When there were no doctors, missionaries, nuns and other religious figures took up the slack, and when they weren’t available, ordinary people stepped in–even if, normally, they were divided by deep social gulfs. One of Richard Collier’s correspondents, a white South African, wrote that his infant sister’s life had been saved by the mother of a ‘coloured’ family who lived next door to them, in a rural part of the Western Cape. When both his parents fell ill, this woman–who was breastfeeding her own child–took the baby and fed her until they recovered.
Again, there were exceptions, but it’s interesting to see who they were. ‘Hospital sweepers deserted and refused to go near “the white men’s plague”, as they called it,’ one British soldier wrote of his experience of recovering from the Spanish flu in India. If they had worked in a hospital for more than four years, the sweepers probably had memories of the British response to the plague outbreak that killed 8 million Indians between 1896 and 1914. They knew that they could expect no solidarity from the British. Likewise, the convicts hired to dig graves in Rio de Janeiro, and who–if the rumours were true–committed all manner of heinous crimes in the presence of the corpses, probably felt they had nothing to lose.
At some point, according to the theory of collective resilience, the group identity splinters, and people revert to identifying as individuals. It may be at this point–once the worst is over, and life is returning to normal–that truly ‘bad’ behaviour is most likely to emerge. The Swiss Red Cross, which had been gratified by the surge of unqualified women volunteering to nurse, lamented the fact that some appeared to have done so for ‘morally dubious’ reasons. These impostors often clung to their new roles even after the epidemic had passed, it reported, ‘presenting themselves as experienced nurses, donning diverse uniforms and sometimes producing fake medical certificates designed to trick the public and the medical corps’.7
In 1919, Carnival in Rio took the theme of divine punishment, and more people attended it than ever before. Flu had not quite vanished from the city, and death was still very present. Carnival songs fixed the trauma for perpetuity, and some of the blocos or neighbourhood carnival groups gave themselves flu-themed names–‘The Block of the Holy House’, ‘The Block of the Midnight Tea’. A change came over the revellers on Carnival Saturday–a desire for catharsis, perhaps. The newspapers documented the ‘unusual joy’ that engulfed the city. ‘We had a party,’ wrote one chronicler, with droll understatement; ‘the binge was full’, another. ‘Carnival began and overnight, customs and modesty became old, obsolete, spectral… Folk started to do things, think things, feel unheard-of and even demonic things.’8
Something similar may have happened in the wake of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. ‘Nor is it the laity alone who do thus,’ wrote Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron, describing that interlude in Florence. ‘Nay, even those who are shut in the monasteries, persuading themselves that what befitteth and is lawful to others alike sortable and unforbidden unto them, have broken the laws of obedience and giving themselves to carnal delights, thinking thus to escape, are grown lewd and dissolute.’
In Rio, in that unusual atmosphere, boundaries became blurred. There are references to numerous defloramentos–deflowerings–which led in turn to a cohort of children dubbed ‘sons of the flu’. Such reports are hard to confirm, but one historian, Sueann Caulfield, has scoured the archives and found that, in the period immediately after the epidemic, there was indeed a surge in reported rapes in Rio, to the extent that they temporarily outnumbered other types of crime.9 Some saw this wave of obscenity as the revenge of the unloved dead; others as a shocking reassertion of an inextinguishable life force. Whatever it was, it brought closure: the pandemic was over. Humanity had entered a post-flu world.
WOLVES ON THE PROWL
Perhaps the best illustration of both the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ of human behaviour is to be found in Bristol Bay, Alaska. When the Spanish flu swept through Alaska in the autumn of 1918, two groups of Eskimos were spared: those living in the outer islands of the Aleutian chain, the furthest west you can go in North America without getting your feet wet, and the Yupik of Bristol Bay. The Aleuts had a natural cordon sanitaire in the Pacific Ocean, but Bristol Bay, the eastern-most arm of the Bering Sea, was remote in a different way. Bound by the Alaska Peninsula to the south, several mountain ranges to the north and a waterlogged tundra in the interior, it isn’t easily accessible today, and was even less so when steamer and dog team were the only means of transport. In winter the Bering Sea has a tendency to freeze over, blocking the ocean route entirely. But when, in the spring of 1919, the sea ice began to break up and the first fishing boats of the season arrived, the flu came with them.
‘The surroundings are truly arctic,’ wrote Katherine Miller, a Seattle-trained nurse who laid eyes on Bristol Bay for the first time that spring. ‘No vegetation except the grasses and mosses of the vast swampy plain or tundra which extends limitless on every side.’10 A priest who had explored the Alaskan coast two winters earlier was only a little more generous: ‘In the main the country traversed is as dreary and naked as I suppose can be found on earth, and cursed with as bitter a climate; yet it is not without scenes of great beauty and even sublimity, and its winter aspects have often an almost indescribable charm; a radiance of light, a delicate lustre of azure and pink, that turn jagged ice and windswept snow into marble and alabaster and crystal.’11
In fact Bristol Bay is subarctic, not arctic. The summers can be warm, if short, but in winter the temperature can drop below minus forty degrees Celsius. The country may have struck southerners as inhospitable, but it was rich in natural resources. The rivers that empty into Bristol Bay are the greatest spawning grounds for red salmon in the world, as Captain Cook intuited when he passed by in 1778, on his fruitless quest for the Northwest Passage. Eyeing the mouth of a river, he imagined that ‘It must abound with salmon, as we saw many leaping in the sea before the entrance; and some were found in the maws of the cod which we had caught.’12 The land, meanwhile, was home to bear, moose and caribou. The Yupik were less nomadic than other Alaskans–they had much of what they needed on their doorstep–and for that reason, combined with their isolation, contact with outsiders came relatively late for them.
For millennia their lives had followed the seasons. From the first snowfall in October they gathered in their villages, to see out the winter living off stocks they had laid in during the warmer months. In the spring they dispersed in small family groups to hunt or trap game, building themselves temporary brush or canvas shelters to live in, and by June they were back in their villages to fish salmon. The men left again in August, to hunt until the snow came.
Their villages consisted of barabaras, dwellings made of turf covering a log frame, two-thirds of which were underground. The women and children lived in smaller barabaras circling a large, central one known as the qasgiq. The qasgiq was a male domain, the place where the single men slept, but in winter it often became a communal space–a space where, as anthropologist Margaret Lantis wrote in 1950, the dark days and nights were spent ‘delighting the spirits of the animals with feasts, dances, and masks’.13 The Yupik inhabited a world crowded with spirits, both human and animal. As one elder explained, ‘When the Yupik walked out into the tundra or launched their kayaks into the river or the Bering Sea, they entered into the spiritual realm.’14
The first to intrude on this world were the Russians. In 1818 they established a fur-trading post at Alexandrovsky Redoubt at the mouth of the Nushagak River, which spills into an arm of Bristol Bay–the site of the modern town of Dillingham. In 1867, America bought Alaska from Russia and within a few decades the commercial fishing industry had taken off in the bay, under the auspices of the San Francisco-based Alaska Packers’ Association (APA). The Russians brought the Orthodox religion, the Americans the Protestant one, and both brought disease–a series of devastating epidemics that culminated, in 1900, in the most lethal of them all: a double
epidemic of flu and measles, known to Alaskans as the Great Sickness, that wiped out between a quarter and a half of the Eskimos of Western Alaska.
By 1919, the Yupik were a people in transition. They still lived mainly by hunting and fishing, and sought out shamans to interpret the spirit world for them–especially when they were sick–but many now lived in modern houses, wore store-bought clothes and, in the Nushagak area, professed the Orthodox faith. In the summer of 1918, the salmon run failed–due to overfishing, in the opinion of the local Bureau of Fisheries warden–meaning that Yupik stocks were low the following winter, and they were hungrier than usual, come the spring.
The flu entered Alaska at Unalaska Island, one of the most landward islands in the Aleutian chain that forms the tail of the Alaska Peninsula, and hence a natural stopping point for northbound ships. The story of how it spread from there, north-eastward to Bristol Bay, is the stuff of Alaskan legend. A Russian priest, Father Dimitri Hotovitzky–known to his flock as Father Hot Whiskey–travelled from Unalaska up to the bay to lead celebrations of Orthodox Easter, and it is said that whoever attended his services returned home sick.15 That he infected the bay’s population is possible, but unlikely. The incubation period for flu, during which a person can be infected but symptom-free, is between one and four days. Orthodox Easter fell on 20 April in 1919, coinciding as it sometimes does with ‘western’ Easter. The first cases in Bristol Bay were reported around 12 May, three weeks later. Even allowing that some earlier cases may have gone unreported, three weeks is an unreasonably long incubation period. Someone who followed in Hot Whiskey’s footsteps more likely brought the virus in.
Alaska was a US territory in 1919, not yet a full state. The territorial governor, Thomas Riggs, therefore had no vote in Congress, and his voice was drowned out by the louder ones of the representatives of the then forty-eight states. Riggs had managed to persuade the government to provide funds for a territory-wide quarantine during the autumn wave of 1918, but it had been lifted in March, and when the disease reappeared a few months later, his renewed pleas fell on deaf ears. In the forty-eight states, this third wave was relatively mild. The burden of managing the new epidemic in Alaska therefore fell on the doctors employed by the APA at salmon canneries around the bay, and on the government hospital at Dillingham.
This hospital was run by a doctor named Linus Hiram French. He knew and loved that part of Alaska, having worked there previously as a cannery doctor. After taking up his government post in 1911, he set off to survey his vast catchment area, travelling through the winter months by dog and reindeer team, or on foot with snowshoes. On his return in the summer of 1912, he reported to his government bosses that the houses he had visited were, in the main, warm, damp and dark, ‘as the native keeps in all warm air, to avoid chopping wood’, and that dogs and humans shared living space. TB and syphilis were common, as was the eye disease trachoma. He treated some of the sick, sent others to the hospital, and issued instructions on how to prevent the diseases that were preventable. He was surprised to find that many of the people he encountered thought that Alaska was still Russian: ‘In every house are hung pictures of Russian priests or the tsar and all keep time by the Russian calendar.’16
As soon as the flu appeared French imposed a quarantine on the region. Those Yupik who had not yet reached their villages for the start of the fishing season therefore found themselves cut off from them, and if they had passed through infected areas, placed in ‘detention cabins’ for ten days at their own expense. The APA doctors also declared quarantine zones around individual villages, and supplied afflicted ones with food, fuel and medicine. Despite these measures, the hospital at Dillingham was soon operating at full capacity, as were the makeshift hospitals the APA doctors had set up by erecting tents over wooden platforms. In late May, as the epidemic peaked, both French and the two nurses assisting him fell ill, and French wired the captain of a US Coast Guard cutter, the Unalga, requesting urgent assistance.
The Unalga had left San Francisco over a month earlier on one of its routine cruises to patrol the coastline, and incidentally, to ferry passengers, mail and goods between stopping points along its route. The ship’s captain, Frederick Dodge, knew Alaska well, but it was the first cruise in those waters for the Unalga’s new cook and watch officer, the unfortunately named Eugene Coffin. He later noted in his diary that Captain Dodge had a penchant for the Russian icons and samovars that were to be found in many Alaskan homes, and that he collected along the way: ‘I guess he paid something for the things, no doubt.’17
The Unalga had a doctor on board, and when it reached Unalaska–the main town on Unalaska Island–on 26 May, the crew found the town in the grip of flu. Captain Dodge organised a relief operation, and in his diary entry for 30 May, Coffin wrote that, ‘Unalga feeding and nursing the entire town and burying the dead.’ By then, according to the ship’s official log, the captain had sent a message to French saying that the Unalga had its hands full and couldn’t come to his aid. French seems never to have received that message, and two cannery superintendents who also sent SOSs to the Unalga claimed never to have received replies either. By 7 June, the epidemic had passed its peak in Unalaska, but Dodge had received word from Governor Riggs that a relief ship, the USS Marblehead, was expected there on 16 June, carrying fresh supplies provided by the American Red Cross. He waited for the other ship to arrive.
The Marblehead and one other ship were the federal government’s only concession to the new tragedy unfolding in Alaska, and the Marblehead had one passenger of note on board: Valentine McGillycuddy. McGillycuddy was a physician who had made a name for himself as an Indian agent, but an unusual one, whose sympathies lay at least partly with the Sioux he was sent to ‘civilise’. He counted Crazy Horse among his friends, and was at the great Sioux chief’s bedside when he died in 1877. When America joined the war he had scented new adventure, and asked the War Office to send him to Europe as a surgeon or reconnaissance officer. They declined on the grounds that he was too old. He offered his services to the Red Cross and received the same answer. Only the US Public Health Service was interested, once the Spanish flu had broken out. He was summoned to see one of its representatives in San Francisco, to whom he confessed that ‘he didn’t know a damn thing about influenza’. ‘I can’t advise you,’ the representative replied. ‘Not one of us knows a damn thing about it, either.’18 Thus the seventy-year-old doctor came out of retirement, first to fight the flu at the New Idria mercury mines in California–where he observed the supposedly prophylactic effects of mercury vapour–and now in Alaska.
The day after the Marblehead arrived at Unalaska, McGillycuddy–along with two other doctors, three pharmacist’s mates and four nurses–boarded the Unalga, taking some of their supplies with them, and the cutter set off on the two-day journey to Bristol Bay. ‘As the ship reached port, the doctor stood on the deck of the launch and scanned the coast,’ wrote Julia Blanchard McGillycuddy, the doctor’s wife and biographer. ‘A gentle breeze blew offshore bringing with it a cadaveric odour. There was something wrong, the doctor said, not far inland.’19
The Unalga anchored off Dillingham on 19 June. The Marblehead, which had followed it, headed for a different part of the bay with the remainder of its medics and supplies on board. Both were ‘too late to be of any service’, according to one cannery doctor, because by then the worst was over. French and the two nurses at the government hospital, Rhoda Ray and Mayme Connelly, were back on their feet, and two more nurses had arrived from the Alaskan port city of Valdez. They had completed the 800-kilometre journey by boat and dog sled, and one of them, the aforementioned Katherine Miller, recorded her observations on reaching Dillingham: ‘Here and up the Wood River [another tributary of Bristol Bay], the ravages of influenza were most severe. Some villages were completely wiped out… Whole families were found by relief parties lying stricken on the floors of their huts.’20
The Unalga’s log recorded that the crew administered aid where it was need
ed, but the local fisheries warden gave a different version of events. He reported that the cutter would anchor off a stricken village and send a landing party ashore which, rather than administer succour, would go hunting for souvenirs: ‘Eskimo houses were invaded–in some instances rifled–and acts bordering on vandalism committed.’ At Dillingham, the warden wrote, the four nurses from the Unalga did report for duty. ‘They were not there an hour, however, before they invited the two nurses at the government hospital to a dance on board the cutter that evening.’21
Ray and Connelly explained to the four nurses that even with the extra help from Valdez, they were stretched to the limit, looking after the sick and the growing influx of orphaned children, while also taking care of the laundry and keeping the hospital clean. They declined the invitation and the visitors left. When they returned a couple of days later, Ray and Connelly told them their services were not required, since they didn’t need any more mouths to feed. The fisheries warden was complimentary about one unnamed doctor in the relief party, probably McGillycuddy, who took temporary charge of the hospital, showing ‘efficiency and devotion to duty’, and freeing French to go out to the villages.
The Unalga had not covered itself with glory in Bristol Bay, but it did have one final contribution to make. On 25 June, a party that included Coffin and McGillycuddy headed up the Wood River on French’s launch, the Attu. In the early hours of the following day they came in sight of a village, probably Igyararmuit, meaning ‘people who live at the throat’, because it was situated close to where the river flows out of Wood Lake. The Attu tied up to a government barge that was there for the purposes of a salmon census, and those aboard tried to snatch some sleep despite being strafed by mosquitoes. In the morning they went ashore and found the village deserted. A bad smell was coming from one of the barabaras, and they ventured in to investigate. Coffin described what happened next: ‘On going into the low narrow door into the first of two connecting rooms was unexpectedly confronted by three big malamutes–promptly retired closing the door–broke windows on the roof and shot the dogs–two skulls and many large bones all picked clean scattered over floor and evidence that the dogs had been fighting over the remains.’22 It was a ghoulish echo of another American’s observation, during the Great Sickness of 1900, that, ‘Prowling dogs ate at dead bodies while from the foothills came the long drawn-out eerie calls telling that wolves were near.’23
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World Page 14
