Notes on the West Indies, vol. 2 of 2 : $b including observations relative to the Creoles and slaves of the western colonies and the Indian of South America: interspersed with remarks upon the seasoning or yellow fever of hot climates
| Language | en |
|---|---|
| First published | 2025-11-24 |
| Rights | Public domain in the USA. |
| Gutenberg ID | #77323 |
Description
"Fatal fingers" by William Le Queux is a novel written in the early 20th century. Based on the opening provided, however, the text reads as an epistolary travel and medical account by a British army physician in the West Indies, interweaving observations on colonial society, slavery, Indigenous peoples, natural history, and the scourge of yellow fever. The narrator’s voice is reflective and practical, shifting between clinical detail and vivid, often unsettling, scenes from plantations and garrisons. Readers drawn to colonial-era life-writing and medical history will likely find its frank reportage and moral commentary compelling. The opening of the text presents a run of letters from Berbice and Demerara in which the narrator returns from river excursions, trades news of island conflicts, notes a giant snake, and listens skeptically to colonists’ tales of mermaids. He records extravagant planter hospitality and comic excess alongside a terrifying tropical storm and a military funeral whose pomp deepens soldiers’ despair; he contrasts local “yellow fever” treatments (emetics and bark) with army practice and reflects on the peculiar privileges and burdens of medical life. We see Dutch military punishment by gauntlet, the shock of an electric eel, a visit from painted Indigenous people, a delicate lion-monkey, and a raw instance of color prejudice when a mulatto woman refuses even to touch a black infant. The narrative then shifts to a surge of fever cases, detailing the doctor’s exhausting routine at Mahaica—long rounds, scant supplies, improvised diets—and culminates in a harrowing account of a plantation manager’s brutal murder of a slave and the near-fatal flogging of the man’s wife, the slaves’ defiant funeral rites, and the attorney’s chilling indifference. Subsequent letters describe more deaths (including a captain undone by fear), failed trials of local remedies, talk of the trade-wind as “the Doctor,” a black “Doctor Bob” noting fever spikes with high tide, and small mercies like planters’ meat donations. It closes with a striking forest fire and a visit to an eccentric, self-sufficient planter living at the edge of the woods, whose austere cottage, tamed birds and fish, and female-run household leave a memorable portrait of frontier life. (This is an automatically generated summary.)