Ship Fever (25 page)

“I'm fine,” she told him, although in the last few days her bowels had loosened and she feared she had a mild case of the flux.

He patted her arm and then disappeared. He was admirable, if mad. Dr. Douglas called on Lauchlin one evening, and the two of them holed up in Lauchlin's converted closet. As she bathed the patients and tidied bedclothes she overheard them drafting indignant letters to someone named Buchanan, to someone else named Lord Elgin: Canadian officials, she understood, powerful people who might have sent more help but refused. “A petition,” she heard Lauchlin say to Dr. Douglas. “To Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies—we'll demand he take action to stem the flood of immigration.”

“These half-naked, famished paupers,” she heard Dr. Douglas dictate. “Sick or aged or too young to work—are you writing this down, Lauchlin?—shipped off to our young country with
promises of clothes and food and money on their arrival, when in fact there is no one here to greet them, and no prospect but further starvation or private charity: Where is the humanity in this? Where is our common decency?”

It was her and her kind they were talking about; Nora shivered. Of course she was grateful to them, to everyone working on this island. Yet it was horrible to hear herself described this way: a “pauper,” a “half-naked pauper.” Before the blight fell on the potatoes, her family had been hard-working and decent; if they had no savings it was only because the landlord took everything in rent. What kind of new world was this, where the rich blamed the poor for their poverty?

But still, the physicians were admirable, even Dr. Douglas; despite his brusqueness he worked very hard, and was fair with her and the other attendants. No one worked like Lauchlin, though. She watched him draw up a list of healthy orphaned children and then sit down with a group of six priests and convince them to divide the orphans among their parishes for adoption. She saw him bathe patients with his own hands, when the attendants were too busy. She saw him carry out armfuls of filthy straw he had no business touching, and make new beds from fresh straw he'd gotten who knew where. And at night she saw him reading and writing, reading and writing, as if in his papers he might find an answer to this nightmare afflicting them all.

July 28, 1847.
A break in the weather; three days of blessed coolness and light breezes. No word from Susannah, although I have written her twice. No word from Arthur Adam. Perhaps this is because he's already on his way back.

We have been forced to abandon quarantine entirely. Dr. Jaques is down with fever; his replacement now simply calls at the ships and instructs the passengers to file past him while he
looks at their tongues. Those in fever are carried here; those appearing even remotely well are given clean bills of health and transferred immediately to steamers headed for Montreal. The steamers move from ship to ship, collecting their cargo. In the prow of these steamers, fiddlers scrape away with a horrible gaiety.

In this month of July we have entered 941 persons in the death-register under the description of “unknown.” Dr. Alfred Malhiot died July 22, of fever. Dr. Alex Pinet died July 24, also of fever. Twelve other physicians are sick, including Dr. Jaques.

At night I write letters to officials of our government; it is as if I've turned into Arthur Adam, but without his skills of persuasion. At night I lie on the pallet in this room for a few hours and listen to the sighs and cries and moans around me, and I wonder how it is I spent my whole life with so little understanding. In Paris, I thought of medicine as a science. I thought that by understanding how the body worked, I might cure it when diseased. What's going on here has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics—just what John Jameson tried to tell me. Jameson has the fever now. I look out at the harbor and all I can think is: Stop the ships. Stop the ships. This although I know, from talking to Nora, that to forbid further emigration from Ireland would be to condemn those people absolutely.

I met Nora today by accident, just around suppertime. We stole half an hour and walked to the top of Telegraph Hill, where we shared some bread and cheese. She sang me a song about a woman standing on a cliff in Ireland, waiting for a fishing boat to return. Untrained, uneducated, she has been of more use and shown more dedication than anyone except the Sisters who came this month from Quebec. Two of them have already died. Still no news of Nora's brothers. Four dogs were shot today, found scavenging in the cemetery.

August 3, 1847.
Hot again; 98 degrees where I measured in the tent. New sheds are under construction at the eastern end of the island: I have requested that boilers be built between two of the old sheds; if they can be completed I plan to order the attendants and other visitors to the sheds to remove their clothes immediately upon leaving and soak them in the hot water. Nora is in favor of this; I do not tell her the idea comes partly from Annie and partly from her own stories about her grandmother. But why would I scorn their ideas, when everything I have tried on my own has failed?

I believe I can convince the other physicians to adopt this plan as well: there is precedent in the writings of Lind, whom many respect; also in Wood's new text. Of course we will need tents in which to change—I wonder how many of us have a spare set of clothes? I am down to three changes myself; the remainder are in tatters from the constant scrubbing. I will worry about the details later. The important thing is to take
action,
to do something to stem this flood of deaths among the staff.

Nothing from Susannah. Nothing from Arthur Adam. None of the promised supplies have arrived. Dr. John Jameson died yesterday. Two of the carters engaged to transport the sick and dying and dead are dead themselves. In the woods delirious patients wander, finding the forest less fearful than our hospitals. When they die they are buried where they fall, as their finders are afraid to transport them elsewhere.

August 6, 1847.
Still hot; this weather is insufferable. The river surrounding us looks like soup. A man separated from his wife threw himself over the rail of his ship and sank in this turgid filth. On the beach the sick and dying taken from the ships are dumped without ceremony. As there are no longer enough carts to transport them promptly to the hospitals, nor enough healthy carters, they flop like fish among the mud and rocks as they try to haul themselves to higher ground.

I carried a woman up to some grass beneath a tree, where she might have shade until we could get her to one of the sheds. I carried two boys and a younger girl, aged perhaps five or six, and a man my age reduced to half my weight. Then one of Dr. Douglas's clerks spotted me and came running, irritated and anxious; I was needed at the hospital, I was needed at one of the sheds. And what was I doing down here by the water, lifting bodies like a servant?

I am being torn to pieces. Wherever I am, whatever I do, means only the neglect of someplace else I need to be and something else I ought to be doing. I have given up sleeping almost entirely and no longer miss it.

The new hospital is almost completed. No doubt it will be ready for use just as the emigrants cease to come. Will they ever cease?

Bishop Mountain of Montreal has descended upon us. He demonstrates his concern by making speeches and wrinkling up his fat face. In Dr. Douglas's quarters, where the few of us healthy enough to be presentable had been ordered to gather for a welcoming dinner, we listened to the Bishop wax indignant. He is corpulent; his hands are plump and small-boned. With a wineglass in his hand, with his voice trembling in anger or surprise or both, he told us about the scenes he'd witnessed his first day on the island. Sick people newly brought from the ships, lying outside the church and screaming for water: “They were lying on the
ground,
” he said. “It is a sin, what's happening here.”

Does he suppose we haven't noticed?

When he calmed down, after several glasses of wine from the last case Dr. Douglas had set aside, he spoke at length of the situation in Montreal. Until just a few days ago, he told us, steamers from this island had been landing emigrants at the old stone wharves there. Absolutely as predicted, many were already in fever on arrival. No one was there to receive them, no arrangements had been made. “They lay on the wharves,” the Bishop
said. “In the open air, like here. Some of them crawled into an old passenger shed.”

I could not help thinking of Nora's poor brothers: can this be what has happened to them? Some of the sick, the Bishop said, were carted off to the hospital. Those apparently healthy but destitute were crowded into the old sheds near the Wellington Bridge, there to await transport further upriver by barge. Many sickened, and despite the ministrations of the Grey Sisters upwards of thirty a day died.

Earlier this week they were transferred to a new site, above the Lachine Canal at Point St. Charles, on a low piece of ground where the Indians once encamped each summer. A better place: and yet, the Bishop says, it is still very bad. Fifteen or twenty die each day, and the crowding is appalling. The barge firms, who promised a wait of only a few hours before the next stage of the journey to Kingston or Toronto, must often leave prospective passengers waiting for days. During that time, many sicken.

Of the Catholic priests from Montreal who have been tending to these emigrants, eight have already died. Some twenty of the Grey Sisters are sick, as is the Vicar-General. It is Bishop Mountain's considered opinion that the sick in Montreal number many thousands. How many sick have we here? he asks.

No one could tell him for sure. Our last count was two days ago; more ships have since arrived, and among the fleet still awaiting transport of the sick to the island is the bark
Larch,
of Sligo, with 150 sick out of 440 embarked; 108 dead during the passage. Also the
Ganges,
from Liverpool, with upwards of 80 sick. And more and more: the
Naparima
from Dublin, the
Trinity
from Limerick, the
Brittania
from Greenock among them.

We know that near 80,000 emigrants have arrived here since May; of these some 2,500 have died in hospital or in the quarantine sheds, and we will without a doubt lose another two or three thousand. Among the nearly 200 attendants and nurses and cooks, almost half have sickened and 22 are dead. Eight
policemen have sickened, two have died; all of the 21 stewards have sickened and two so far have died. Six Catholic priests have died here: Fathers Robson, Roy, Paisley, Power, Bardy, and Montminy. Also two Anglican clergymen: Anderson and Morris.

Among us physicians, I said—for it was I who told the Bishop these things; I rose from the table, spilling my wine; I shouted, I could not help myself—he had only to look at the haggard faces around our small table: where at our peak we were twenty-six, four are already dead and eighteen down with fever. There were four of us, only four, at that table. Count us, I said to him. Count us.

Dr. Douglas led me outside; although he might have rebuked me he did not. Nora is nowhere to be found. My hand is shaking so that I can hardly write. What is to become of us?

One minute Lauchlin was rushing between two sheds and the next he was flat on his back, in a room he didn't recognize. Like one of his father's trees he'd been felled, thrown in the river, chained into a raft with the others to begin the long journey downstream.

In fact he was in his converted closet, on a pallet surrounded by his books. Dr. Douglas came by when he could, but by then only he and two other physicians were well enough to work. So it was Nora who tended to Lauchlin, sponging him down with lukewarm water, dripping water into his mouth from a cloth, massaging his legs and feet and hands. She did for him all she wished had been done for her during her illness on the ship. All her brothers had wanted to do but been unable. There had not been enough fresh water on the ship for drinking, never mind for washing; there had been so little food, and no brandy of course, no milk, no clean linen, no space nor privacy. Unlike her brothers, she had access to these things. As soon as Dr.
Douglas heard of Lauchlin's illness, he gave Nora everything she asked for. He had a private stock of supplies, she learned, for treating his sick staff.

She did not resent this; the medical staff on the island were not to blame for what had happened to her and the others on the ships. Perhaps the authorities in Quebec were at fault, for not making better arrangements. Certainly the landlords back home had acted badly, and the passage brokers, the ships' captains, the government in England that had encouraged emigration and then closed its eyes to conditions on the ships.

But these people here, the few remaining physicians and nurses and attendants still well enough to work—weren't they all doing what they could? And if they gathered outside in knots sometimes, smoking and talking bitterly about the filth and poverty of her fellow travelers, their ignorance of the most elementary principles of hygiene and the way their habits contaminated the entire province, certainly they didn't mean for her to overhear them. They were exhausted, she knew. They had no understanding of what the people they treated had been through, no ability to imagine the hardships that still lay before those who survived and tried to make a life in this new country. She overheard one attendant say, both puzzled and outraged, that he had yesterday seen a woman land whose only piece of clothing was made from a scrap of a biscuit bag. And how, he said, could a woman let herself come to that?

But they meant well, and they risked their own lives, and whenever she felt bitter she reminded herself of this. Thirty-six people died on the island the first two days Lauchlin was sick, among them another attendant and three emigrants she'd tended herself in the chapel: Jane Quinn, Peter Hogan, Caspar Fitzpatrick. She grieved for them, as she grieved for everyone. But Lauchlin had raised her from the dead, and while she did not neglect her other duties she bent herself to returning the favor.