The war with France, which dated from the accession of William III. and continued until the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, led to numerous conflicts with French and Spaniards in the West Indies, and to naval expeditions year after year. The loss of life from sickness in the British ships for a few years at the end of the century was such as can hardly be realized by us. Some part of it happened on the outward voyages, but by far the greater part of it was from the poison of yellow fever which had entered the ships in the anchorages of West Indian colonies. It was probably to that cause that the enormous mortality in the fleet under Sir Francis Wheeler was owing. After some ineffective operations against the French in the Windward Islands in the winter of 1693-4, he sailed for North America with the intention of attacking Quebec. This he failed to do, having sailed from Boston for home on the 3rd of August without entering the St Lawrence. The reason of the failure was probably the extraordinary fatality which Cotton Mather, of Boston, professes to have heard from the admiral himself, namely, that he lost by a malignant fever on the passage from Barbados to Boston 1300 sailors out of 2100, and 1800 soldiers out of 2400[180]. Another instance comes from Carlisle Bay, Barbados. The slave ship ‘Hannibal’ arrived there in November, 1694, during a disastrous epidemic of yellow fever. Phillips, the captain, whose journal of the voyage is published[181], had great difficulty in saving his crew from being pressed into the king’s ships, which were short of men owing to the yellow fever. Captain Sherman, of the ‘Tiger,’ who convoyed the ‘Hannibal’ and other merchantmen back to England in April, 1695, told Phillips that he buried six hundred men out of his ship during the two years that he lay at Barbados, though his complement was but 220, “still pressing men out of the merchant ships that came in, to recruit his number in the room of those that died daily.” These and other similar experiences of yellow fever in the West Indies, which might be collected from the naval history, do not come properly into this chapter; and I pass from them to ship-fever proper, having indicated how much of the loss of life abroad was due to yellow fever.