CHAPTER V
Synopsis of Chapter. Fall of the Roman Empire—Succeeding Period known as the Dark Ages—Sanitation during the Dark Ages—Beginning of Material Progress in Sanitation—Pilgrimages to Juggernaut—Water Supply to Paris—London Water Supply—Aqueduct of Zempoala, Mexico.
During the period following the fall of Rome, the empire was overrun by barbarians from the north, and the magnificent baths, aqueducts and public edifices reared by the Romans with such painstaking care were suffered to fall into decay. So little in sympathy were the barbarians with the people they conquered and their institutions, that in time the inhabitants of many localities even forgot the uses to which the old works had been put; and had it not been for the Popes the supply of water to the city of Rome would have been cut off completely, while as it was the service was frequently interrupted.
Following the fall of the Roman Empire there was a period of over one thousand years of intellectual darkness, during which no material progress was made; indeed, instead of progress a retrograde movement set in which left a lasting impression on the times. The little spark of knowledge that survived this period burned in the monasteries of the monks, who treasured and kept alive the spark of civilization.
Destroyed Lead Font, Great Plumstead, Norfolk
The Dark Ages, as this period is called, if lacking in progress, were replete with adventure. During this period, which might equally well be called the Age of Romance, there sprung up a brotherhood of men noted for skill in combat, who were dubbed knights. There also spread a creed about that time that uncleanliness was next to godliness, and clergy and laymen vied with each other to see which could live in the most filthy manner. They associated in their minds luxury and cleanliness as inconsistent with godliness, while squalor and bodily filth were considered as outward indications of inward piety and sanctification. So it came to pass that bathing, instead of a daily practice, became uncommon; homes and inhabitants became filthy and streams polluted. Such violations of sanitary principles could not continue indefinitely without evil results, and scourge after scourge of filth diseases that swept over Europe and Asia, claiming over 40,000,000 victims, were due to the unsanitary condition that prevailed. The restless, seething, venturesome spirit of the times and the emotional zeal displayed in religious matters contributed greatly to the spread of pestilence. The crusades, starting out with a romantic and religious fervor, but with no set rules of conduct for guidance, and lacking a leader strong enough in discipline to hold in check men whose only claim to distinction lay in their powers in a tilt and their love of battle, soon degenerated into the most disorderly and lewd of rabble. Women camp-followers joined their fortunes with that of the knights, who in most cases forgot the object of the crusade, and gave themselves up to indolence and debauchery. Sanitary precautions were dispensed with on the march, and the result was that wherever the crusaders went they left sickness and pestilence in their wake.
Leaden Cup, of the time of Vespasian, found in Rome. The band was decorated with colored glass
Lead Cistern with the Arms of the Fishmongers' Company, in the possession of Mr. Merthyr Guest
Pilgrimages to the holy shrines, which drew together thousands of human beings without adequate shelter or food, also served to spread contagious diseases throughout the land. Perhaps the best picture of a pilgrimage which, while of a latter date, will still serve to show the unsanitary conditions when thousands of people are brought together without food or shelter, can be had from a report of Dr. Simmons, of the Yokahama Board of Health. In speaking of a latter-day pilgrimage in India, he says: "The drinking-water supply is derived from wells, so-called 'tanks' or artificial ponds and the water courses of the country. The wells generally resemble those of other parts of Asia. The tanks are excavations made for the purpose of collecting the surface water during the rainy season and storing it up for the dry. Necessarily they are mere stagnant pools. The water is used not only to quench thirst, but is said to be drunk as a sacred duty. At the same time, the reservoir serves as a large washing tub for clothes, no matter how dirty or in what soiled condition, and for personal bathing. Many of the watercourses are sacred; notably the Ganges, a river 1,600 miles long, in whose waters it is the religious duty of millions, not only those living near its banks, but for pilgrims, to bathe and to cast their dead. The Hindoo cannot be made to use a latrine. In the cities he digs a hole in his habitation; in the country he seeks the fields, the hillside, the banks of streams and rivers when obliged to obey the calls of nature. Hence it is that the vicinity of towns and the banks of the tanks and water courses are reeking with filth of the worst description, which is of necessity washed into the public water supply with every rainfall. Add to this the misery of pilgrims, then poverty and disease and the terrible crowding into the numerous towns which contain some temple or shrine, the object of their devotion, and we can see how India has become and remains the hotbed of the cholera epidemic." In the United States official report the horrors incident upon the pilgrimages are detailed with appalling minuteness. W. W. Hunter, in his "Orissa," states that twenty-four high festivals take place annually at Juggernaut. At one of them, about Easter, 40,000 persons indulge in hemp and hasheesh to a shocking degree. For weeks before the car festival, in June and July, pilgrims come trooping in by thousands every day. They are fed by the temple cooks to the number of 90,000. Over 100,000 men and women, many of them unaccustomed to work or exposure, tug and strain at the car until they drop exhausted and block the road with their bodies. During every month of the year a stream of devotees flows along the great Orissa road from Calcutta, and every village for three hundred miles has its pilgrim encampments.
The people travel in small bands, which at the time of the great feasts actually touch each other. Five-sixths of the whole are females and ninety-five per cent. travel on foot, many of them marching hundreds and even thousands of miles, a contingent having been drummed up from every town or village in India by one or other of the three thousand emissaries of the temple, who scour the country in all directions in search of dupes. When those pilgrims who have not died on the road arrive at their journey's end, emaciated, with feet bound up in rags and plastered with mud and dirt, they rush into the sacred tanks or the sea and emerge to dress in clean garments. Disease and death make havoc with them during their stay; corpses are buried in holes scooped in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls washed from their shallow graves by the tropical rains. The temple kitchen has the monopoly of cooking for the multitude, and provides food which if fresh is not unwholesome. Unhappily, it is presented before Juggernaut, so becomes too sacred for the minutest portion to be thrown away. Under the influence of the heat it soon undergoes putrefactive fermentation, and in forty-eight hours much of it is a loathsome mass, unfit for human food. Yet it forms the chief sustenance of the pilgrims, and is the sole nourishment of thousands of beggars. Some one eats it to the very last grain. Injurious to the robust, it is deadly to the weak and wayworn, at least half of whom reach the place suffering under some form of bowel complaint. Badly as they are fed the poor wretches are worse lodged. Those who have the temporary shelter of four walls are housed in hovels built upon mud platforms about four feet high, in the center of each of which is the hole which receives the ordure of the household, and around which the inmates eat and sleep. The platforms are covered with small cells without any windows or other apertures for ventilation, and in these caves the pilgrims are packed, in a country where, during seven months out of twelve, the thermometer marks from 85 to 100 degrees Fahr. Hunter says that the scenes of agony and suffocation enacted in these hideous dens baffle description. In some of the best of them, 13 feet long by 10 feet broad and 6½, feet high, as many as eighty persons pass the night. It is not then surprising to learn that the stench is overpowering and the heat like that of an oven. Of 300,000 who visit Juggernaut in one season, 90,000 are often packed together five days a week in 5,000 of these lodgings. In certain seasons, however, the devotees can and do sleep in the open air, camping out in regiments and battalions, covered only with the same meagre cotton garment that clothes them by day. The heavy dews are unhealthy enough, but the great festival falls at the beginning of the rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys are converted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and dead are huddled together.
Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico
In the numerous so-called corpse fields around the town as many as forty or fifty corpses are seen at a time, and vultures sit and dogs lounge lazily about gorged with human flesh. In fact, there is no end to the recurrence of incidents of misery and humiliation, the horrors of which, says the Bishop of Calcutta, are unutterable, but which are eclipsed by those of the return journey. Plundered and fleeced by landlords, the surviving victims reel homeward staggering under their burden of putrid food wrapped up in dirty clothes, or packed in heavy baskets or earthenware jars. Every stream is flooded, and the travelers have often to sit for days in the rain on the banks of a river before a boat will venture to cross. At all these points the corpses lie thickly strewn around (an English traveler counted forty close to one ferry), which accounts for the prevalence of cholera on the banks of brooks, streams and rivers. Some poor creatures drop and die by the way; others crowd into the villages and halting places on the way, where those who gain admittance cram the lodging-places to overflowing, and thousands pass the night in the streets, and find no cover from the drenching storms. Groups are huddled under the trees; long lines are stretched among the carts and bullocks on the roadside, then half saturated with the mud on which they lie, hundreds sit on the wet grass, not daring to lie down, and rock themselves to a monotonous chant through the long hours of the dreary night. It is impossible to compute the slaughter of this one pilgrimage. Bishop Wilson estimates it at not less than 50,000, and this description might be used for all the great India pilgrimages, of which there are probably a dozen annually, to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller shrines scattered through the peninsula, each of which attracts its minor horde of credulous votaries.
Near View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Mexico
Such then may be accepted as a picture of one of the numerous pilgrimages made during the Dark Ages and which helped to spread infectious diseases broadcast throughout the land, polluting water supplies to such an extent that in many localities filth diseases became epidemic. It was not until about the end of the sixteenth century that general improvement began to be made in sanitary matters, although some notable exceptions may be mentioned in the construction of a few important works in Spain by the Moors, such for instance as those at Cordova in the ninth century and the repair of the Roman aqueduct at Sevilla in 1172. Until as late a date as 1183 Paris depended entirely on the River Seine for its water supply. During that year an aqueduct was constructed to conduct water to Paris from a distant source, but as late as the year 1550 the supply of water to Paris amounted to only one quart per capita per day.
Zempoala Aqueduct. From an old print in the Engineering News
London, England, was more backward than Paris in supplying the inhabitants with water, and it was not until the year 1235 that small quantities of spring water were brought to the city through lead pipes and masonry conduits.
Little is known about the strange race of people that inhabited the North American continent prior to the Indians, and it is only by the ruins of works which they constructed in the shape of mounds that their existence is known of. Nevertheless, had historians of that time written of the engineering projects successfully carried out by the engineers of the mound builders no doubt some surprising facts would be revealed to contemporary man; for wherever men have existed, whether in China, Japan, Egypt, Europe, England or, as we are informed by astronomers, on Mars, gigantic works of irrigation have been successfully undertaken, and in most of the places mentioned conduits or aqueducts to supply water to inhabitants of communities were constructed. Reasoning then by analogy it would be safe to infer that before the race of mound builders became extinct they built works of equal importance if not of equal endurance. This belief is borne out by the fact that long before Columbus discovered America, the Aztecs of Mexico built an aqueduct to supply the ancient city, built on the site of the present City of Mexico. How long the aqueduct supplied the city before Cortez, in his expedition to conquer Mexico, destroyed the works, in 1521, nobody knows and the truth will probably never be told. The fact of the existence of such a structure is interesting chiefly as showing that in the matter of supplying communities with water the ancient tribes of Mexico and America had made considerable progress long before Europeans set foot on shore. It was in Mexico, too, that the next aqueduct in point of time was constructed. This work was built during the period between the years 1553 and 1570, under the supervision of Friar Francisco Tembleque, a Franciscan monk, and served for about two centuries to carry water from the mountain Lacayete to the city of Otumba, state of Hidalgo, district of Apan, a distance of 27.8 miles.
The aqueduct, which is known as the Zempoala, included three arched bridges of a maximum height of 124 feet. This aqueduct is further interesting from the fact that the original agreement, under which the work was performed, is still in existence, a copy of which was published in the Engineering News, 1888, from which the following copy is taken.
The first bridge contains forty-six arches, the second thirteen arches and the third sixty-eight arches. The length of the longest bridge is 3,000 feet and the span of the arches at the springing line is fifty-six feet. About five years were required to build the principal part of the aqueduct which is carried on arches.
Contract Under Which Aqueduct was Built
I, Friar Cristobal y Chanriguis, preacher and secretary of this holy province of the holy evangel, certify that Father Luis Gerro, preacher and guardian of the Convent of All Saints, Zempoala, has presented to me a patent in favor of natives of said town, whose legal tenor is as follows:
We, Friar Juan De Bustamanti, Commissioner General of the Indes of the Ocean Seas, and Friar Juan De San Francisco, Provincial Master of the province of said holy evangel, and Friar Deigo Nolivarte, and Friar Juan De Gavna, and Friar Antonio Centad Rodriquez, and Friar Bernardino De Sahagun, subordinate of priests of said province of the holy evangel, declare:
That inasmuch as you, the Governor Alcaldes and principal officers of the town of Zacoala, have agreed, for the love of God and because of our intercession, with the same officers of the town of Otumba to give to them half the water which you have in your town of Zacoala for the use and benefit of the inhabitants of Otumba and for the use of the monastery of our order founded in that town, in which you do great good to them and to our said monastery, because of our intercession as stated; and, inasmuch, moreover, as you, the said people of Zacoala, with much labor and for the good of your souls, agree to join with the people of the Flaquilpan and Zempoala in the place where you are erecting an All Saints Monastery, at which point you agree to remain and work and not to depart for the reason that you are removed from your own houses; on order to labor for the good of our souls and in return for the labor which the priests have in visiting you. And whereas now you will soon have together a monastery for the friars of our order, in which must be administered for all the holy sacraments; therefore, in return for this benefit and work we promise you that in all our time we will not cease to give friars for said monastery, and for the whole length of our lives we will aid you in your prayers in all the agreed respects; and for the time to come after our lives, in consideration of said benefit, we will petition the said Commissioners General and Provisional Masters that they will severally and collectively adhere to the agreement, and always have the charity to furnish friars in the Monastery of All Saints, as now in view of the great and good work which you have done through our intercession, both in giving the said water and in aiding the said work to supply it. And if by chance there should happen to be so few priests that it is impossible to spare them from the house of Otumba that they shall place friars in said Monastery of All Saints first and let the loss fall upon other places than Zacoala and the Monastery of All Saints, in all of which places you are entitled to be taught by our priests.
We will beg of our successors in charity to favor us in these said respects, in return for your faithful labor and agreement in our behalf, and so we sign this agreement, made this seventh day of February, 1553.
Then followed signatures.
Decoration
THE OLDEST BATH ROOM IN THE WORLD IN VSE 2500 YEARS AGO AT TIRYNS, GREECE
From Stereograph, copyright 1908 by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
(See page iv)