The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  On the third day of the riotous celebrations in town—the eleventh since ferrying Charlie to his ship—Scipio at last managed to slip out a back door of the Paxton mansion. A few minutes later, he slid into a crowded room hazy with smoke and filled with fiddling, dancing, brawling, a little too much heat, and a scent of rum so raw it could kick over a mule. In particular, it was full of Seahorses, as that ship’s sailors were known according to the navy’s proud custom of naming men for their ships. He found Hector and slid in beside him. They were toasting a man’s life—a man’s death—it was all one—and gathered Scipio right into their fold. Another Seahorse he knew slightly, Jack Dunn by name, had been committed to the ground that morning. They would miss the man’s capers in the tops, the rest of the Seahorses declared. They would not miss his loutish ways while his pride was overly damp with grog. A tear or two, long guffaws of laughter, and a jig were in order.

  “What happened to ol’ Jack?” Scipio asked Hector.

  But the Indian was already glassy eyed with rum—had no head for drink—and would only reply with one of his gutteral Indian words, chanted low over and over, before he collapsed face forward on the table.

  Two or three taverns later—it was getting hard to keep track—Scipio stumbled into the passage, heading out to relieve himself. He pushed open the door to the garden, and out billowed that rotten-sweet scent he had caught a whiff of before, down in the Seahorse hold. The house had convulsed on him, surely, had twisted about, while he wasn’t looking. This infernal door did not lead to the garden; it opened on a small chamber where a man lay on the floor. Scipio blinked. A sailor, by his clothes. He knew that coat, that checkered neckcloth. Another black man: Joseph May, the gunner’s mate.

  Then he saw the man’s face—if it could be called a face—and felt the wall on the opposite side of the hall hit him in the back.

  He did not remember anything else until the following morning, when the sudden nausea he had suppressed the night before startled him awake up in his own attic chamber. After emptying his stomach, he realized that he had a splitting headache, a throb in his lower back, and that he was not certain, from one minute to the next, whether he was freezing or frying.

  It had been one hell of a party, even by sailors’ standards: Scipio’s feverish nausea didn’t break till late on the morning of the third day, when he drifted into a heavy sleep. That evening, as the Sabbath drew to a close, one of the maids, a generous girl, fixed up a tray and carried up a light supper of bread sopped in broth. Opening the door with her hip, she turned into the room, her eyes on the tray, keeping everything in balance. Then she glanced up, and the smile she was unfurling for Scipio—poor man—disintegrated. Her hands dropped the tray into a clatter of breaking dishes, rattling pewter, splintering wood.

  Apron to mouth, she was backing out of the room when the captain roared up the stairs and walloped her for carelessness. A little strangled scream escaped her throat, but she still could not form any words, so the captain stepped in to speak with Scipio himself.

  Hunched in a corner of his cot, he looked up from his own body and across to the captain in terror. He was covered in a thick rash of bumps, even blacker than the midnight of his skin.

  After a hurried interview, the captain retired, ashen faced, to write a short note to the selectmen, regretting to inform them that his servant was ill with what looked to be the smallpox. He had heard, he added, that another black man, a certain Joseph May of HMS Seahorse, was also ill in town, but he couldn’t be certain where: one of the taverns or inns that clustered around the alleys leading off from the Long Wharf, probably.

  This he sealed, and delivered into the hands of a small boy who went speeding off in the direction of the biggest house in town, bar the governor’s mansion: the house of Elisha Cooke, Esq., up in School Street.

  Paxton watched the boy melt into the night, and then shut the door.

  He had not found it necessary to announce that Hector had arrived on the doorstep yesterday with Charlie, the boy shivering with the same kind of high fever that had felled Scipio. Hector had also brought a tale that Captain Paxton had been doing his best to ignore. Was doing his damnedest to go right on doing so too. Charlie, after all, had not erupted in spots.

  Yet.

  Early Monday morning on the eighth of May, 1721, Boston’s six selectmen (Elisha Cooke’s finest selection, the joke went) filed grimly into the Council chamber upstairs in the grand new brick Town House at the top of King Street, shutting the door firmly behind them.

  Murmuring could be heard outside that thick door, but little else, even by the steward who knew the best ways of listening into any room in the building.

  Their meeting was brief and to the point.

  Smallpox had been raging in London for a year; only the previous month, it had been killing as many as twenty to thirty people a day in Barbados. But Boston had been vigilant, had carefully designed and manned defenses to keep it out: the town already had laws that all ships with sickness aboard must stop at Spectacle Island or face a steep fine. It already had a fine new hospital there. The trouble was to force everyone to use it: not everyone had the selfless discipline of John Gore.

  Boston already possessed a customs bureaucracy that could catch the smallest grain of sugar or gold; rather ingeniously the existing machinery of this bureaucracy had been retooled to catch smallpox, too, pairing every cargo inspector with a medical examiner. No ship could enter the inner harbor without leave from customs, and no ship could get leave from customs unless her crew passed a medical inspection.

  No ship, that is, save a king’s ship, not subject to customs.

  It was a gap that no one had glimpsed. Though naval ships knew damn well they were supposed to pass a quarantine inspection, swore William Clark. Knew even damn better that, rules or no, they ought to submit voluntarily to quarantine when carrying something as dangerous as the small-pox, added William Hutchinson.

  Where the smallpox had come from, though, was not their concern at the moment. They much preferred to know where it had got to, and how they could prevent it from going any farther. A full-scale epidemic—or even a small-scale epidemic accompanied by full-scale panic—would wreak havoc with trade, rein the town to a nervous standstill.

  Their decisions were practical, made quickly, and set neatly into their minute book:

  Whereas a certain Negro man is now sick of the Small Pox in the town who came from Tertudos in His Majesty’s Ship Seahorse, which renders it very likely that that distemper may now be on board that ship, therefore for the preservation of the inhabitants of this town:

  Voted, that John Clark, Esq., be desired to go on board His Majesty’s Ship Seahorse and report what state of health or sickness the ship’s company are in, especially with respect to the Small Pox or other contagious sickness.

  Whereas a certain Negro man, servant to Capt. Wentworth Paxton of Boston, is now sick of the Small Pox at his master’s house, and it not being known that any other person is infected with that distemper in this town, wherefore for the better preventing the spreading of that distemper,

  Ordered: That some suitable nurse be provided to attend the said Negro during his present sickness and until she be dismissed by the Select Men, who is to suffer no person to come within the room where the Negro is but such as shall have liberty from the Select Men, and that two prudent persons be appointed to wait at the doors of the house and suffer no one to come in or go out, but such as shall have liberty and allowance as aforesaid.

  These things went into their minutes. What did not go into their minutes was their determination to keep the crisis—potential crisis, insisted Mr. Cooke—quiet as long as possible, and to find the second sick man.

  It was all well and good to run a red landsman’s flag of quarantine over Paxton’s mansion in the South End, but until they discovered this other sailor and bundled him back aboard, they were sitting atop a powder keg. And he—this missing man—was the fuse.

  At the appointed
hour the following morning, Dr. Clark met Captain Durell at the Town House. After curt greetings and stiff bows, the two men reentered Dr. Clark’s carriage for the short journey down the length of King Street, lined with shops of hushed luxury, to the harbor. There they emerged, tight lipped, the captain turning heads with his silver-laced, cockaded hat gripped firmly in white-gloved hands, his finely tailored blue coat fastened with gilt buttons above the clean lines of white breeches and gray hose, his black wig tied neatly with a bow, the gleam of his sword competing with the flash of immense silver buckles on his shoes.

  The doctor’s red face, plump outline, and quiet elegance cut no figure next to Captain Durell.

  “There is no necessity of an inspection, of course,” the captain said smoothly as they stepped onto the planking of the Long Wharf. “However, formalities must be maintained.” Except for the hollow clomp of their footsteps and the scent of water wafting up from beneath their feet, they might have been marching along any busy road lined with shops and warehouses, crawling with men loading, unloading, loitering, bargaining.

  Minus necessity, thought Dr. Clark, he would not be huffing down the Long Wharf a third of a mile into the sea with this peacock, formalities be damned. The time for formalities—the day the ship arrived—had long since past. Captain Durell, with his love of trumpets (on the Sabbath, no less), of flags, and fifteen-gun salutes, of all ritual pomp, irritated the doctor no end. He was all of a piece with that insufferable snob, Governor Shute—was the governor’s good friend and ally, for that matter. Did they not treat each other to elaborate suppers whenever possible, forcing the captive audience of their other guests to suffer through their endless compliments to each other?

  Hand in hand with his love of a good show went his rashness. To listen to his tales, the man loved nothing more than to chase pirates, guns blazing, sails nearly popping off the rigging, the ship skimming through warm aquamarine seas. The ferocity of this obsession was the captain’s glory. Dr. Clark was hoping that it would also prove to be his Achilles’ heel: that the captain would, in short, do anything to sidle out from under a sentence of quarantine.

  Engrossed in his irritation, the doctor did not deign to offer his companion a reply until they reached the end of the wharf, where the Seahorse rocked gently in the water. Then he let his eyes ostentatiously scan the harbor. A few days earlier, the entire horizon had fluttered with a scattering of immense blossoms from heaven. Now masts shorn of their sails clustered thickly near shore like the trees of a barren and leafless forest in winter. “So many ships,” he said, shaking his head. “Difficult, you know, to water and provision them all at once. Beer, biscuit, salt beef—not to mention canvas and line to repair torn rigging”—the Seahorse tops, he had seen with a grimace of contempt, were a veritable rat’s nest: what foolish seeking after speed had tangled them so? He let his eyes drift back to Durell. “Some ships, I fear, will be obliged to wait as much as a month until the warehouses can replenish their supply.”

  The man’s unctuousness hardened to blank stone. “Difficult, no doubt,” said Captain Durell. “But surely if every captain commands no more than his share, there will be plenty for all.”

  Dr. Clark registered that saucy word commands with a slow, smiling lift of one brow and then turned to step up the gangway and onto the ship’s deck. The captain could command all he pleased, but if the selectmen willed it, there would be no beer, no biscuit, not a morsel of beef—fresh, salt, or putrid—to be found in all of Boston. The lift of brow had been a warning for the captain; the smile was for himself. He had been right: Durell was susceptible to any threat to tie him to the shore. Thus fortified, he strode into the task at hand.

  Unfortunately, the ship’s surgeon, Mr. Thomas Gibson, was absent, having been detailed to accompany Lieutenant Hamilton in the chasing of pirates. Even so, working alone on a ship he did not know, Dr. Clark needed no more than fifteen minutes to find what he had no wish to find: the scent of death. Down in a small airless compartment at the far forward end of the lowest deck, two men lay ill with the smallpox. The doctor’s nose made the call as soon as his head cleared the hatch through the deck above, as he was still clambering down the ladder. A mere glance into the sickroom, garishly lit by a guttering lantern, confirmed the diagnosis. A third man shivered with fever that might well bubble up into pocks in a day or two.

  Dr. Clark hauled his bulk back up several ladders to find the captain at ease with a pipe in his cabin. Durell rose as the doctor entered.

  Dr. Clark bowed. “I regret to inform you, sir, that your ship is infected—unequivocally—with the smallpox. Pursuant to the laws governing Boston and her harbor, I am placing the Seahorse under quarantine until further notice.”

  “Surely,” said the captain, “two gentlemen such as ourselves can find some way around such an extreme measure.” He relaxed back into his chair and offered the doctor his choice of tobacco or snuff.

  The doctor declined both pleasures.

  “Smallpox,” said the captain, swatting lazily at the word as if it were a fly, though the doctor observed that his grip on the pipe had tightened. “You will find, Doctor, it is not of major concern aboard a warship. From time to time it sputters up, but it quickly dies out again.” He leaned forward. “Ship fever”—typhus—“or scurvy, now: those are diseases to fear.”

  Dr. Clark stared at the man in disbelief. “Surely you are not suggesting, sir, that you have been aware for some time that your ship carries this contagion and have disregarded it?”

  Captain Durell’s eyes flared with anger; the man insisted upon pressing the far edges of gentlemanly behavior. “The health of the men is my surgeon’s concern,” he snapped. “Mine is to sail this ship.”

  “And mine is to safeguard the health of this town,” growled the doctor. He had not budged an inch since entering: just stood there, his ample girth occupying what seemed like most of the room for air and light that the cabin possessed. “Perhaps,” he went on, forcing his voice back to the cadences of pleasantry, as if they were speaking of gardening or husbandry, “you do not realize the gravity of the situation. This town has not seen a case of smallpox in nineteen years, in which time the population has doubled. In regard to that disease, we are a keg of powder. The smallest spark will not sputter, will not smolder: it will ignite a conflagration whose destructive force you cannot begin to imagine. That, sir, is why we have laws governing quarantine.”

  Laws, hung an unspoken sentence between them, which you have violated quite flagrantly. “So perhaps you would be so good as to allow me to examine your logs and paybook, so that I may—in the absence of Mr. Gibson—attempt to piece together the recent history of your crew’s health for myself.”

  It was an irregular, even audacious invasion of the captain’s privacy, but Dr. Clark intended to obtain what he wanted. “Meanwhile,” he added, “no one will leave this ship without my leave.” Including her captain, said the ice in his eyes.

  The logs were duly produced.

  He had, of course, all the evidence he needed to quarantine the ship: sick men in the hold. But Dr. Clark was nothing if not thorough. It was one of the reasons he had become the most prestigious doctor in town. He thought of everything. He explained everything.

  For all their neat, spidery writing, their massive officiousness, the logs and books were not easy to decipher. As usual the men were listed by the dates they had volunteered, or been pressed into service. Dr. Clark obtained paper and pen, and in the rock and creak of the ship, he sat at the captain’s table, rearranging the information into a list of his own devising, ordering men by their date of death, dismissal, or disappearance, scratching his way through to an understanding of what the captain apparently took pains not to know. Or at least, not to say.

  The Seahorse had arrived in Boston on October 11, from London via New York, where she had delivered that province’s new governor. At the end of November, as she sat in Boston Harbor, three men had died in the space of five days: no reason given. />
  “What, may I ask,” said Dr. Clark, his voice rasping in the silence, “was the trouble in November?”

  “You will have to ask Mr. Gibson,” Durell answered tightly. “As I said, it is his job to keep the crew healthy. Mine to sail the ship.”

  It was debatable, thought Dr. Clark, whether his men entirely agreed: certainly they seemed to have concluded that Seahorse was not a desirable place to be. By the time she sailed for Barbados with her brood of merchantmen on January 6, 23 men—a fifth of her allowed complement of 115—had jumped ship, though the captain did not mark them down as having run, or deserted, until she sailed out of the harbor without them. Presumably, he had known of this hemorrhage before leaving, even if he refused to know the cause: because he had already replaced quite a few of them.

  The problem could have been smallpox, mused the doctor. London—including nearby Deptford, home of the naval dockyards and Seahorse’s port of origin—had been in the throes of an epidemic for over a year. If the ship had been carrying smallpox, though, surely men would have begun to die during the voyage across the Atlantic. And many more would have jumped ship at first opportunity, in New York: but Seahorse had lost only seven men to desertion in that city, plus one more at Staten Island. Furthermore, the disease would not have waited until May to appear in Boston.

  More disturbingly, Seahorse had been in and around Barbados at the height of the smallpox epidemic there in February and March. Durell had listed eight desertions in Barbados and Tortuga: eight runs, or eight deaths ashore? It was useless to ask. If he could cocoon himself so successfully within the claustrophobic wooden world of his ship, refusing to know what was forcibly held under his nose—well, remaining blissfully ignorant of what happened to his men on shore must be easy.