Exposed to these emanations were “a multitude of people breathing and constantly perspiring in a close place, such as a ship’s _allop_ or lower deck next the hould, where is the entry to a certain vacant space near the ship’s center, which leadeth to the bottom, for gathering all the water together which the ship draweth by leakage, and is called the well. Several times there is occasion for some people to go down to examine the quantity of the water, and in some ships to bore an augur hole to let in as much as will preserve a good air. I have often known two or three men killed at a time, as it is said; and the reason may be understood from what I said of the general effects of that fluid in ordinary fever [he is now writing on heat apoplexy], where there is not above two or three inches, but just as much as may make a surface, almost equal to the square of the well, of stagnant salt water which had been a long while in gathering; and the air over the whole _allop_ extremely rarified, and here not at all ventilated[184].” We owe it to the accident of the celebrated Dr Freind having accompanied Lord Peterborough’s expedition to Spain in 1705 that some account has been preserved of the sickness among the troops ashore and afloat[185]. The expedition of some 8000 men being then in its second year, fever and dysentery were by far the most common diseases, so common that “we can hardly turn, whether at sea or in camp, without finding them as if our inseparable companions and as if domesticated among us.” In the summer of the previous year there had been much fever both in the ships of the fleet and in the camp before Barcelona: “It was of the continual kind, though it usually remitted in the day time, and seemed to approach nearly to the stationary one which Sydenham has described in the years 1685 and 1686.” He then gives symptoms, which were on the whole those of the hospital fever to be afterwards described from Pringle’s medical account of the campaigns in 1743-48. Persons of a robust habit were affected more than others, and more severely, and carried off sooner. The others were generally taken away by a lingering death. “Some, when the fever seemed to have been wholly gone off lay four or five days without pain or sickness, though weak; afterwards being suddenly seized with convulsions of the nerves they in a short time expired”--perhaps the phenomenon of relapse, which Lind recorded for ship-fever fifty years after and was seen among the troops landed from Corunna in 1809. In some few the parotids, or abscesses formed about the groin, carried off the disease.