The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  It was after the first call at Barbados that death began flitting about the ship with the determined abandon of a sailor’s whore. One at sea on February 4, just eight days after arriving in Barbados on January 27. Surely, thought Dr. Clark, that could not be smallpox, not yet. No—the logs showed a ship newly burdened with 86 extra armed soldiers, heaving hard on a chase after pirates, until terrible storms had snapped so much of her rigging that they had been in serious danger of the masts tumbling overboard and the ship swamping. Surely that man had died in the mayhem of splintering wood and wet whipping canvas, of waves leaping across the deck: the wild, roaring danger of the sea.

  The doctor’s finger stopped at a second death, duly noted as drowning, on February 20.

  Thereafter, the explanations evaporated. One death, unexplained, on March 30. A second—a Boston man, Samuel Gregory—on April 20, just two days before reaching home. A third on May 4, while the ship lay in the harbor: which made steam rise from the back of the doctor’s plump neck.

  Again, he asked the captain what had been killing his men. Again, the captain claimed ignorance. Momentarily, the doctor lost his grip on calm. “Damn it all, Durell,” he exclaimed, slamming both hands down on the table. “I am not asking for the precision of a medical report. I am asking, did they have pocks, sir? Did you see wens, boils, blisters, so much as a pimple or two?”

  But the man clung steadfastly to his ignorance.

  Dr. Clark did a few quick calculations. If just the last three deaths had indeed been smallpox, that indicated anywhere from 9 to 18 men ill. Maybe more. Not enough to cripple the ship: as the captain had implied, most of the men had volunteered or been pressed into service in the home ports of London, Deptford, and Portsmouth. Were likely scraped from the floors of jails, from the sewers of the streets: had imbibed that contagion with their gin-soaked mother’s milk, and having survived, could now laugh in the face of smallpox and pass the rum.

  A fair number of his crew, though, were mariners recruited in Boston since last October: and many more of these would—or should—be quaking in their boots. No matter what kind of strict quarantine Mr. Gibson might have been able to impose when he was present, the doctor thought grimly.

  “I should like to see the entire crew, for medical inspection,” he said aloud.

  Reluctantly, Durell gave the order to muster all hands on deck.

  There were 111 men currently on the books. The turnout was just what Clark had feared: pathetic. No more than 15, and a handful of those, by the look of them, too scurvy-weakened to be of any use setting sail. According to the master’s log, fifty of the missing were accounted for in the sloop Durell had hired and sent chasing the pirate sheltering in Tarpaulin Cove. That should have left 61 men. Three lay below, ill. Which left the hair-raising number of 43 loose ashore, the devil only knew where, or how many were ill.

  Dr. Clark stayed only long enough to demand that the yellow jack be run aloft and to inform Captain Durell that he would have to withdraw to Spectacle Island as soon as a pilot who knew his way through the harbor’s shifting confusion of sandbars, currents, and deep sea lanes could be secured.

  Fifteen men, Clark reflected, would not be near enough to move her even so far on a fine day. He would have to inform his brother and the rest of the selectmen they needed not only a pilot, but mariners. All pockmarked.

  The doctor accompanied the captain all the way back up the Long Wharf in silence: his freedom being the unspoken price of a look at the logs. At the bottom of King Street, where Dr. Clark’s carriage stood waiting, they bowed one last time.

  “I have every confidence,” said the captain, “that it is I who shall prove correct in our differing assessments of the danger at hand.” If the doctor had been a sporting man, he would have tossed out a bet; but the Bostonian elders were a singularly unsporting lot, suffering from extravagant overdoses of a noxious, pinched brand of piety.

  “You have a taste for trumpets, sir,” said Dr. Clark. “Do you recall what will happen after the sounding of the first trumpet?”

  “What?” Captain Durell was a Church of England man; it took him a moment to realize that he was being steered, in fine Puritan style, toward the Bible.

  The doctor’s voice rang out clear and deep. “There followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up.” Around them, men stopped their work, drew in a step closer. “Apocalypse, sir,” said the doctor. “Hell on earth. And that is just the beginning.” He rapped the driver’s box with his stick, and his carriage drove on.

  4

  CAGING THE MONSTER

  ON the twelfth of May, a Friday, the freeholders of the town of Boston—the propertied men sworn in to the company of voters—filed upstairs into the great domed representatives’ chamber that occupied most of the upper story of the Town House. Slanting through long narrow windows, the morning light skated over polished wooden floors and splashed the yellow walls with sunny foam. Almost, so warm and relentless was its cheer, they might be in Barbados, rather than the center of Boston, convening a town meeting.

  As a first order of business, the men elected Elisha Cooke, Esq., as moderator; then they went noisily to work. There were many contentious items on the agenda, from choosing representatives to the General Court to levying the town for the next year’s expenses. Just before two o’clock, the men burrowed out from under piles of unfinished business and adjourned for dinner. At three, they reconvened and began tidying up loose ends. Tucked in at the end of the meeting, as if that might somehow make it negligible, Mr. Cooke mentioned the word smallpox.

  Stillness fell across the room as Dr. Clark rose to detail his inspection of the Seahorse. Sitting amid a tight knot of selectmen, Mr. William Hutchinson, the youngest of the town’s chief office-holders—and as of that morning, newly elected representative to the General Court as well—watched his fellows listen with quiet gravity to the doctor’s formal report, as if they had not already heard it informally. As if, hearing it, they had not already rejected it outright, mulled it over, cursed it, silently shouted it down, leaned their shoulders hard into its obstinacy, striving to shove it aside with strength accustomed to move mountains. The selectmen were, after all, men of a certain stature, men used to command and obedience. They were not used to standing aside helpless or, worse yet, turning their backs to run. Or, worst of all, he thought, scuttling to the governor to ask for help like scared schoolboys.

  As Dr. Clark finished, a deep murmur swept through the room and died away like a dark squall scudding across the open sea. A short, sharp debate ensued, presided over by Elisha Cooke’s very sour face. And then, respectfully, the men of the town took a vote.

  Voted: that the Select Men be desired and directed to wait upon His Excellency the Governor and pray him to call a Council in order to advise about the Seahorse man-of-war, being sent down to Spectacle Island, Pursuant to a Law of this Province to prevent (God willing) the Spreading of the Small Pox in this Town & Province, two or three men being sick of that Distemper on board the said ship now in the Harbor.

  “If anyone can persuade Captain Durell to just action, it will be his good friend the governor,” grumbled Dr. Clark as the company filed out.

  If anyone can persuade the governor to any action whatsoever, thought Hutchinson with uncharacteristic gloom, it’ll be the six selectmen arguing the opposite case. And if there is anyone whose advice he will contradict more happily than ours, it’s Dr. John Clark.

  In the end, Mr. Cooke and Dr. Clark’s younger brother, Selectman William Clark, called on the governor alone, while the rest of the selectmen watched shadows lengthen in the Council chamber. Striding to the central window, his back to the room, hands clasped behind, William Hutchinson looked more ship’s captain than fine shore-bound gentleman. Staring eastward down King Street and the Long Wharf, he could see the three masts of the Seahorse—the tallest in the harbor—swaying slightly, just beyond the town’s grip. They were still brazenly barren
, free of the least flutter of a quarantine flag. It put his mind on the ghost of another ship, with a different captain at her helm: John Gore, who had died last year among strangers rather than risk infecting the town with smallpox. Captain Gore had been Mr. Hutchinson’s classmate at Harvard. Had been his friend.

  Presently, Mr. Cook and Mr. Clark returned with grim faces. The governor had agreed to call the Council, reported Mr. Cook. Meanwhile, he had sent for the insolent puppy of a captain himself. With that, Captain Durell was announced. The blast of air that sprang up as the man strode into the room, thought Hutchinson with a shiver, had been born, surely, in the farthest southern seas, fanged with ice.

  Puppy, scoffed Hutchinson to himself. Here is a puppy who fancies himself a lion. A vision of the lion—the King of the Beasts, and the only one of his kind in America!—on display at Mrs. Martha Adams’s place in the South End flitted through his head. That creature lazed all day in the sun, not unlike the captain standing at such arrogant ease before them. Not at all the same sharp attention that Durell granted the governor. Hutchinson shifted his gaze back out the window, lest the captain’s report snag on his smile.

  The captain regretted, he said, the selectmen’s concern that the Saltertudas fleet might have brought the smallpox into town. Might? Hutchinson’s attention snapped back, one brow skimming up into the fringe of his wig.

  Willing to do his part, of course, continued the captain: he had ordered the commanding officer on board to fall down with the ship to a mooring off Bird Island, so soon as these good gentlemen—small nod, just this side of perfunctory—could provide a suitable pilot.

  In spite of himself, Hutchinson snorted. Suitable, hell, he thought. Safely pock pitted is what you mean, and we all know it. Then he identified the jolt that had bothered him in that sentence. “You mean Spectacle Island,” he said aloud.

  “I am sure,” said Mr. Cooke just a little too smoothly, “that we can trust an officer in His Majesty’s Service to keep our few small harbor islands straight in his head.”

  Hutchinson glanced quickly from Mr. Cooke to Mr. Clark. Their faces should have betrayed surprise—same as his—but all he saw was a studied blandness. So a deal has been struck, he thought, a bargain sealed. He could smell it: something had been offered and accepted in return for escape from formal quarantine at Spectacle Island. But what? Not money: Mr. Cooke might be grasping, but he was also righteous. He would not sell the town into the smallpox.

  Mr. Hutchinson knew as well as anyone that he had been elected so high so young for his staunch support of Mr. Cooke. But if Mr. Cooke’s party assumed they had acquired a pliant yes-man, he thought, they might as well be disabused of their error at once. In this case, they would get his support, but for a price; for it galled him to the edge of fury to think of John dying alone in quarantine, while this smug, strutting captain draped in lace got off scot-free. “No doubt,” he said with a tight nod to Mr. Cooke, “His Majesty’s ship Seahorse will be quite as isolated off Bird Island as she would be docked at Spectacle Island. Possibly more so.” He unfurled a smile of contempt for the captain. “So long as she flies the yellow jack, of course.”

  Captain Durell glanced at Cooke, but he offered no help.

  “Of course,” echoed the captain with a grimace. “We will show the yellow jack.”

  Hutchinson transferred his smile back out the window, as the man departed.

  Another tight-lipped discussion shot here and there between the six men, or between the five men and Mr. Hutchinson’s back. There were one or two more decisions at hand.

  The outcome went into their minutes, along with several other statements that were not as discreet as the captain might have wished. The selectmen had tacitly agreed, it was true, not to wag any more fingers of blame in public, but they had made no such promise about private conversations:

  Whereas His Majesty’s Ship Seahorse, Capt. Thomas Durell, Commander, now lyeth in the Harbor of Boston infected with the Small Pox, the greatest part of his company are now a cruise, sundry others sick on shore, so that there is not above ten or fifteen effective men on board, and the said Captain having given orders to the commanding officer on board to fall down to Bird Island with the ship, in order to prevent the infection spreading in the town, upon Captain Timothy Clark’s repairing on board to take the charge of piloting her down:

  Voted, that Captain Clark be desired forthwith to procure a sufficient number of men to effect that matter.

  “Vermin monger!” thundered Dr. John Clark, flinging open the door to the best private room upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes, the plush tavern standing at the head of the Long Wharf and favored by the selectmen. Having worked through the dinner hour, they had at last left the Town House and sauntered the length of King Street to share a late supper of haddock in capers, beef, mutton, salad, and hasty pudding. By the time Dr. Clark found them, the last crumbs had been withdrawn; several half-full bottles of Madeira remained. The six men were gathered around the tavern’s newest amusement, a large table covered in green cloth and edged with six holes, or pockets. “Pox-ridden dog!” cried Dr. Clark.

  All but one of the men seemed to have found something fascinating in the close grouping of three ivory balls, red, white, and blue, in the center of the table. The sixth man, William Clark, turned and leaned on his long mace-ended stick. “Hello, brother,” he said. “Perhaps you would care to clarify that you do not intend to indicate any of us?”

  “Captain Durell,” roared the doctor.

  Five backs straightened, and five pairs of eyes swiveled to face him.

  “He’s discharged them,” said Dr. Clark. “The three men sick with the smallpox. Gone. Cast out. Lord only knows where.”

  William sighed. His brother was trustworthy as well as experienced in both medicine and politics, which was why they had chosen him as their inspector. But in medical matters he was also a perfectionist and a bit of an alarmist as well. Which would make him about as comfortable as a horsefly in the upcoming weeks.

  “They’re in the Province Hospital on Spectacle Island,” said Mr. Cooke, taking careful aim at the white ball with the mace end of his stick. The mace collided with the cue ball, and the cue ball collided with the red ball, which spun silently down the table, banked off the end, and veered back through a hoop called the port. This was followed by a short, sharp silence, like a pop, not entirely due to the marvel of the man’s skill at billiards.

  Mr. Cooke straightened, though he kept his eyes on the table, assessing the new layout of the balls. “As you say, the captain discharged the three men you told us of. James Mansell of Boston, and the two strangers, John Wilkinson and Gilbert Anthony. Unfortunately, he also offered—as is his right—to go on discharging men, as fast as they should fall ill.” He cornered the table and confronted Dr. Clark directly. “What would you have done?”

  Most of the time, he and the doctor were wary allies against their mutual foe, the despised governor; occasionally, though, they could be determined, if respectful, opponents.

  “That whole damned ship belongs at Spectacle Island,” growled the doctor.

  “The whole damned ship was not going to go there.”

  “It’s where she belongs,” Dr. Clark insisted. You’re a physician by training if not by practice, he thought. You know that much.

  Cooke shrugged. “I don’t give a ship rat’s fart where she is,” he said, “so long as she is not here, and Durell is not discharging his sick at will into my streets.” With a firm shove of the mace, he sent the white ball spinning toward Mr. Clark’s blue ball, which flew into the pocket in the far corner. The point of this delicious new game of billiards was, like its forerunner croquet, as much to wreak havoc on one’s opponent as to work one’s own ball through the port at one end of the table and back to hit the skittle called the king on the other side. Cooke turned to Dr. Clark and spread a wolfish smile. “I owe you thanks, though, for the tip that he would do anything to remain free to chase pirates. Quite useful information,
that. Deal clincher, in fact.”

  “What deal?” asked the doctor.

  “I suggested it might be best if we joined forces to round up all the ramblers and stragglers from the Seahorse, sent the sick to the Province Hospital, the healthy back aboard ship, and the ship away from the docks. After short consideration, and the promise of some likely timber for the repairing of his crosstrees, Durell agreed.” Cooke laughed. “Though Mr. Hutchinson quite brilliantly wangled a further promise that they will fly the yellow jack.”

  “And in return?”

  “A promise that the Seahorse will not be forced into formal quarantine. And none of her officers or crew threatened with either the fifty-pound fine or the six months’ jail time specified by the law. . . . I think it was the threat of time, in jail or in legal haggling, that won him over.”

  Dr. Clark stalked back to the door. “You have made a deal, sir, with the devil,” he said, laying his hand upon the latch.

  “No, Doctor,” said Cooke with smooth disagreement. “I’ve made a compromise with reality. Furthermore, the other selectmen have agreed.”

  “I see that,” said Dr. Clark, gazing around the room, his stare coming to rest upon his brother. “Thankfully, this year I am not one of your number.” He departed, banging the door behind him.

  From dawn till dusk on Saturday the thirteenth there were discreet searches along the docks, the taverns, and brothels frequented by sailors: the Dog and Pot, the Turkey-Cock, three different Castles, Noah’s Ark, the Sun, the Swan, the Three (soused) Mariners. Every Seahorse who could be found was whisked away, inspected for fever and spots, and sent one of two directions: the healthy back aboard ship, the sick out to Spectacle Island. A distressing number had melted into the still cold and damp air of spring. One man—Joseph May, the gunner’s mate—was discovered dead, curled up in the deserted corner of a warehouse, whispered some, or, muttered others, rolled gently this way and that by the swell beneath a dock. At least, observed one of the gravediggers given the task of consigning him to a pauper’s grave, he would not rest in the earth as he had died: alone.