² To my knowledge, very few of the Companies' records of those nations trading with Africa, or maintaining forts on the Gold Coast, have been explored for this information. Davies, K.G, in The Royal African Company (New York, 1970 paperback edition), 256,Google Scholar only briefly touches on the problem, concluding: ‘Mortality rates were at times very high.’ He cites two examples: (a) ‘Between November 1684 and April 1685, 36 men died on the Gold Coast and at Ardra, about one quarter of the total strength’; (b) ‘Of 64… alive at Cape Coast in April 1685, 18 were dead by the end of the following year.’ (28 per cent). Davies will remedy his brevity in a forthcoming article, ‘The Living and the Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, 1684–1732’, in Stanley, L. Engerman and Eugene, D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton 1974). Mr Davies has graciously consented to my citing results from his article, for which permission I am most grateful.Google Scholar

³ Philip Curtin first wrote on this problem in ‘The White Man's Grave: Image and Reality, 1780–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 1961, 94–110.Google Scholar

⁴ Curtin, P., ‘Epidemiology and the Slave Trade’, Political Science Quarterly, LXXXIII, 2 (06 1968), 202.Google ScholarGreat, Britain, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1840, xxx (Accounts and Papers, II), 228,Google Scholar ‘Statistical Report of the Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding among troops in Western Africa, St, Helena, Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius’. For comparative statistics at the end of the nineteenth century, see: Raymond, E. Durnett, ‘The Campaign Against Malaria and the Expansion of Scientific Medical and Sanitary Services in British West Africa, 1898–1910’, African Historical Studies, 1, 2 (1968), 153–97.Google Scholar

⁵ Tullock, PP, 1840, iii.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid. 7, 19.

⁷ Between 1820 and 1824, 1830 and 1836, the European troops were ‘principally white non-commissioned officers’. There is no indication that the last group was the same as the first. Note should be taken of the fact that ‘a considerable portion of deaths in 1825 and 1826 took place at the Gambia’. Tulloch believes that if each area's mortality was determined separately, ‘that of the European troops at Sierra Leone would not probably have exceeded 350 per thousand’ per year. Ibid. 7.

⁸ The sharp increase in white troops on the Gold Coast was due to the war with Ashanti, which resulted in the death of Charles McCarthy. A part of the Royal African Corps, formerly disbanded in South Africa ‘was reembodied and augmented by drafts of “commuted-punishment men” from Europe’. Similar troops were sent to Sierra Leone. Tulloch describes many of these troops as being ‘of the most degraded class of soldiers’. Ibid. 19.

⁹ Ibid. 24. However, this statistic should be used with care since an officer could be invalided home for medical reasons. Once an officer was relieved of duty in order to return to England, he would no longer be counted as a member of his unit. If he died on the way to the boat or en route, his death would not be included in the statistics here discussed. Philip Curtin pointed this out to me in a personal communication. He is convinced that this explains why the death rate for officers was substantially different from that of the enlisted men.

¹⁰ Curtin, P, The Image of Africa (Madison, 1964), 483–7. The rate of 43.3 per cent is based on 22 death rates cited by Curtin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Curtin, , ‘Epidemiology’, 203 n.Google Scholar

¹³ By the sale of papers to paper mills (1821) and by fire (1844). Ratelband, K, ed., Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina (The Hague, 1953), xxv.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See Carson, P, Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland (London, 1962).Google Scholar

¹⁵ The West India Company employed other Europeans in addition to Dutchmen, especially among its soldiers. Unlike the officials and traders, the soldiers were recruited from various parts of northern Europe, such as parts of what are today Belgium, Western Germany and France. It is primarily for this reason, that reference in this article is to Europeans employed by the West India Company, not to Netherlanders exclusively.

¹⁶ William, Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705), 106.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid. 107.

¹⁸ Curtin, , ‘The White Man's Grave’, 97.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Bosman, , A New and Accurate Description, 108.Google Scholar

²⁰ Up to 1750, the number of Africans employed by the Vest India Company in their forts was about ten a year; during the decade 1750−60, this figure rose from 16 to 75; and in 1773, 146 out of 326 employees were African or mulattoes born on the Gold Coast. Tweede West Indische Compagme (WIC) 490, 491, 931, 31 12. 1773, fol. 154. See also West Indische Comité 101, B, C, G, 1795, 1796, 1800.

²¹ Curtin, , Image, 74.Google Scholar

²² Other mathematical processes were attempted, but no significant difference resulted in the mean figures. The rates published here are believed to reflect most accurately the true statistical situation.

²³ K. G. Davies does have data for those leaving England (this being one of the main differences between his paper and mine), though he is unable to determine if all who embarked landed on the Gold Coast. He cites 1,489 enrolments for the Gold Coast between 1694 and 1732, an average of 38 per year. However, he states that this was an unprofitable time in the Royal Africa Company's history, which suggests that more may have been coming in profitable years. ‘The Living and the Dead’, Table 1.

²⁴ Davies deals with the period 1684–1732, but the data do not exist for 1698–1702, 1713–16, and 1727. Our data, therefore, overlap for fourteen years (but are comparable for only ten of these years). He will publish his data in five year averages only, so that it is unclear if his mean would be higher or lower if the data were compared on an annual basis. His average death rate for the English serving the Royal Africa Company on the Gold Coast is 27 per cent, approximately 8.5 per cent higher than for the Europeans serving the Netherlands West India Company between 1719 and 1760. The highest rate for a single year is 57 per cent, in 1694; the lowest, 13 per cent in 1691. Was the English experience in fact so much worse than that of the Dutch? Davies himself admits that his average death rate estimate is ‘extremely crude, owing to fluctuations in the size of the establishment at different times of the year… [and to] a good deal of variation both from quinquennial period to period and from year to year’. Davies also quotes Bosman, who believed: ‘… if the State of Health in Guinea be computed by the number of the English which die here, certainly this Country must have a much more unhealthful Name in England than with us’. ‘The Living and the Dead’, conclusion. Perhaps, then, the English case was exceptional and the Dutch more representative.

²⁵ Davies found that June and July were the deadliest months for Europeans on the Gold Coast.

²⁶ If one used Tulloch's rates only for Sierra Leone (Tulloch's last column, C, on pp. 358–359) the rate would be 32.3 per cent or 323 per thousand.

²⁷ Tulloch, PP, 1840, p. 8.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid. 7.

²⁹ See H.M. Feinberg, ‘Director Generals of the Netherlands West India Company: An Accurate List for the Eighteenth Century’, Bijdragen tot Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde (forthcoming).

³⁰ This problem, in reference to Colonial America, is discussed by: James, H. Cassedy, Demography in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), especially chapter 2;Google ScholarPhilip, J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970), 7Google Scholar and Kenneth, Lodtridge, ‘The Population of Dedhani, Massachusetts, 1636–1736’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., xix (1961), 319, 332. I would like to thank Max M. Mintz of Southern Connecticut State College for calling these to my attention.Google Scholar

³¹ Curtin, , ‘Epidemiology’, 202.Google Scholar

³² Bourgeoise-Pichot, J, ‘The General Development of the Population of France Since the Eighteenth Century’, Glass, D.V. and Eversley, D.E.C., eds., Population in History (Chicago, 1965), 495, 506;Google ScholarChambers, J.D, ‘Population Change in a Provincial Town, Nottingham’,Google ScholarIbid. 351.

³³ Cassedy, , Demography in Early America, 13–14;Google ScholarAlexander, Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York, 1898), 464, 467, 612.Google Scholar Between December 1606 and May 1618, 1,800 persons sailed for Virginia. Approximately 1,100 died en route or in Virginia. Between 1619 and 1625, 4,749 immigrants arrived there. However, in 1625, the population was only 1,025. Ibid. 285, 612.

³⁴ Oscar, Handlin, ‘The Significance of the Seventeenth Century’, James, M.Smith, , ed., Seventeenth Century America (Chapel Hill, 1959), 8.Google Scholar However, there are some recent suggestions that life quickly unproved, with mortality declining to a rate lower than or comparable to those of England and France: Greven, , Four Generations, 196 n.;Google ScholarLockridge, , ‘Population of Dedham’, 332–3.Google Scholar See also Jolm, Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).Google Scholar

³⁵ John Duffy cites the views of two contemporaries on the dietary problems of eighteenth-century New England: William, Douglas, ‘In New England… the general subsistence of the poorer people… is salt pork and Indian beans, with bread of Indian corn meal, and pottage of this meal with milk for breakfast and supper’; Cadwallader Colden observed that ‘scurvy is exceedin[gly] common in North America and hardly anybody [is] free of it…’, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953), 12. Diseases in North America included malaria, dysentry, yellow fever, smallpox, measles, and influenza. Yellow fever was a completely new disease to Englishmen arriving in the New World.Google ScholarIbid. 13, 14.

³⁶ Curtin, , ‘Epidemiology’, 203.Google Scholar Disease problems in India are discussed in Mark, Naidis, “Ants, Muskeetoes, Flies and Stinking Chints”: The British Battle Against Disease in India', Western Humanities Review, xviii, (1964), 39–48.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid. 193–4.