24
THE ASIATIC EPIDEMIC OF 1817-21.
prisoners. " At Punderpoor, to tlie south of Bombay, it happened to break out at the time of the great jatra, and was spread at once in all directions by the pilgrims returning to their homes. The poison would seem to have been more concentrated there from^there being so many sources of production ; the number of deaths in a few days was estimated at 3000, and the patients were described as having been knocked down dead as if by lightning."*
After visiting Aurungabad, Amednuggur, and Nas- sick, it reached Seroor on the 18th of July, and towards the end of the month appeared at Poona, " On the 6th of August it broke out with great violence at Panwell, a considerable village on the main hue of communication between Poona and Bombay, separated from the latter by an arm of the sea, and distant fifteen or twenty miles, but between which a pretty constant communication is kept up by means of boats. On the 9th or 10th of the same month the first case appeared on the Island of Bombay, and' could be traced to a man who had arrived from Panwell the same day ; it also spread north and south along the sea coast from the same place, and was imported into a village in the neighbourhood of Tannah, on the Island of Salsett, distant from Bombay about twenty miles, by a detach- ment of troops that escorted a state prisoner to that garrison from Panwell. The disease did not break out at Maleni on the extremity of the islancj., distant only five or six miles from the principal native town of Bombay, until it had been established in the latter ; it then gradually spread over the Island of Salsett, through which the road from Bombay to Surat and
- 'Report on tlie Epidemic Cholera of 1818.' Published under
authority of the Government of Bombay, 1819, p. 151.
