![]() ![]() He starts to breed bedbugs, admiring them under microscopes. “Believing some of the Materials not to be had in Europe, I procured of him a quantity, and soon after returned to England.” Curiously, the supposed cause of the British infestation - the importation of foreign resources - also becomes its potential cure. He further trades the Jamaican some “English Beef, Pork, Biscuit, and Beer” for knowledge of the “Secret”. ![]() come out of their Holes, and die before my face.” Southall, it seems, has found his calling. ![]() Applying the liquor to his bedding, the author observes “vast Numbers. ![]() When Southwall asks “how to destroy those Disturbers of my Rest”, the former slave trades him a “Calibash full of Liquor” in exchange for some tobacco and Spanish coin. Observing Southall “often rub and scratch”, the nameless man “wonder’d white Men should let them bite they should do something to kill them, as he did.” The itchy Englishman is titillated: “this unexpected Expression excited in me a Curiosity to have farther Discourse with him”. He meets an “uncommon Negro”, “one of the first Slaves brought into that Island” during Oliver Cromwell’s time. Our exterminator finds himself in a kind of colonial fever dream: sick in Kingston, Jamaica, he has “lost the Use of my Limbs” through “a Complication of the Country Distempers”. In order to defend against the invasion of bedbugs that “abound in all foreign Parts”, Southall seeks out a wiseman where the parasites spawn to learn his ways of combat. ![]()
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