Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

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 that 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.