interior of Massachusetts. Old people still
remember when New York was so completely deserted that its principal
streets were boarded up, and watchmen went their rounds of silent
streets by day as well as by night. The fever of the present year can
be traced directly to this accursed traffic. Slaves had been smuggled
into Rio Janeiro, who brought the disease in its most virulent form
from Africa. In that city it was carrying its hundreds to the grave,
when a vessel cleared for New Orleans, having the disease on board.
This vessel disseminated it in the upper wards of the city, while at
the same time there arrived from Cuba another vessel which, from a like
cause, had caught the vomito at Havana, and from this second vessel the
disease was disseminated in the lower wards of New Orleans. It was the
meeting of these two independent currents of the fever in the centre of
the city, on Canal Street, that caused that fatal day on which three
hundred victims went to their long homes. Such were the fruits of this
offspring of an inhuman trade in a single city, in a single day.

FRIAR PAGE.

I learn from the preface of a book in the Spanish language, which I
purchased at Mexico, entitled "The Voyages of Thomas Page," that a
Dominican monk of that name, the brother of the Royalist Governor of
Oxford under Charles I., was smuggled into Mexico by his Dominican
brethren, against the King's order, which prohibited the entry of
Englishmen into that country. As a missionary monk he resided in
Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, eighteen years. On his
return to England he published an account of the country which he
visited, under the title of "A Survey of the West Indies." This being
the first and last book ever written by a resident of New Spain that
had not been submitted to the most rigid censorship by the Inquisition,
it produced so profound a sensation, that, by order of the great
Colbert, French Minister of State, it was expurgated and translated
into French by an Irish Catholic of the name of O'Neil. From this
expurgated French edition the Spanish copy now before me was
translated. From this Spanish edition I had made the several
translations that are found in this, and the following chapters. I have
since found a black letter copy of the original, printed at London, in
1677; but I have concluded to use the translations, as furnishing a
more official character to the picture therein drawn of the grossly
immoral state