OTHERS._
To JAMES WILLIS, Esq. late Consul to Senegambia.
Your letter reached my hands yesterday; but I am afraid I shall not be able to satisfy you in every enquiry which you have made relative to the plague in Barbary in 1799. I have, however, no doubt but the plague which has prevailed in Spain has originated from it. Some of the following observations may probably be of service to you.
It does not appear to be ascertained how the plague originated in Fas in the year 1799. Some persons have ascribed it to infected merchandise received at Fas from the East; whilst others maintain that the locusts which had infested Western Barbary during seven years, destroying the crops, the vegetables, and every green thing, even to the bark of the trees, produced such a scarcity, that the 420 poor could obtain scarcely any thing to eat but the locusts; and living on them for several months, till a most abundant crop enabled them to satisfy the cravings of nature, they ate abundantly of the new corn, which producing a fever, brought on the contagion. At this time the small-pox pervaded the country, and was generally fatal. The small-pox is thought to be the forerunner of this species of contagion, as appears by an ancient Arabic manuscript, which gives a full account of the same disorder having carried off two-thirds of the inhabitants of West Barbary about four hundred years since; but, however the dreadful epidemy originated, the leading features of the disorder were novel, and more dreadful than the common plague of Turkey, or that of Syria or Egypt, as the following observations will demonstrate.
In the month of April, 1799, a plague of the most dreadful kind manifested itself at the city of Old Fas, which soon after communicated itself to the new city. About this time the Emperor Muley Soliman ben Muhamed was preparing a numerous army, and was on the eve of departure to visit his Southern dominions, and to take possession of the province of Abda, which had not acknowledged him as Emperor, but was, as well as the port of Saffy, in a state of rebellion. The Emperor left Fas early in the summer, and proceeded to Sallee, Mazagan, and Saffee; thence to Marocco and Mogodor. Now the plague began to kindle in all the Southern provinces, first carrying off one or two the first day, three or four the second 421 day, six or eight the third day, and increasing progressively till it amounted to a daily mortality of two in a hundred of the whole population; continuing _with unabated violence_, ten, fifteen, twenty days, being of longer duration in old than in new towns; then diminishing in a progressive proportion from one thousand a-day, to nine hundred, to eight hundred and so continuing to decrease till it disappeared.