Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  She had fallen sick before they reached the Gaspé Peninsula and Anticosti Island, and although she had not taken to her bed at first—there being no bed for her to go to—she had spent the days after they entered the St. Lawrence reeling between the deck and the hold. On deck she’d stared at a cabin passenger, neat and clean and well-fed, sketching the sights on a pad. An impossible figure, a gentleman. From the corner where she huddled, he’d looked like someone who might save her, had he cared to. But he was occupied with other interests.

  Whales! she heard him exclaim to the mate. She’d seen them too, a great swirl of water near the side of the ship breaking to show a glossy flank. Beluga whales, the gentlemen said; his pencil moved on his pad. A shark followed in their wake with great constancy, and the gentleman mocked the ship’s carpenter who said it was a certain harbinger of death. He pointed out sturgeon, green with white bellies—she saw them too, or thought she did, and that was the name he gave them. Eavesdropping on his conversations, she learned the names for porpoises and eels in the water and the white birds overhead. She needed no help to appreciate the green hills and stony cliffs and farms along the water. They’d been right to come, this was paradise. It was curious, though, that the gentleman never noticed her.

  She stayed on deck when the weather allowed, even though she was very ill; anything was better than the crowding and smells below. One of her brothers brought her water, the other what food he could. She knew the younger, Ned, had already been caught once begging extra water from the sailors’ scuttlebutt. She worried about them, distantly, and prayed they’d stay healthy. But a deadly calm had come over her, a calm she knew came from her illness. Shivering that swept her body in waves, scarlet spots on her shoulders—she had fiabhras dubh, the black fever, like all the people dying below. At home she’d taken care of fever patients, using the tricks she’d learned from her grandmother. But now her tongue had gone quiet in her mouth, she could no longer groan, she could not resist. She was filled with a gentle resignation that, during her brief lucid moments, she recognized as fatal.

  Where was it she’d finally collapsed? Near the galley, she thought. Somewhere in that crowded space around the range of cooking fires, hemmed in by the cow-house and the poultry pens and the pigsty and the heap of spare spars. Down she’d gone, with the sky overhead rushing down to greet her. Afterwards came a long stretch of darkness and a tormenting thirst. A weight arrived, pressing and crushing as the ship heaved in what must have been a storm. Feebly, during brief waking moments, she had tried to push the weight aside. The weight was first warm and then cool and then cold and very heavy. She woke when the hatches were open, letting in a pale streak of light, and found herself staring into the open eyes of Julia McCullough. They were filmy, like the eyes of a fish.

  She’d tried to push Julia’s body away but she had no strength. Her brothers were up on deck where she’d ordered them, knowing her death crouched beyond the bulkhead and unwilling for them to witness it. How they had wailed when she’d said goodbye to them!

  But here were sounds, and a sense of the boat motionless beneath her in a way she’d never thought she would feel again. A man spoke above her and then lifted Julia’s body away. He touched her hair, gentle hands. She wanted to thank him but was unable. He touched her shoulders, released them suddenly, made a strangled noise she could not interpret, and then brought his face down so close she could feel his breath.

  “You’re alive!” he said.

  With a great effort she opened her eyes. Red hair, blue eyes, a nose like a chunk of granite. Almost like someone from home. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Don’t worry—I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  Another man appeared behind the first man’s shoulder; then both straightened out of sight. She heard the sounds of argument, then nothing. And so when Lauchlin carried her up the ladder himself, she was not aware of Dr. Jaques’s angry objections, nor of her brothers who broke into sobs as they saw what they assumed was her body draped across a stranger’s arms. She did not hear their joy when they rushed to her and found her miraculously alive, nor their anguish when one of the doctors, red-faced and truculent, pushed them aside and denied them entry to the island.

  The two boys who’d staggered over to Lauchlin were the pair who’d first caught his eye upon boarding; they were brothers, Ned and Denis Kynd, and this woman he was carrying was their sister Nora, whom they’d believed dead.

  “Let us come with her,” Denis begged. “We’ll do anything—carpentry, cleaning, tending the animals. You wouldn’t have to pay us. We could help take care of her.”

  Lauchlin started to say, “Of course,” but Dr. Jaques stopped him. He looked straight at Lauchlin, ignoring the boys.

  “I’ll admit her to the hospital,” he said. “Even though there’s no room—let it be on your head, you can find a place for her. I said ten patients from this ship, and I meant it. There are others sicker than her. But I absolutely refuse to let these two on the island. They’re almost healthy, except for the dysentery, and they’re going on the steamer that leaves for Montreal tomorrow. If they stay here they’ll die. If they land on the island, there’s no telling what will happen to them.”

  “How can you separate them?” Lauchlin said. It seemed to him, just then, that he had never met a more callous man. But all his pleas were no use; in the end Dr. Jaques simply pulled rank. “You’re the junior doctor here,” he said. “Have you managed an epidemic before? Have you ever seen more than an isolated case of typhus? Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “No,” Lauchlin said. “But…”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  The last thing Lauchlin saw of the bark was the Kynd brothers hanging over the rail and wailing, not at all comforted by the thought that they, almost alone among the bark’s passengers, would be on a steamer headed upriver tomorrow. Why hadn’t he thought to give them some money? He could not imagine what would happen to them after their journey—although they didn’t have fever they were half starved, penniless, hardly more than children and deprived of their sister. He could not imagine what would become of any of these people. Already, despite his fury and confusion, he’d begun to doubt the wisdom of singling out a single patient to save among the hundreds needing help. By now he’d figured out the mission of the other boats plying between the ships and the island.

  Some carried the patients lucky enough to be admitted to the hospital by Dr. Jaques’s orders. From his own boat, with Nora Kynd unconscious in the bow, Lauchlin could see sailors lifting the helpless patients from other boats, dragging and carrying them over the rocks in the direction of the hospital he still hadn’t seen. The remaining boats carried the dead.

  The dead from the bark, where there’d been no supplies, were dropped on the nearest beach and corded like firewood to await the men who’d build their coffins. Others, from ships where a few healthy passengers remained, were wrapped in canvas or rudely coffined in boards torn from their berths. The boats carrying those bodies formed a long line, moving around the projecting tip of the island to the burial ground. In some a mourner accompanied the corpses, but in most only the rowers were alive. A lone boat moved in the opposite direction, carrying four priests with their black bags, ready to don their vestments and visit the holds.

  They would be more welcome aboard the ships than him, Lauchlin thought; perhaps more use as well. And yet despite his despair, and his first sight of the hospital surrounded by piles of coffins, the tents lurching upright as the sound of hammering filled the air; despite the glimpses he could hardly bear to register of a panic equaling that on the ships; still he could see that the island was as beautiful as his first glimpse had promised. Above the beach a mass of wild roses bloomed furiously.

  Nora was taken from him, to the hospital he glimpsed in the distance. A man whose name he didn’t know led him, on Dr. Jaques’s order, to the place where Dr. Douglas lived. The road from the village wound through a beech grove in full leaf, casting a solid shade t
hat cooled him. Bewildered, exhausted, Lauchlin followed his guide to a green lawn stretching before a cottage perched at the water’s edge. A dog rushed from the rhododendrons, barking and barking as if prepared to bite, veering off only when Lauchlin’s companion seized a stone and threw it. Lauchlin brushed his clothes off as best as he could while his companion knocked on the cottage door. A small man, tidy despite his shirtsleeves, opened it. His hands were full of papers and more littered the table behind him and towered in stacks on the chairs.

  “Dr. Douglas,” said the nameless guide. “I’ve brought you Dr. Grant.”

  Dr. Douglas said, “Where have you been?”

  [III.]

  June 2, 1847. The weather continues terrible; today it rained again. The men finished building the first of the new sheds but the hammering continues: coffins, sheds, more coffins. I have not been sleeping well. Already the hives that occasionally plagued me in Paris, when I was overworked, have broken out along my upper arms. Another letter from Arthur Adam arrived, dated March 4 and forwarded from the city—he includes this news, which I suppose he meant as a warning:

  There is a great deal of fever here now. We see two types: the so-called yellow fever, which the natives call fiabhras buidhe and some of the doctors call relapsing fever; and black fever—fiabhras dubh—which you will know as typhus. You might warn your colleagues who see this class of patient that they should expect to see some cases among the emigrants headed your way. Yesterday I heard a story, which I could not confirm, that the emigrant ship ‘Ceylon,’ sailing with 257 steerage passengers, lost 117 to fever on the voyage. Have you any evidence yet of this?

  One of his articles appeared in the Mercury a few days ago. Lots of details, very elegantly written.

  Three days after my arrival, another seventeen ships anchored. All of them had fever. By May 26 there were thirty ships, and by the twenty-ninth, thirty-six: a total of some 13,000 emigrants, many of them sick. Yesterday I stood on the wharf and counted forty vessels stretching down a St. Lawrence so befouled I could hardly see the water. We have in excess of a thousand fever patients on the island: more than 300 jammed in the hospital, the rest in sheds normally used to detain passengers during their quarantine, in tents, and even in rows in our little church. More than this number lie sick in their ships, waiting for help we are helpless to provide. At the far end of the island, the quarantine camp for the “healthy” is in fact also full of the sick. Yesterday a boy died there, without ever having seen one of us. First name Sean, last name Porlack? Pallrick?

  June 8, 1847. Muggy and hot. Dr. Douglas is a good man, but nothing he does makes more than a dent in this situation. There are more than 12,000 people on this island now, many without shelter and almost all short of food. Dr. Douglas has applied to the government for a detachment of troops to be stationed here, to preserve order. Buchanan, the chief emigration officer, has obtained some tents from the army. These are not much comfort during the rain and hot weather. My feet are swollen and the skin is peeling between my toes.

  This day Dr. Douglas sent an official notice to the authorities in Quebec and Montreal, warning that an epidemic is bound to occur in both cities. Any reasonable quarantine procedures, as the medical profession would recognize them, have become impossible to enforce.

  We now allow the ‘healthy’ to perform their quarantine on board, as there is no room for them on the island. They are detained aboard for fifteen days, after which they are shipped upriver. We released over 4,000 last Sunday—truthfully, many were already sick, and many more carry the seeds of contagion. We received word yesterday that three ships loaded with emigrants and bound for this port were wrecked in a late snowstorm along the Cape des Rosiers. All aboard were lost.

  Some eighty vessels have now made their way to us. Several among them fly their ensigns at half-mast: captain, chief mate, or other officer having succumbed to fever. Deaths among the passengers are almost past counting. I see I have not yet mentioned the death of Dr. Benson. Arrived here from Dublin on May 21, just before me, he volunteered his services in hospital. After contracting typhus, he died May 28: a kindly, thoughtful man. We are fourteen now, on the medical staff. Twice our number would hardly be enough.

  I have hardly seen Dr. Jaques since my arrival. He spends every minute shuttling among the ships. The sick he can do little for—many lie for days without any medical attention. The ships’ captains, crew, and passengers despise him for his failures, but I can no longer do so. He—we, I—separate the sick from the healthy without regard for family ties; we have no choice. Yesterday a young Anglican clergyman, newly arrived, chided me for dismissing a fully recovered young man from the hospital while detaining his still fevered wife. “Where is that man to go?” he said indignantly. “You know they’re sleeping on the beaches now, without any covering. Do you expect him to go upriver without his wife?”

  “Where would you have me put him?” I asked. “He’s well, and the ships are full of sick who need the beds here.” Of course I heard the echo of Dr. Jaques’s rebuke to me in my words. And on the clergyman’s face I saw an expression that must have once been on my own.

  Why, then, does Dr. Jaques continue so unfriendly toward me? Three young doctors from Montreal assist him at his task, but I am not allowed to join them and he never looks at me squarely. Dr. Douglas says I am needed here on the island more than on the ships; he is courteous to me, but not much warmer than Dr. Jaques, and I cannot help believing that I am under some sort of suspicion because of my behavior that first day. Not because I vomited or fled the hold: Dr. Jaques told the truth there, every new doctor responds this way. But because I argued with Dr. Jaques about the disposition of the Kynd brothers, because I insisted on bringing Nora here…was it what I said? Or only that I raised my voice to say it, that I shouted and showed myself to be excited?

  I have not once since then left a patient’s side when I was needed. I have not once raised my voice in anger. Mrs. Caldwell burned the cuff of my last good shirt, and I said nothing.

  The days pass swiftly, each worse than the one before. Already those here to help the patients begin to turn into patients themselves. More Catholic priests have arrived, from Quebec and Montreal. They travel among the ships with Dr. Jaques, giving what comfort they can. Mostly they administer last rites. One, who returned to the village this evening for dinner, looks to be on the verge of fever himself. The miasma arising from the holds of the ships is so dense that he swears it is visible as a stream of tainted air flowing from the hatches like a fog.

  June 14, 1847. The weather continues extremely hot. Nora Kynd is recovering—a miracle that anyone should get better under these conditions.

  We have almost no equipment. The hospital was overcrowded even before my arrival; we were given, to meet the influx of thousands, exactly fifty new bedsteads and double the quantity of straw used in former years. The new sheds are no more than shacks and what bedding there is has been placed directly on the ground, as there are no planks on which to lay it. Within days it becomes soaked and foul. The old passenger sheds are the worst of all. Here the berths are arranged in two tiers; several patients are jammed in each berth and invariably it seems to happen that the top berths are given to patients with dysentery. The filth and stench are indescribable.

  We have very few nurses—how could this surprise anyone? For three shillings a day they are obliged to sleep amongst the sick and have no private rooms where they may rest or change their clothes. They receive the same food as the emigrants, and are granted no time in which to consume it; I see them crowded outside the sheds at mealtime, gobbling on their feet. It will be a wonder if they do not all succumb to fever. Dr. Douglas asked one of the priests to try to persuade some of the healthy passengers to volunteer their services. Even with the enticement of high wages, very few came forward.

  Buchanan has issued an order compelling all the servants at present on the island to remain, until and unless they can provide substitutes for themselves. They are surly, nea
rly useless, retained as they are against their will; they taunt us, trying by outright misbehavior to provoke us into dismissing them. The woman whose job it is to bring afternoon tea to me and my assistants yesterday spilled it deliberately. She looked me right in the eye as she let the tray tip, the teapot slide forward and crash to the ground. Her name is Millie. If I dismiss her, there will be no replacement. There is talk of freeing prisoners from the city jail and bringing them here to care for the sick. Meanwhile the police appointed to maintain order wander the streets drunkenly.

  On occasion I have longed to join them. I long for many things. Privacy, quiet, sleep, decent food. Susannah. I wonder how she is. If it were not for her and my own fear of appearing weak, I might run away.

  Nora is in the little church, which has turned out to be the best of our makeshift hospitals—the bedding stays dry because of the floor, and the large windows allow for good ventilation. Last night, when I stopped by to see her, her skin was cool, her pulse almost normal. She asked me where her brothers were and I told her they were fine. What use would there be in telling her that they have already been carried against their will at least as far away as Montreal? In fact they may be much farther, as we hear that the residents of that city are in an uproar about the condition of the emigrants, and have insisted on pushing many on to Kingston and Toronto.

  When I woke this morning, I could not at first remember where I was. I heard hammering—a sound one never escapes from here—and the sounds of carts rattling down the streets, and for a moment I was back at home during the season my mother died. Then I heard the bustle of Mrs. Caldwell below, fixing breakfast for the crowd of us. Besides Dr. Stephenson and Dr. Holmes and Dr. Black, with whom I have been working and who share the second floor with me, we were joined two days ago by Dr. Pinet of Varennes, Dr. Malhiot of Vercheres, and Dr. Jameson of Montreal—a quiet, well-bred man with a passion for bees and some real understanding of physiology. Mrs. Caldwell has arranged makeshift beds for them in the attic above me. Rapidly, this is coming less to resemble a boarding house and more one of the sheds where our patients lie. The other physicians are similarly lodged, the attendants and servants lodged much worse. Food is becoming a problem for us, as it is for the passengers. The beef and mutton Mrs. Caldwell can obtain are sometimes inedible. She bakes, and so we usually have bread except on the days when the local storekeeper runs out of flour. We hear that the bread his wife turns out in large batches is purchased at exorbitant prices by the ships’ crews, who are running low on provisions.