All Standing Page 6

  8

  Visitations from a Vengeful God

  HAD GREY SEEN the devastating misery at Grosse Île, he might have been less tempered in his response. Since the start of the shipping season, conditions on the quarantine island had gone from bad to worse. By mid-May they were cataclysmic. More than twelve thousand immigrants languished on the island, long since filled to capacity. “I have not a bed to lay them on or a place to put them,” Douglas wrote to Elgin. Yet the vessels continued to pour into the St. Lawrence and were now anchored in a queue that stretched for over two miles. Conditions on board were almost too ghastly to be believed, continued Douglas. While inspecting a single vessel that day, he found

  that 106 were ill of fever, including nine of the crew, and the large number of 158 had died on the passage, including the first and second officers and seven of the crew, and the master and steward dying, the few that were able to come on deck were ghastly yellow looking spectres, unshaven and hollow cheeked, and, without exception, the worst looking passengers I have ever seen; not more than six or eight were really healthy and able to exert themselves.1

  This was saying quite a lot for a man who had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering in the short month since Grosse Île had opened. Barely three weeks earlier, the Syria had been the first vessel of the season to arrive. Not long after leaving the docks of Liverpool, more than two hundred of her passengers fell ill; nine of these individuals died and were buried at sea. Shortly after arriving at Grosse Île, the vessel brought with it the quarantine station’s first fatality of the season: Ellen Keane, the four-year-old daughter of a weaver and his wife from Mayo. In the two weeks following Ellen’s death, forty other passengers perished while on the island. As troubling as these figures were, however, they paled in comparison to news arriving with subsequent ships: 213 passengers had died at sea; an additional 776 (25 percent of all on board) were diagnosed as suffering from ship’s fever and in grave need of medical attention. By the second week of the shipping season, Douglas’s hospital was already well over capacity, with four hundred sick immigrants; another three hundred languished aboard ships while they waited for a bed.

  In response to these new figures, Douglas strengthened quarantine policy, requiring all passengers, sick or healthy, to submit to longer stays on the island. Grosse Île may have looked like a pastoral island retreat, but it was as much a military fortification as anything else. For the first time since the great cholera epidemic of 1832, Douglas requested the return of the British military to the island. They soon arrived, arming garrisons to sequester the sick from the healthy and manning a large cannon battery in the middle of the island. Pilots delivered warnings to approaching vessels: any captain who did not observe the mandatory anchorage at the island or who attempted to depart before receiving clearance from George Douglas himself would be fired upon until incapacitated.

  Douglas also requested that an additional hospital be built and that healthy passengers be moved to nearby Cliff Island, where they could be properly quarantined from the sick and the dead. Both requests were denied. He had no choice but to require healthy passengers to remain on their beleaguered vessels. He would arrange for their effects to be disinfected there and for a daily visit by one of the hospital staff. It was a breach of quarantine law, he knew, but with more than ten thousand people already on the island, he insisted he had no choice. In response, colonial officials agreed to send over an additional four doctors to assist. They also sent another detachment of troops and military tents, along with the suggestion that Douglas pitch these tents on his own farm. As Douglas wrote his cool response, a violent storm swept through the region, sheering away Grosse Île’s decrepit wharf. Conditions, he reported, were about as dire as they could get.

  With public attention to Douglas’s reports growing, George Mountain, Quebec’s Anglican bishop, arranged a visit to Grosse Île. He was shocked by what he found there and wrote his superiors that Douglas’s reports were indeed accurate: “Conditions, it seemed, could get little worse. Typhus sufferers languished outside in rain storms, covered in rags so populated with lice and fleas that the fabric seemed to move of its own accord. Beds in the newly erected tents contained three or four filthy children each, some of whom had long since died. Orphans sat on piles of unclaimed luggage. Dysentery and disease was rampant.” Mountain concluded, “The impression produced upon my mind was that of the hopelessness of doing anything effectual to stay the consequences of such a visitation from the hand of God. A little abatement, a momentary breathing space, was followed by a thickening influx of squalid misery and fatal disease.”

  Worst of all, no one was immune, including the medical staff themselves. The first to fall was the quarantine hospital’s chaplain, who had worked nonstop for over ten days without even bothering to bathe or change clothes. When doctors attempted to tend to him, they first had to scrape his boots and stockings from his feet.2 Twenty-two of Douglas’s twenty-six staff doctors were also sick. Over a dozen of his nurses had died.3 Finding replacements was all but out of the question: no one in his right mind would willingly take on a position with such mortality rates. Still Douglas persisted, first asking for, then demanding, then pleading for any kind of assistance the government was willing to offer. In the meantime, resident British soldiers stood in, doing their best to tend to the sick and the dying. Increasingly it was the latter who required their greatest attention. Many of the ships arriving now were so inundated with illness that no one aboard was well enough to help. Each day soldiers and priests ferried out to the vessels to collect the dead.

  Overwhelmed by reports such as Bishop Mountain’s, Canadian officials arranged to have three large steamers—the Quebec, the Queen, and the Rowland Hill—transport seven thousand immigrants directly to Montreal, where the city’s hospitals could provide additional quarantine.4 Few observers doubted that this was but a stop-gap attempt to avert what was about to become a far greater tide of sick immigrants.

  They were right. By the second week in June, it was clear that another year of failed potato harvests in Ireland had exacerbated the already dire famine there. New York City alone had already received nearly twenty thousand immigrants, thousands of whom had succumbed to disease and now lay buried in overfilled cemeteries. In Boston, the “ship’s fever” had become so virulent that even the 185-acre Deer Island was overfilled with affected immigrants. Residents of the city, still embittered by their inability to prevent a quarantine station on the island, decided once and for all that they had had enough. Hundreds of them stormed Boston’s wharves, forcing the harbormaster to turn away the immigrant schooner Mary, claiming that her passengers would become an undue burden on the already strapped city.

  • • •

  A disaster of this magnitude required a scapegoat of similar stature, and as far as Alexander Buchanan, chief emigration agent in Quebec, was concerned, the culprits were obvious. Writing to Earl Grey, he insisted that the crisis plaguing North America was, more than anything, caused by insufficient shipping regulations and an inability to control the unscrupulous behaviors of ship owners. He was supported in his claim by Robert Whyte, a cabin passenger aboard the immigrant vessel Ajax. Many of his observations on the ship, Whyte wrote, were “too disgusting to be repeated.” What he was willing to report included an illuminating account of the inequities and suffering on board. Sailors were given daily rations of beef or pork, along with biscuits, coffee, sugar, and lime juice. The immigrants, on the other hand, were given a half-pound of oatmeal—most of which, Whyte reported, was “bad.” Their only means of hydration was “nauseous ditch water” that was “quite foul, muddy, and bitter.”5

  Initially these conditions were the cause of great consternation on board. Passengers complained about their rations and fought over the two meager cooking fires on deck—the only means of making their oatmeal palatable. By the second week of the voyage, however, this tension had been replaced with a collective terror over the escalating death rate on the ship. Dys
entery plagued many; the faces and feet of some passengers were “swollen to double their natural size and covered with black putrid spots.” In many cases, victims were so disfigured that their own families were unable to identify them. Other immigrants would appear perfectly well, only to drop to the deck without warning, “screaming violently and writhing in agony.” So pervasive was the collective suffering, Whyte said, that “the moaning and raving kept” him awake for days on end. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the “effluvium of the hold” was so “shocking” he could think about little else.6

  Small wonder, then, that illness rates on ships like Whyte’s were as high as 75 percent or that mortality rates were increasing in kind, surpassing the deaths on both the coolie and slave ships. It was no surprise to anyone that the vessels carrying Irish refugees were now known as “coffin ships.” Death, it seemed, followed them everywhere.

  While at sea, crew members disposed of the deceased by launching them overboard, consigning the bodies to the anonymous depths of the North Atlantic. Once in the shallows of the St. Lawrence, however, no such invisibility existed. While anchored at Grosse Île, sailors removed the dead from below deck with grappling hooks, and several eyewitness accounts reported that bodies of the “barely dead” were inofficiously cast overboard, often without so much as a shroud or covering.7 Others described a crude pulley system used by sailors to remove bodies from ships and transport them to the island. It was, wrote one eyewitness, an indisputably ghastly scene:

  On deck a rope was placed around the emaciated form of the Irish peasant, father, mother, wife and husband, sister and brother. The rope was hoisted and with their heads and naked limbs dangling for a moment in mid-air, with the wealth of hair of the Irish maiden, or young Irish matron, or the silvery locks of the poor old grandmother floating in the breeze, they were finally lowered over the ship’s side in the boats, rowed to the island, and left on the rocks until such time as they were coffined.8

  Commingling with the cadavers were entire families of immigrants, too terrified by the mysterious sickness either to enter the island hospital or to return to their ships. Among them were a disproportionate number of orphans, many naked or nearly so, and without a sense of the direness of their fate. A visiting clergyman wrote in painful detail of one young child who sat for hours playing with the hand of his dead mother.9

  An Anglican priest wrote to Bishop Mountain that the inadequacies of the island were only intensifying this suffering. “There are a number of cooks and nurses,” Father Horan reported, “but never enough. From every side people are asking for food, and when you see how thin most of these poor wretches are, you have no doubt that lack of food is the principal cause of their sickness.”10 Horan and the other priests worked beyond exhaustion, often called in the middle of the night to administer last rites. Each day they traversed the island on foot, calling upon the suffering. Douglas tried to alleviate their hardship and even offered them use of his horse and cart once a day, but any more than that was an impossibility; he too was stretched beyond reason.11

  Testifying before a special committee, Douglas reported that conditions had deteriorated so badly that the island had become more of a mortuary than a hospital. Six men were employed around the clock to dig graves; by the end of the season, this mass graveyard would encompass over six acres of land. Overwhelmed by the number of bodies awaiting burial, quarantine workers moved cadavers in wheelbarrows to the island’s deadhouse, where they were left to wait in piles of wood chips until they could be buried.12 Those refugees hale enough for hard labor were busy digging long ditches that served as mass graves, covering the layers of bodies with only a few inches of soil. Ship captains and crew members reported that the overwhelming smell of decomposition lingered for over a mile downwind of the site.13 With so many individuals dying so rapidly, neither the workers nor the geography of the rocky island could keep pace. Eventually officials in Quebec were forced to send barges filled with dirt from the mainland to ensure that all bodies were interred.14

  Meanwhile the number of stricken immigrants on the island—now fifteen thousand by Douglas’s count—overwhelmed the capacity of the hospital and sheds several times over.15 Quarantine workers enlisted the assistance of waiting ships’ crew members to build a village of crude tents constructed out of salvaged ship masts, spars, and sail canvas. Viewed from the decks of the waiting vessels, the scene had a decidedly spectral quality to it: splintered pikes lodged into the rocky soil, covered with tattered and billowing canvas. Below these shrouds sat dozens of emaciated survivors, their gaunt faces a sober reminder of the suffering in Ireland and out at sea.

  Douglas and his staff were showing their own signs of strain. Reports were now surfacing that island priests, nurses, cooks, police officers, and undertakers had fallen victim to the disease. Though he tried to hide it, Douglas too had contracted typhus. His fever soon rose dangerously high, plaguing him with severe chills; his body was wracked with pain, and his head felt as if it might split open. Despite protests from his wife, he continued to work. Each morning, nearly delirious, he stumbled to his horse, draping himself across the animal’s neck as he rode from the farm to the hospital. He had no choice. His best doctors were dying; others, overwhelmed by the horror of it all, had fled. He had tried to secure suitable replacements but soon discovered that the only individuals willing to set foot on the island were what he called “profligates of the worst kind, who came to prey upon the helpless.”16 When the Wadsworth, one of the few coffin ships to travel with a surgeon on board, landed, their doctor offered to remain on the island. Douglas readily accepted. The ship’s doctor was dead within a week.

  9

  A Course for Disaster

  AS SHIPS inundated by illness continued to arrive, the Quebec Gazette began devoting a column to the names of immigrants who had unclaimed letters at the post office. By June that list consumed almost the entire front page of the paper. Ads begging for information about loved ones also littered the pages of nearly every paper in Canada and the eastern United States.1 Their implication was clear: thousands of people had failed to make landfall, their bodies defeated by starvation and disease and now left to drift in the North Atlantic.

  Meanwhile what had begun as a steady flow of new immigrants was now an unmanageable torrent for the ill-prepared city of Quebec. With death tolls in the thousands, doctors and undertakers in the city proper found themselves stretched dangerously thin. More than four hundred orphaned immigrant children were languishing in the city’s churches, schools, and hospitals, none of which was prepared to house them. Those immigrants still well enough to escape hospitalization lingered in boatyards and public houses, looking for work and food. They mobbed shipping agents, slept in alleys, and wandered the streets, looking for places to bury their dead. To any observer, Quebec appeared a city in the last throes of a particularly grisly war.

  The scene was more than John Munn could bear. Many of the ships he built were now employed in the immigration efforts, carrying Irish refugees not only to North America but now also to Sydney, Calcutta, and other far-flung places. Munn’s barque the John Bolton lost 141 immigrants during its summer crossing. Several others had arrived in New York, Norfolk, and New Orleans and were awaiting clearance. Miraculously two of his favorites, the Fame and the Lord Canterbury, had just passed quarantine in his own city of Quebec with only one immigrant death between them. Others, like the Douce Davie and the Highland Mary, were not so lucky. Like the dozens of other famine ships, they were forced to lay at anchor off the island quarantine station of Grosse Île, where their casualties quickly mounted. Munn tried to stave off the crisis as best he could. He agreed to take over guardianship of six of the famine ships held up in quarantine; he managed to employ a dozen or so Irish immigrants looking for work; he again led the entire city in money donated for the Irish relief fund. But he knew it wasn’t enough to mitigate the extent of a tragedy just beginning.

  Construction continued at his shipyard. His workers co
mpleted the Cromwell first, followed soon after by the Blake. Desperate for good news, the press covered their launch with grand treatment, offering subscribers detailed accounts of the event, including descriptions of the cannon fire and visits to the flag-bedecked vessels by local dignitaries. Somehow, as long as John Munn was launching one of his vessels, a tiny vestige remained of life as people once knew it.

  A month later, Munn prepared for what promised to be an even more dramatic event: the double launching of the England and the Jeanie Johnston. Both were vessels of exceptional quality; a surveyor from Lloyd’s Register, the leading surveyor and ship classification society, gave the two ships first-rate designations. For their maiden voyages, Munn chose two accomplished naval men as masters: George Rocke would skipper the England, and Matthew Armstrong, a decorated veteran of the Patriots’ War, would captain the Jeanie. Perhaps as a way of showing her owner’s preference, the crew would launch the 123-foot Jeanie first, allowing the unremarkable barque to lead the much grander England, first to the Customs House for registration and then to Liverpool, where she would await a buyer. The event symbolized not only the return of the great wright but what promised to be his domination of the North American shipbuilding industry.