All Standing Page 4
Still, they kept coming.
The last day of the 1846 shipping season was October 30, and although the arrival of new vessels had slackened considerably, it was still a busy afternoon on the docks of Quebec City. As a gale swept along the coast threatening to soak everyone and everything, more than four hundred immigrants were disembarking from two large cargo ships. Dozens of others were arriving from the Grosse Île quarantine station by steamer, including seventy-three emaciated refugees from Tralee, all of whom had almost perished aboard a ship aptly named the British Empire. The vessel’s owner, perhaps hoping to cut costs, had replaced the mandatory one pound of oatmeal or sea biscuit ration required for each passenger with moldy cornmeal he ordered from New Orleans. The results were disastrous.
Few of the British Empire’s passengers had the means to provide their own food for the voyage, and many soon fell ill from the contaminated rations. Even had the meal been in good condition, it was far from sufficient to nourish a healthy individual; when given to a famine victim, it was a death sentence. Three passengers perished of starvation over the course of the fifty-day passage to Quebec. Those who survived presented what colonial officials soon identified as the classic symptoms of severe malnourishment: low-grade fevers, diarrhea, ashen skin, pronounced lethargy. Even after weeks in the quarantine hospital, their bodies were skeletal, save for their distended abdomens and protruding eyes.
That the refugees from Tralee managed to blend in with the other immigrants landing that Friday afternoon says much about the collective condition of those fleeing the famine. So too did their willingness to be treated like chattel as they disembarked onto the bustling cargo docks in Quebec’s lower harbor. They picked their way hesitantly around enormous piles of deerskins, boxes of goose wings, heaps of pig iron, and casks of porpoise oil. They threaded around the towers of timber and barrels of sugar; they fought the overpowering smell of turpentine and rotting mackerel.
George Mellis Douglas, medical superintendent for the Grosse Île quarantine station, had spent the past several months monitoring the Tralee refugees’ well-being and looking for any sign of sickness. Disease spread rapidly among immigrants, he knew, and it was his responsibility to ensure that the approximately thirty-two thousand Irish who passed through his station before arriving on the mainland of North America that year did not bring with them an epidemic. On this, the last day of the season, he should have been relieved. Instead he was visibly concerned.
Douglas had taken great care in writing a letter to colonial officials warning them that, while a crisis had been averted that year, they would no doubt be far less lucky the next. The passengers who crossed his hospital’s threshold were already showing demonstrable signs of malnourishment and desperation. Another winter would only worsen that, along with their susceptibility to disease. Although it was still months away, Douglas eyed the next shipping season with worry. There were rumors of epidemics in continental Europe. It wouldn’t take long for disease to reach Ireland, and when it did, the starving people there would be helpless to combat it. Douglas also sent a requisition for an additional two hundred hospital beds and eight hundred cots to accommodate those healthy passengers required to land as part of the quarantine. He requested £3,000 (about $300,000 today) for structural expansion during the off season and urged officials to take precautions to secure the city proper as well.2 He was given £300 along with a polite note thanking him for his concern.3
5
Phoenix Rising
A CONFIRMED BACHELOR who lived the ascetic life of a monk, John Munn was nothing short of an oddity in Quebec’s high society. His only known companion was Elizabeth Allen, his matronly cousin who kept his house. He rarely ventured out for the regattas and festivals that infused life into the city’s port. He never attended dances or parties, nor did he spend money on gay carriages and pianofortes. Instead he pledged his money—nearly every cent of it—to orphanages and hospitals, immigrant relief funds, and schools and homes for the destitute.
Munn was also known far and wide as the laborer’s friend. He regularly employed Irish workers, despite the fact that, for most of them, the only vessel they had seen before arriving at his yard was the one that ferried them across the ocean. He took in Native Americans and freed slaves with the same equanimity and happily fostered a reputation as an employer who insisted on a fair wage. (In fact the British Navy used his labor rates as their own gold standard when considering compensation for their seamen.) The newspaper Le Fantasque deemed him “the father and supporter of the working class.”1 Crimpers—brokers who lured sailors out of their contracts only to force them into indentured work at shipyards—bragged that they could exploit this cheap labor at any yard except Munn’s.2
In short, John Munn’s shipyard was the golden ticket for anyone seeking an honest day’s wage. Men of every stripe went to his yard in search of salvation. But in the fall of 1846, they found something that looked a whole lot more like Armageddon. Half-finished buildings and piles of ash stood where Canada’s most prolific shipyard had once stood; Munn’s was one of the hardest-hit properties in a massive fire that had killed hundreds and left thousands homeless just a year before. Damages to St. Roch, a suburb to the west of Quebec City and already the locus for Britain’s greatest shipbuilders, were estimated at £1.5 million—well over $40 million today. On St. Dominique Street, not a single house remained. King, Queen, and Prince Edward Streets fared only slightly better. Munn’s yard was burned to the ground. Throughout North America, people speculated about whether this disaster would be the end of Munn, if he would leave the shipbuilding business altogether, perhaps to return to his native Scotland. But Quebec had become home to him, and more than ever he felt a responsibility to stay.
Since the fire, Munn had dedicated himself to the process of rebuilding—not just his own compound but also the larger neighborhood. He petitioned officials to increase the width of the streets to allow the fire brigade easier access. He contributed part of his insurance settlement to resupplying that brigade. Still, the reconstruction of the yard had been frustratingly slow. The stone for his new steam building had not yet arrived; his low-slung sawmills were still missing half their roofs; and the narrow spire that housed his shipyard bell, which announced the beginning and end of each work day, lay unceremoniously in the midst of charred rubble. Other than the slow tempo of working roofers and masons, the yard was uncharacteristically silent.
When the late-season Irish refugees arrived at the Munn yard, he was, for the first time in his career, forced to turn them away. As it was, Munn still had no work for his two hundred regular employees, most of whom were highly specialized tradesmen—sail makers, block men, and hull caulkers—whose hands and skills were at home only on a ship. As yet another biting winter set in, many faced the prospect of homelessness, or even starvation, themselves. Next door, Munn’s competitor—and hundreds of employees—were busy at work on the Wilson Kennedy, said to be the most impressive vessel to be launched in Quebec the following year. By comparison, the Munn yard seemed positively desolate.
Something about this grim state of affairs must have stirred Munn. Despite the unfinished state of his yard, he spent the remainder of the season obtaining contracts to build three vessels: the England, the Cromwell, and the Blake. He also signed on 180 of his regular employees to construct them. That still left about forty men without a paycheck. He consulted his finances. Insurance had covered a good part of the rebuilding; the rest had been taken from his residual profits. There was still enough, he decided, to finance the construction of a fourth ship on his own.
This was a risky venture. Like most wrights, Munn preferred to construct two ships a year—one in the fall, one in the spring. Three was a risk. Four seemed absurd and would certainly mean a confusing overlap of space and supplies. Then there was the problem of a buyer. Rumors of an economic depression prompted sales of cargo ships to collapse that year, and already many vessels awaited purchase in Liverpool and other ports. Munn
decided he would worry about that later. In the meantime, he hatched plans for a ship he would call the Jeanie Johnston.
The weather had turned bitterly cold—so cold, in fact, that the wood-stoves in the new yard did little to alleviate the chill. Most of the workers wore layer upon layer of clothing, covering their heads and hands with fur if they could afford it and wool if they could not. Munn would have liked to have worn thick mittens as well, but he needed his hands free to carve the Jeanie’s half-model, a two-foot approximation of the ship’s hull he would eventually build. Normally a wright would consult a number of half-models he had used on previous vessels when conceiving of a new ship; all of Munn’s, however, had been lost in the inferno. He could have used the one he created for the England and the Cromwell, but those two vessels were much larger—over seven hundred tons—and Munn didn’t have enough capital to finance a ship of that size himself. No, the Jeanie Johnston would need to be a much humbler sort of ship, the kind he had first learned to craft while working as an apprentice for his father.
As he sat watching the construction on his new yard, Munn took his knife to a hunk of pine, just as he had been taught forty years earlier. He imagined the straight lines of the Jeanie’s stern, the thick rounded hull that would carry tons of timber from his coves to ports around the world. Like most timber vessels, the Jeanie would have a deep, square hold. Somewhat unusually, Munn also chose to create a particularly spacious area between decks with clearance high enough for a grown man to walk about. Did he know that this decision would someday make passage across the Atlantic far more bearable for the thousands of people who would travel there? Perhaps. Like many town leaders, Munn believed the reports predicting that the flood of immigrants would only get worse. Whether that prediction dictated the dimensions of his new ship, we will never know, but we do know he committed to build an unusually spacious and sound vessel.
After Munn completed this boxy half-model, he moved to his molding loft, the three-hundred-yard-long shed that would give birth to the vessel. The wooden floor still bore the patterns of that season’s larger vessels, so he ordered his carpenters to sand down the floor until it was once again bare. For days he paced the blank floor, imagining the true dimensions of his new project. When he felt confident he knew the Jeanie’s contours, he bent down and, using paint and a yardstick, drew a large grid that covered the entire loft floor. Then, on his hands and knees and in painstaking detail, he sketched the barque that would soon make history.
6
Ship’s Fever
1847
AS THE CALENDAR ushered in the New Year, construction on all four of Munn’s vessels was well under way. Workers vied for space in the sawmill and the rigging shed. The sail loft overflowed with canvas, including the fourteen sails that would soon be set on the Jeanie. At 734 tons, the England required the lion’s share of Munn’s men and his attention, but he had a soft spot for the boxy little vessel he himself would finance, and he instructed his workers to take extra care when planking and caulking her hull.
As construction neared completion, Munn chose to paint the Jeanie a subdued black. For her figurehead, he selected a simple scroll of parchment rather than the garish female bust gracing most merchant ships. Both cosmetic choices captured the mood of a city that should have been animated by a stream of ships, cargo, seamen, and immigrants. Instead 1847 was proving nothing short of a failure. Prime Minister Russell’s government had succeeded in repealing corn and sugar duties, but instead of prompting a run on the market, this decision had panicked both growers and buyers into a spending freeze. To make matters worse, the promised railway boom failed to materialize, leaving speculators on the edge of bankruptcy and yards filled with unused ties and half-constructed ships. The British economy was now in free fall, with commercial failures in England topping £15 million and rumors of a full depression sending panic-stricken mobs to make runs on banks.
Meanwhile the U.S. national debt was skyrocketing, at least in part because of the country’s war with Mexico. On the front page of every American newspaper, headlines about the war vied for space with the most sensational story of the year: the brutal winter had forced members of the Donner party into cannibalism after being trapped in the Sierra Nevada’s notorious snow and cold. It seemed an apt metaphor for the new economy.
The weather that killed the Donner party was making headlines in Quebec as well. As late as April, the lingering winter also prevented the normal influx of market goods and gaiety into lower Canada. Flooding had become rampant in the region, after a series of surprise storms met with ground still frozen and unwilling to absorb moisture. An unprecedented amount of ice delayed ship traffic in the St. Lawrence.1
At least one man was frankly glad for the delay. Dr. George Douglas’s warnings from the previous year had gone largely unheeded, and as the start of a new shipping season approached, he was left mostly to his own devices. On May 3 of that year, he and his family made the steamship ride from their home in Quebec City to the Grosse Île quarantine station, some thirty miles down the St. Lawrence River. It was a difficult day for Douglas’s wife, Charlotte, a bright and vivacious socialite who would spend the next six months sequestered on their tiny farm at the base of the island. Four months pregnant, she was beginning to show and was already fatigued from caring for their three young children. Douglas knew the season would be a trying one for her. He also knew it would be exhausting for the staff who joined them. Colonial officials had been miserly in their outlay for his expenditures, granting an additional orderly and nurse as supplemental staff along with the two hundred beds he had requested. He was nervous—nervous enough to requisition another fifty beds and an additional fever shed just before stepping aboard the river transport. Hopefully they would arrive before July, the peak of the immigrant season and undoubtedly the island’s most vulnerable time for an epidemic.2
But death and disease had no intention of waiting that long.
By the middle of May, the ice had kept all but a meager twenty-six vessels out of the Quebec port, well below the 150 or so that usually had made landfall by that point in the shipping season. Then, without warning, the weather reversed itself. An epic heat wave struck the region, and with it oppressive humidity, unpredictable storms, and temperatures soaring well into the 90s. The air took on a sickly quality, ripe with the odors that came from months of stagnating waste and unwashed bodies. Not long after, scores of people both in the city and in the timber camps began falling ill at an alarming rate, victims of what had come to be known as “swamp ague.”
The ague—probably a virulent strain of northern malaria—was marked by fever and chills, sweating, and tremors. For some, it quickly proved fatal. Even those who survived were often bedridden for months. But as dire a condition as that illness caused, it paled in comparison to the mysterious disease that descended upon North America’s port cities along with the arrival of the first immigrant ships.
Overnight, it seemed, otherwise healthy individuals of all ages were contracting a dangerously high fever, coupled with a severe rash that made them look as if they had been beaten. They convulsed for hours in agonizing muscle and joint pain, before finally falling into a stupor or total delirium. Then, as suddenly as they had contracted the disease, they died. And the disease was spreading around the world.
Colonial officials were at a loss to explain this new malady. Members of the British Parliament worried that the plague might be a resurgence of the typhoid that killed more than 100,000 of Napoleon’s troops during their assault on Russia, or perhaps a particularly deadly strain of influenza. The disease’s prevalence on Irish immigrant transport vessels soon earned it the moniker “ship’s fever” among American doctors and reporters. William Guy, dean of medicine at King’s College in England, insisted that the disease was caused simply by “the unhappy obstinacy of the nation of Celtic savages.”3 The truth, of course, was far simpler—and more deadly.
We now know that the world was suffering from one of the worst
typhus pandemics in history. Spread by the feces of an infected louse, typhus enters the human body either when its victim inhales the dust of louse feces or inadvertently scratches that feces into a wound or cut. Once in the bloodstream, typhus kills its victims by causing blood vessels to erupt. The death rate is one of the highest of all epidemic diseases, about 25 percent on average. For reasons no one quite understands, the disease is particularly fatal in adults, which is why, in 1847, cities like Quebec and New York were playing host to an entire generation of orphaned immigrant children.
Even with these rates of infection and death, typhus is not properly defined as a contagious disease. Instead it is, as the contemporary epidemiologist Anne Hardy describes, a disease of “social dislocation.”4 Whenever large groups of people are assembled in unsanitary confines—in, say, a jail or an army camp, a poorhouse or an immigrant ship—blood from a host is soon passed to others by the growing number of lice taking refuge on unclean bodies. Infection spreads based on the movement and appetite of this tiny parasite rather than any direct contact between people. In Central Europe, where the potato crop had also failed once again, scores of starving farmers and peasants sought refuge in poorhouses. There infected lice quickly moved from one body to another. Before long, thousands were dead in Germany, where many of the victims were either displaced farmers or textile workers.5 In Austrian Poland, more than 400,000 people would die of typhus-related illness between 1847 and 1849.