Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[402] five miles below the quarantine establishment, and there be inspected by the health officer, who would report to me by telegraph the condition of the vessel, passengers, crew, and cargo. The officer at Fort St. Philip was to allow no vessel to go up without my personal order, by telegraph or in writing, and this was not given unless the quarantine physician, upon examination below, reported a clean bill of health in every respect. If any vessel attempted to evade quarantine regulations and pass up without being examined, the vessel was to be stopped if there was power enough in the fort to do it. I required that the term quarantine should be used literally, and any

The levee at New Orleans.

vessel found with sickness on board, of any malarial kind, or with ship fevers, should stay down forty days and not come up again until reinspected. Before this, it had been possible, under the State laws, for such a vessel to come up at the end of ten days, if a dishonest surgeon chose to certify that the vessel would be all right in that time,--a fact he could not know.

One further regulation: No vessel which had come from an infected port, i. e., a port where the yellow fever was prevailing, whatever the condition of her health, should be allowed to come up under forty days.