In The Telegraph, Dalrymple reflects on the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius, placing it in a long historical tradition of plague ships, quarantines, and the atavistic terror of unfamiliar disease.
There is something almost medieval about the situation, however. For nearly 500 years, port cities—starting in the Venetian city of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, in the 14th century—enforced a quarantine of people arriving from outside, to ensure that they were not carrying plague with them.