Hosack hoped for a peaceful outcome that would not divide Americans. While living abroad, he had noticed that many Britons still held out hope that the American experiment would fail. He would complain in a letter to Rush right after his Mohawk trip that the British “have the peculiar talent of embellishing every story” that gave the slightest hint of political conflict in the United States. Still, there was no ignoring the fact that Americans disagreed violently among themselves on whether the current tensions with Britain presaged disaster. Any Democratic-Republicans on board the Mohawk would have been angered by Jay’s effort to establish cordial ties with Britain at the expense of France, even as the Federalists were loudly applauding Washington’s wisdom in sending Jay to London. It was not until after they landed at New York that they would all learn of the sensational events unfolding in France in late July. On July 27, Robespierre was arrested while trying to seize the floor during a legislative session. He went to the guillotine the next day. Opponents of his rigid Revolutionary ideals breathed a collective sigh of relief.
As for Hosack, he thought physicians should steer clear of politics. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, he set up his decanter and took a second oxygen reading.
IT WAS PROBABLY around the time of Robespierre’s death that illness broke out on the Mohawk. Jail fever, war fever, ship fever—typhus. Hosack later described the terrible symptoms of typhus, among them the “frothy and offensive discharges from the bowels, discoloured lips . . . [and] a cadaverous and offensive smell of the whole body.” Transmitted by body lice, the bacteria killed the lice but lived on for days, infesting the raw, itchy sores of prisoners, soldiers, sailors, the poor. A mother gathered up dirty bedclothes in a sickroom, or a doctor lifted a sweat-drenched shirt away from clammy skin, and the disease silently moved to its next victim. How did it stow away on the Mohawk? Perhaps it had boarded with a sailor from London or a laborer from Sussex. Perhaps it had crossed the Atlantic on Captain Allen’s last voyage, hidden in a moldering mattress. It was a disease that made its presence known subtly at first—in pale faces, light chills, a general weariness. Its name was descended from typhos, the Greek word for the delirious stupor that settled over the minds of the infected. In the close confines of the steerage compartments, the sickening scent of gangrenous flesh would have mingled with the stench of diarrhea.
Before long, some of the first-class passengers also fell ill. The whole ship was a stinking hospital. For the first time in his life, Hosack faced a medical catastrophe on his own, far from the surgical theaters and clinical wards where he had been able to rely on his professors’ experience. Now, after climbing down to the steerage quarters to examine the sick, he had only his memory and his medical texts to consult. At the University of Edinburgh, the preference was for strong purgatives to clean out the bowels, especially during the late stages of the disease. But Hosack felt deeply mistrustful of drastic measures such as bleeding and purging, which he suspected of exhausting patients exactly when they needed to marshal their feeble energies. He would later condemn these conventional treatments for typhus as “dangerous” and “indiscriminate,” advocating instead the use of gentle purgatives like rhubarb or magnesia as well as nervous-system stimulants like Peruvian bark, snakeroot, and bitters. It seems highly likely that Hosack had these staple medicines with him on the Mohawk after his time in London, and he could also ask Captain Allen to commandeer some of the ship’s stores of liquor (another stimulant Hosack would later recommend for weakened typhus patients). The captain was genuinely concerned about his steerage passengers and worked tirelessly alongside Hosack to care for them. Although Hosack left no record of how he and Captain Allen contrived not to lose a single life, the New York papers later noted that all were saved.
WHILE HOSACK AND THE CAPTAIN toiled to contain the fever ripping through the Mohawk, the president of the United States was facing a crisis of his own. For several years, Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s unpopular excise tax on the production of distilled liquor had incensed frontiersmen in western Pennsylvania. Now, in early August 1794, they gathered by the thousands near Pittsburgh, raising the specter of a major rebellion against the federal government. As the news filtered back east, coffeehouses and taverns buzzed with talk about the disturbances. Washington, the valiant general who had helped defeat an empire and shepherd a new nation into the world, now confronted a grievous threat from within. One newspaper worried “that the western disturbances have risen to so great a height, that the ordinary powers of government are altogether inadequate to the suppression of them.” Hamilton agreed completely with these grim appraisals. Over the protests of Secretary of State Randolph, he was pressing Washington to raise a special militia of twelve thousand men. Jefferson, Randolph’s predecessor, found such measures tantamount to suppressing the right of citizens to assemble peacefully.
As the president neared a decision about sending Americans to fight Americans, the Mohawk approached the coast of the United States. Hosack took one last oxygen reading with his decanter. His experiments seemed to support the notion that there was less oxygen at sea, although he later lamented to Benjamin Rush, “I could wish the experiments were repeated and were made under more various circumstances.” On August 26 Captain Allen guided the Mohawk into New York Harbor, passing between Governors Island and an unremarkable little pile of sand and rock called Oyster Island. The surprising changes recently wrought on Governors Island would have been obvious to Hosack and any other New Yorkers waiting on the Mohawk’s deck as she sailed past. All that summer, citizens had been boating over to volunteer alongside paid laborers as they erected a monumental structure on the foundations of the old Continental Army fortifications. It was a new fort meant to defend New York City from the much-anticipated British attack. New Yorkers had banded together in work teams—grocers, teachers, carpenters, cartmen, coopers, blacksmiths, bakers, deacons, Irishmen, Columbia students, and so on—and spent months moving wheelbarrows full of rocks. Many of the volunteers had trumpeted their Democratic-Republican opinions as they planned their outings to Governors Island, whose new fort they viewed as a thumb in the British eye. If the familiar old foe tried anew to penetrate the harbor, the plan went, her ships would crash into a wall of cannon fire launched from Governors Island to the east and from Oyster Island and nearby Bedloe’s Island to the west.
As the Mohawk traversed the upper harbor and made for the mouth of the East River, Manhattan came into view: the tree-lined Battery, the spires of Trinity and St. Paul’s, and beyond them the fields galloping northward as far as the eye could see. To starboard lay the green expanse of Brooklyn, stitched to Manhattan over and over by the ferryboats that carried the harvests and farmers of Long Island to the city. The Mohawk dropped anchor near Crane’s Wharf at the foot of Beekman Street around seven o’clock in the evening, with all of her passengers safe and sound. A ship anchored nearby, the Providence from Antigua, had not fared as well—one passenger had died on the way to New York, and two more would die in town in a few days. The chairman of the municipal health committee, John Broome, observed that the victims of the Providence had evidently fallen “sacrifice to common Typhus fevers, not attended to, perhaps, so early or so vigorously as is generally requisite in those disorders.” The Providence, in short, had had neither a Captain Allen at the helm nor a newly minted Dr. Hosack among its passengers.
New York City as Hosack would have seen it from the Mohawk in the summer of 1794
Almost as soon as the anchor splashed into the harbor, Captain Allen found himself besieged from all sides. Merchants looking for their shipments clambered onto the ship just as he was trying to assist the passengers eager to disembark. Captain Allen was anxious to deliver his cache of letters, not least John Jay’s, to the post office, but it took him so long to handle the flurry of requests for his attention that the office was closed by the time he could even think of going ashore. He would sleep on the Mohawk that night and deliver the letters the next day. Meanwhile, the passengers
stepped with sea legs onto Crane’s Wharf. Shouts and curses rang out in different tongues as servants, sailors, merchants, and enslaved humans circumnavigated mountains of stacked crates and coiled ropes. The waterfront was a notoriously pungent place, where a crush of unwashed bodies in sweat-drenched clothing added spice to the brackish notes of the water stagnating beneath the wharves. Sometimes the crowd of men and horses was so dense it was hard for pedestrians to squeeze between them.
The next day, Captain Allen left the ship and walked to the post office at 30 Wall Street to deliver the letters. Within hours, Sarah Jay was tearing one open and devouring its contents. She replied immediately. “My d[ea]r Mr. Jay, It is impossible to describe what were my sensations upon beholding again the handwriting of my husband and my son.” That same day, the first-class passengers, Hosack among them, placed a public letter to Captain Allen in the New-York Daily Gazette. “Having observed your very liberal and humane treatment of the steerage passengers, and having ourselves experienced every attention, we cannot refrain from expressing to you our unanimous sentiments of your conduct, and from conveying our cordial wishes for your prosperity.”
Hosack was overjoyed to be home, as he wrote Rush soon afterward. Making his way across Water Street into the heart of the city, he headed for his parents’ house on William Street, where Kitty was living, along with Hosack’s younger siblings. He had been absent for two years, twice as long as he had spent with Kitty before leaving for Britain. They were practically strangers to each other now, and they had also lost a son. Whatever Hosack’s emotions on reuniting with Kitty, he would soon be directing his grief over Alexander’s death into his medical practice. In a letter Hosack wrote to one of his Edinburgh professors not long after he returned to New York, he described in harrowing detail the morning he was called to the side of a dying newborn—the week-old son of lawyer Nathaniel Pendleton and his wife. As Hosack tried to count the faint pulse, the baby turned a “dark livid blueish colour” and repeatedly fell into “fits of screaming” and “convulsions.” Hosack, after exhausting every other remedy he could think of—including camphor oil, laudanum (a narcotic derived from poppies), and a mustard plaster applied to the whole body—decided to submit the baby to a hot bath of Peruvian bark, spirits, and smelling salts. After repeated bathings, the baby’s pulse quickened, his skin returned to normal, and his eyes brightened to “their natural expression.” Soon he was nursing contentedly, out of danger.
Hosack may have lost his own son while he was in Britain, but he could now hope to rescue other children. The venerable old cities of Edinburgh and London, with their universities and gardens, their anatomists and botanists, had given him such generous gifts. Above all, one dazzling idea had lodged itself in his mind. So much of his home continent was unexplored. There must be undiscovered medicines growing out there in those vast, verdant lands.
Chapter 4
“HE IS AS GOOD AS THE THEATRE”
COMPARED WITH THE MAJESTY AND SWEEP OF LONDON, NEW YORK looked newly humble to Hosack. He had set sail from the world’s largest city and its one million inhabitants, and now he had washed up among fewer than sixty thousand. During his British sojourn, the abodes of kings and lairds had taken up residence in his memory. Kensington Palace, Edinburgh Castle, even the jewel-box Brodie Castle dwarfed the mansions of New York’s bankers and merchants. The city’s houses, churches, and shops were still crammed into the pointy little end of Manhattan Island. All around him, goats ran through kitchen gardens and cows liberated themselves from their sheds to saunter down the streets. Pigs rooted in the dirt by the Columbia College fence. A world away in Soho Square, Banks and Smith continued their sparkling conversations, and he was not there to listen. On this backward little island, there was no Royal Society, no Linnean Society, no Brompton Botanic Garden. Hosack turned the situation over in his mind and decided it suited him perfectly.
Soon he received exciting news from London—the Linnean Society had held its election while he was at sea. He was now a full-fledged Fellow, the first foreigner to be so designated. Henceforth he had the right to sign his name “Dr. David Hosack, F.L.S.” Perhaps it was this good news that encouraged him to dream that the Fellows of the Royal Society might one day permit him to trail their honors at the end of his name like the tail of a brilliant comet: F.R.S. First, however, he would have to prove himself worthy of sharing such a distinction with the most revered of all American scientists, Benjamin Franklin, who had been elected in 1756. Not even Benjamin Rush was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Hosack would need to tread a careful path through the political minefields that had been laid across the island in his absence. Both the city and the nation had entered precarious new times. Even with the national government in Philadelphia, at a safe remove from New York, local partisans of Hamilton and Jefferson had become ever more starkly polarized in the early 1790s. At the warehouses, wainwrights’ shops, and ropewalks, the men who rolled sloshing barrels of Madeira off the ships, who wove the ropes that held firm when huge sails billowed in the trade winds—these have-nots watched with growing rancor as speculators lined their pockets. New York’s stock traders, one Antifederalist charged, were “minions of despotism, who are living on the vitals of our citizens.” Meanwhile, many New Yorkers were not allowed to vote because they didn’t meet the minimum land ownership or rental thresholds—or because they were women or enslaved (or both). Some of the city’s disenfranchised men organized themselves into the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen and made common cause with the Clintonians in attacking Hamilton and his financial policies. When Jefferson and Madison arrived in New York City to begin their botanical tour of the Northeast in May 1791, they had quietly met with Governor Clinton’s allies, who now included members of the powerful Livingston family and the shrewd Revolutionary War veteran Aaron Burr.
Emotions might not have run so high so fast had the Antifederalist camp not been swept along by a tidal wave of political inspiration that rolled from France across the Atlantic. From Secretary of State Jefferson on down to New York’s dockworkers, Antifederalists—now more often called Democratic-Republicans—had for the previous two years been mesmerized by the fast-moving events of the French Revolution. Jefferson himself had been in Paris on July 14, 1789, when a crowd stormed the Bastille and came away with the head of the prison director bobbing on a pike. Even as he acknowledged the Revolution’s violent excesses, Jefferson greeted the overthrow of the old order with cheerful optimism, observing to his friend General Lafayette that “we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.” After departing for the United States that autumn, Jefferson kept an avid watch on the news from France.
As did New Yorkers. They couldn’t have ignored the Revolution if they had tried, since there were days when it seemed to be unfolding in the streets of Manhattan, where Democratic-Republicans reveled publicly and loudly in the news that the most humble Parisians had marched a despotic monarch out of his own distant palace and back to their city. By mid-1793, after Louis XVI had been beheaded and Britain had gone to war against France, Democratic-Republicans and pro-British Federalists were skirting one another in the New York streets with their hackles raised. The threat of physical violence pulsed through the city.
It erupted into the open that summer. In June, a group of French officers from the frigate L’Embuscade, anchored in New York Harbor, were publicly insulted by British sympathizers. Pro-French New Yorkers retaliated by hoisting one of the Revolution’s most recognizable symbols at the brand-new Tontine Coffee House on the corner of Wall and Water Streets, where a group of brokers and dealers had been meeting since early in 1793. It was a red “liberty cap,” the sort worn by working-class French Revolutionaries. Word quickly circulated through New York that anyone foolhardy enough to remove the cap would earn the “scorn and hatred” of all true American patriots.
Meanwhile, out in the streets, crowds of Democratic-Republicans paraded along singing the Mars
eillaise and sporting liberty caps of their own. The captain of the British frigate Boston, also anchored in the harbor, challenged the captain of L’Embuscade to a naval battle. Wagers were laid on the outcome and fistfights broke out. On August 1, 1793, just around the time Hosack was beginning his course of botanizing in the tranquil English countryside with William Curtis, the French and the British went to war in New York Harbor. Hosack’s younger brothers may well have been among the thousands of New Yorkers who thronged the tree-lined park at the Battery to egg on the combatants. The Embuscade trounced the Boston, but that hardly eased the friction. All that next year, while Hosack was away in London, the electric charge of French Revolutionary politics crackled in the New York air. In May 1794, when John Jay had set sail from lower Manhattan for his negotiations with the British government, his cheering well-wishers were countered by Governor Clinton, Chancellor Livingston, and the French consul, who boarded a French naval ship in the harbor and sang French anthems together.
In France, this was the season of the Reign of Terror, when aristocrats and even moderate Revolutionaries were fleeing the guillotine in herds. Many landed in Manhattan, where they became hairdressers, dancing masters, schoolteachers, farmers, or dinner-party fixtures. “The city is so full of French,” a British visitor observed in 1794, “that they appear to constitute a considerable part of the population.” The French consul himself lived just a few doors from Hosack’s parents on William Street. Culturally and intellectually, Hosack leaned decidedly British; to accomplish what he was envisioning for his city and his nation, he would have to keep his political opinions to himself.
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