Fully a tenth part of the men raised were lost by sickness. Fever was the chief sickness, and as it happened rarely that more than one in ten cases of fever died, it will be easy to form an approximate estimate of the proportion of all the men raised for the ships that were on the sick list at one time or another with fever--nearly the whole, one might guess. During the three last years of the period Haslar Hospital was constantly full of typhus fever. Admiral Keppel’s fleet arrived at Spithead on 26 October, 1778, and soon began to be infected with contagious fever; before the end of December, 3600 men had been sent to Haslar, which could make up at a pinch 1800 beds. But the great epidemic at Portsmouth was the next year, 1779, when the very large Channel Fleet under Sir Charles Hardy came in. During the month of September, 2500 men were received into hospital, and more than 1000 ill of fevers remained on board for want of room in the hospitals. In the last four months of 1779, 6064 sick were sent to Haslar, which had 2443 patients on 1 January, 1780. There was an additional hospital at Foston, holding 200, as well as two hospital ships holding 600. The infection was virulent during the winter, when Portsmouth was crowded with ships; and in the first five months of 1780, when 3751 cases of fever were admitted during the decline of the epidemic, one in eight died. The following shows how much fever preponderated at Haslar Hospital in 1780. In 8143 admissions on the medical side, the chief forms of sickness were as follows[201]: Continued Fevers 5539 Scurvy 1457 Rheumatism 327 Flux 240 Consumption 218 Smallpox 42 Blane gives the instance of the ‘Intrepid,’ one of the Channel Fleet under Hardy in 1779: “Almost the whole of her crew either died at sea or were sent to the hospital upon arriving at Portsmouth. This ship, after refitting, was pretty healthy for a little time; but probably from the operation of the old adhering infection, she became extremely sickly immediately after joining our fleet and sent 200 men to the hospital after arriving in the West Indies. Most of these were ill of dysentery[202].” During a voyage of three weeks of the ‘Alcide’ and ‘Torbay’ from the Windward Islands to New York in September, 1780, nearly a half of the men were unfit. In the ‘Alcide’ it was a fever that raged, in the ‘Torbay’ it was a dysentery[203]. These experiences of fever in the ships of the Royal navy continued to the end of the 18th century. In Trotter’s time, as in Lind’s, receiving ships were a source of contagion to others, one ship of the kind, the ‘Cambridge’ having diffused fever among many ships of the Channel Fleet by men drafted from her[204].