Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

“There’s a place called Detroit,” Nora said. “I heard about it on the island; it’s off one of the huge lakes that this river runs into.”

Sissy, unnoticed until then by Nora, set down the beets and her knife and crept closer to the table. “I’ve heard about that place too,” she said.

Because she had company, and because she was abashed by her earlier outburst, Annie restrained herself from snapping at the girl and only motioned her back to the corner with her chin. Nora, thinking of Denis and Ned, registered Sissy’s shining, curious face before she turned. This one had lived, like her, somehow escaping the trail of bodies littered across the ocean. And like her was all alone. She said, now speaking to Sissy as well as to Annie, “A man who has some family there told me it’s easy to sneak over the border, and that the city is lively, and there’s lots of work. I’d like to be in a new place,” she said. “Start fresh.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Annie said. “Didn’t we all of us think that was what we were doing, leaving our homes for here?” She put down her saucer as Nora rose and grasped her satchel. “You’re leaving already?”

“I am,” Nora said.

I am indebted to Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger, from which I first learned about the events on Grosse Isle. Robert Whyte’s journal of his passage from Ireland to Quebec (published in 1848 as The Ocean Plague) provided key eyewitness descriptions of conditions on the ships and on the island.

The Grosse Isle Tragedy and the Monument to the Irish Fever Victims, 1847 (compiled by J.A. Jordan and first printed on the occasion of the dedication of a monument honoring the victims of ship fever as the Quebec Daily Telegraph’s “Grosse Isle Monument Commemorative Souvenir”; later reprinted as a book by The Telegraph Printing Company, Quebec, 1909) is the definitive source for details of the typhus epidemic on Grosse Isle during 1847. The chapter “Medical History of the Famine” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History (edited by Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams) provided much useful information about the diseases — particularly typhus — that follow in the wake of famine.

Drs. Douglas and Jaques are historical persons, as are Buchanan and the doctors and clergymen Lauchlin Grant records as having died on the island. The remaining characters, including Lauchlin Grant, are fictitious.

Andrea Barrett lives in Rochester, New York. As well as Ship Fever — which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1996 — she is also the author of five novels, the most recent of which was the much acclaimed The Voyage of the Narwhal.