"I consider the part of the country which I had just passed through extremely healthy, except, perhaps, during the rains. It appears that in this season the water, flowing down from the mountains and passing over a quantity of poisonous detritus, becomes impregnated with mineral substances, gives out pestilential miasmata, and causes the terrible jungle-fever, which, if it does not at once carry off the victim, leaves behind it years of suffering. My journey, as has been seen, took place at the end of the rainy season and when the floods were subsiding; some deleterious exhalations, doubtless, still escaped, and I saw several natives attacked with intermittent fever, but I had not had an hour's illness. Ought I to attribute this immunity to the regimen I observed, and which had been strongly recommended to me--abstinence, all but total, from wine and spirits, and drinking only tea, never cold water? I think so; and I believe by such a course one is in no great danger." CHAPTER XI. FROM BANGKOK TO CHANTABOUN--A MISSIONARY JOURNEY IN 1835 For many years the region on the eastern shore of the gulf has been more or less familiar to the foreign residents in Bangkok. So long ago as 1835 the Protestant missionaries explored and mapped out, with a good degree of accuracy, the coast line from the mouth of the Meinam to the mouth of the Chantaboun River. Extracts from the journal of Dr. Bradley, a pioneer among American missionaries in Siam, give an interesting sketch of the country as it was, as well as of the modes of travel many years ago, and the beginnings of the civilization in which, since that time, Siam has made such extraordinary progress. Dr. Bradley, accompanied by another missionary and wife, made his journey in the first vessel ever built in Siam on a European model. A young nobleman, who has since then become very distinguished by reason of his interest in scientific pursuits of every kind, and his attainments in various branches of knowledge, had built at Chantaboun a brig which he had named the Ariel, and was about returning from Bangkok to that port. With the liberality and kindness by which his conduct toward the missionaries has always been characterized, he invited Dr. Bradley and his colleague to be his guests on the return voyage. Dr. Bradley thus speaks of the Ariel.