The Other London• 51ded to the list. The civic officials of Rotterdam and London lobbied the privy
council to let a perishable cargo of barreled cod and peas pass through to
London for the coming Lenten season. However, a line was drawn: “no
passengers to stirruntil triantine done.” Then ships from Holland
stopped briefly in the neighboring province of Zeeland to hide their infected
place of origin. The royal council responded by including Zeeland stopovers
in the embargo. In May 1664 , the nervous councilors of Charles II extended
the triantine in British ports to forty days, or “quarantine.”^27
The holes in the dike were opening faster than the privy councilors’ fingers
could plug them. In August 1664 a Dutch ship captain broke quarantine. He
was sent back to his ship, and the houses of Dutch immigrant friends he had
visited were shut up for forty days. How many foreign sea captains were try-
ing the same thing? English royalty itself bent the rules when its special in-
terests were at stake. Sixteen horses were brought ashore for the duke of Al-
bemarle, Master of the Horse. Cordage was unloaded for the duke of York,
Lord High Admiral. Glazed tiles reached the king’s palace at Greenwich.
The brewing war with Holland prompted other exceptions by Denis
Gauden as Surveyor General of the king’s maritime victuals. The Dutch ship
King David of Rotterdampromptly unloaded a cargo “useful for the king’s
fleet.” This was business as usual: the two states were unofficially at war, and
selling and buying naval supplies took precedence over pestilence.
As 1664 neared its end, a navy informer reported that the infection had
come into the East Anglia port of Yarmouth, but he remained optimistic.
Only one person had died from this sickness, he assured Whitehall. A few
days later, he was all confused, writing that reports of new deaths were not to
be believed because the searchers were the usual ignorant old women chosen
by parishes to view corpses and determine the cause of death, and they were
debauched and drunken as well. Yet he had to admit that a pesthouse was
taking in sick persons, and the contagion had spread to a house in the inte-
rior. The external quarantine of England’s shores had failed.^28
In February 1665 the monarchy officially declared war on the Dutch re-
public and pressed commercial sailors into naval service. Between engage-
ments at sea, sailors slipped into London to explore the sights and while
away the time. Danger lurked in the clusters of immigrants in the city and
suburbs, who had personal and business contacts with Holland, Flanders,
and France. Many were engaged in importing and finishing cloth, one of the
suspected carriers of pestilential seeds. Still, Pepys’ diary made no mention of
plague until that first entry at the end of April, when the deadly disease en-
tered suburbs far from the docks of the city.