All Standing

by Kathryn Miles

  John Snowe’s discovery of the cause of the spread of cholera would come too late to help many in Tralee. The graveyard adjoining the workhouse had seen an addition of almost two thousand bodies since 1850, and groundsmen there had begun the grisly practice of exhuming older graves to make room for more. Not surprisingly, hungry dogs returned in a scene familiar to those who had survived 1847. Soon rumors began to spread that the bodies of babies were in plain sight and packs of animals were feeding on them. When the Poor Commission was criticized publicly over the exhumations, Thomas Hurly, chairman of the commission, shot back, saying that only one infant had been exhumed, that the body was still in its coffin (albeit in plain sight), and that all but the bones had already decomposed. As for the charges that wild dogs were once again scavenging among the dead, Hurly assured townspeople that that too would be coming to an end: he had hired a local man to shoot “those famishing dogs as they attempted to crimson their mouths with the gore of human beings.”4

  That still left the problem of what to do with the bodies of additional victims. In light of the brewing cholera epidemic, even Hurly had to admit there would be hundreds of them. In response, the Tralee Board of Guardians agreed to rent an acre of land for future pauper burials. They also formed a special cholera committee, headed by none other than Nicholas Donovan. Their mandates soon graced placards throughout town: manure was to be carried away from homes and town, all gutters and drains were to be cleaned, and fever sheds were to be cleared for quarantine. They promised legal proceedings against anyone who refused to comply.

  Drafts of lead, injections of scalded milk mixed with egg, and poultices of hot sand were again proving ineffective against the disease. So too were the tinctures of opium and other remedies attempted by baffled doctors. The only thing to do for cholera sufferers, it seemed, was pray.

  The irony, of course, is that, unlike typhus, cholera is one of the most easily treatable diseases; merely keeping the patient hydrated while the microorganism runs its course is often enough to save the person. Water, though, was considered inadvisable for a patient suffering from such severe diarrhea, particularly when that patient was languishing below the deck of a seagoing vessel with no obvious way to clear the waste. That’s what happened aboard the 2,000-ton Guiding Star, which left Liverpool that fall with 550 passengers on board. Not long after, she encountered a gale that sheered away her main topmast and yard, along with several key spars and sails. Disabled, she limped toward Belfast, hoping to seek refuge in the Irish port. But once she arrived, officials there could see that the storm damage was the least of the ship’s problems: during the storm and subsequent attempt to reach the north of Ireland, six passengers had died. The sailors on board tried to pass off the deaths as simple diarrhea, but officials in Belfast could see that the ship was carrying yet another outbreak of cholera. Eleven people lay collapsed on deck; many others were suffering down below. Emigrant officers worked with the city’s guardians to secure space for the emigrants in the workhouse hospital, while the dead, now numbering thirteen, were buried in the pauper cemetery nearby.

  The Guiding Star brought with it an urgent warning for port towns everywhere: cholera was on the move and eager to make landfall. The question to be asked was no longer if it would arrive at Ireland’s docklands, but when and what to do once it did. When an emigrant vessel, also disabled by the gale, sought refuge in the newly named port of Queenstown, customs officials there were forced to admit that they had no facilities for them. Town officials worried aloud what they would have done if the vessel had contained anyone stricken with the disease. The “consequence,” they said, would “have been dreadful.”5

  No one needed to wait long to see the truth in their prediction. On July 11, the full-rigged ship Dirigo, chartered by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, arrived in Cork Harbor, having left Liverpool a week earlier with just over four hundred passengers. Prior to departure, two children had died. The cause of death of the first was not clear to the ship’s doctors; the second, a girl of thirteen, was believed to have succumbed to a fever, and so the captain, believing that nothing was amiss, dropped his anchor lines and began the vessel’s long journey to Melbourne, Australia. Less than twenty-four hours later, an infant died. Not long after that, the thirteen-year-old girl’s father perished as well. A four-year-old boy soon followed. The ship’s surgeon observed that some passengers had “assumed an altered aspect.” A few hours later, the cause was obvious. As night wore on, several other passengers began showing the characteristic signs of acute cholera. The onset of the disease was so rapid and so utterly destructive to those who contracted it that the ship’s doctor beseeched the captain to put in at Cork. He agreed, believing that a marine hospital or other such accommodation was available there or in nearby Queenstown. Summoning a tug steamer, he allowed his vessel to be towed into the harbor, where he reported the condition of his ship and passengers. Almost immediately he was visited by emigration and medical officials, who later said they were shocked by the conditions on board: three women lay dead and dozens upon dozens were incapacitated by “premonitory diarrhea.”6 The officials called for a muster of passengers and then ordered a steamship to tow the Dirigo back to Liverpool, saying that they simply did not have the capacity to tend to its ill passengers.

  No one could deny the warning brought by the Dirigo: without proper medical facilities, Queenstown could soon become the new epicenter of a pandemic.

  • • •

  In Liverpool, tensions were also rising. Philip Finch Curry, the city’s coroner, was at the breaking point. Born prematurely and with a severe case of epilepsy, Curry had never been strong. This latest cholera outbreak had sent him to the edge of exhaustion. As coroner, he was part doctor, part magistrate, responsible not only for declaring the cause of death of the bodies he examined, but also, if need be, deciding who should be held responsible. As far as he was concerned, blame for this rash of deaths and the turmoil they were creating rested squarely on the immigrant vessels moored at the city’s Mersey wharves.

  Those same docks were playing temporary home to the Ben Nevis, a ship destined for Galveston, Texas, with 446 German immigrants, a crew of forty-four, and two physicians. One of those doctors already had enough experience with cholera to last a lifetime. But not even his time aboard the Bussorah Merchant could prepare Richard Blennerhassett for what was coming. On September 17, 1854, a confirmed case of cholera elsewhere on the emigrant docks forced the immediate evacuation of all vessels there, including the Ben Nevis. Six days later, after the ship was cleaned and purified, the captain was allowed to reload his now visibly shaken passengers and crew. On September 26, two children, one twelve years old and the other several years younger, were found dead in their berths. Not long after, Regina Lehatta, the mother of one of the children, died as well, apparently so overcome by grief that her brain swelled. Blennerhassett and his fellow physician, Dr. Hankay, were sent for.

  The two doctors debated the cause of the girls’ deaths for some time and failed to agree; later reports would indicate that one of them maintained the children had died of cholera, and the other contended it was fever. History has lost track of Hankay’s medical training and experience with cholera, but given Blennerhassett’s commitment to studying the disease and his time on the Bussorah Merchant, it seems unlikely that he would miss the telltale symptoms.

  The mere fact that the two physicians disagreed was enough to alert an already vigilant medical staff back on Liverpool’s wharves. The death certificates for the two children, which stated that the physicians were in conflict regarding the cause of death, aroused the suspicions of Chief Emigrant Officer Major Greig, who ordered further inquiry into the case. He contacted Curry, who ordered the doctors to send another certificate, this one with a single cause of death. When the paperwork failed to arrive by 10 A.M., Curry, who by now was more than impatient, ordered a full inquiry into the vessel. But he was too late: the Ben Nevis had left the port, bound for Texas.

/>   Curry had enough suspicion that something was amiss to order further investigation. The bodies of the three victims remained in repose at the Liverpool deadhouse, and the coroner ordered a full autopsy of each. He was shocked by the results: the two children, it appeared, had died of neither fever nor cholera, but starvation. Regina Lehatta, Curry later testified, had been similarly misdiagnosed; as far as Curry could tell, the woman died of inflammation of the lungs, not effusion on the brain.

  Appearing before the Coroner’s Court, Curry presented his findings. His revelation that Blennerhassett and Hankay had misdiagnosed not one but three patients prompted an audible gasp from the jurors, followed by disruptive murmuring. It was all the encouragement the coroner needed. “I am told,” he informed the court, “there is a class of men who go and represent themselves to be surgeons, and who are not surgeons at all.” This statement produced an even greater disturbance in the courtroom, and it was several minutes before order could be restored. Curry went on to tell the court that he had evidence that mere chemists and, in one particularly egregious case, a hospital doorman had stepped aboard vessels purporting to be medical doctors. Richard Blennerhassett signed his name “M.D.,” Curry conceded, but there was no proof of what that entailed or whether it even meant “medical doctor” at all. Perhaps the abbreviation would be more aptly rendered as “most damned” or some other construction.7

  This was all the jury needed to hear. Too many people had died in Liverpool, and no one had yet been held accountable. The jury foreman rose, saying he had been sailing out of Liverpool for eighteen years and had never seen an appropriately trained doctor on board. Ask them for medicine, he said, and they’ll swear nothing’s wrong with you. It wasn’t uncommon, he claimed, for fifteen bodies to be tossed overboard as a result of negligence. Clearly the Ben Nevis was proof of this. By the time the Ben Nevis made an emergency stop at Queenstown on September 29, it had become known as the vessel that sailed, to quote The Nation, “unprovided with competent medical officers.”8

  Those aboard might have taken the time to disagree, had they not been so overwhelmed with the tragedy that had since overtaken the vessel. On the first day out, eight passengers fell ill. Later the captain of the vessel would say their illness “was conceived as sea-sickness,” though whether this was his diagnosis or the doctors’ or even true at all is not known. The next day, an additional four passengers died. By September 29, twenty were confirmed ill and seven had died. Once the vessel anchored in Queenstown, officials there were quickly dispatched. They confirmed what all on board already knew to be true: the Ben Nevis had been wracked by cholera. The official diagnosis, though, would come too late for Richard Blennerhassett.

  It’s unclear when the young doctor felt the first symptoms. Probably he was distracted enough by the condition of his patients that he could have ignored the nausea and abdominal cramps—but not for long. Cholera attacks as quickly as it does virulently, and in no time he would have been unable to stand and would have been taken to his berth. At that point, he would have known better than anyone on board that it would be only hours before he died. First, he would become rapidly and violently dehydrated. That would make him confused and disoriented, perhaps forgetting that he was on a ship or even who he was. His eyes would sink into his skull and become unfocused. He would cry out in agonizing thirst before finally dropping into a stupor. His blood pressure would plummet; his heart rate would become irregular. Not long afterward, it would stop altogether.

  Richard Blennerhassett, the doctor who had saved so many, succumbed to cholera on the Ben Nevis. His body and those of the thirteen others who had died were piled in carts on the dock and taken up a steep and winding hill to the Old Church Cemetery. Richard’s father, reading the news, barely arrived in time to see his son buried along with the other victims in a mass grave. There they remain in an unmarked plot, now flanked by trees and wild grasses but still showing dimensions large enough to hold them. Theirs would be the largest mass grave in the yard until 193 of the 1,100 victims from the sinking of the Lusitania were buried there in 1915.

  While Henry Blennerhassett laid his son to rest, customs officials worked tirelessly to remove fifty of the Ben Nevis’s healthy patients to the retired hulk of the HMS Inconstant. There they were visited daily by local physicians and given enough provisions to last until the Ben Nevis could be properly quarantined, disinfected, and released for Galveston.

  That would be more than enough time for Curry to intensify his assault against the ship’s doctors with an editorial in the Liverpool newspapers. But his smear campaign would not go unchallenged. Curry soon met with fierce opposition from Henry Blennerhassett, who responded to Curry’s public assault with one of his own. The elder Blennerhassett lambasted Curry’s “prosy and rambling” editorial as well as the official’s own medical acumen. He reviewed every action taken by his son, beginning with the case of Regina Lehatta. Everyone in the medical field, he insisted, ought to know that inflammation of the lungs and effusion on the brain often coexist in a patient. Surely, he added, any competent doctor who attended her would be best suited to diagnose of what she actually died.

  Lest there be any question concerning his son’s competency, Blennerhassett also went to great pains reviewing his son’s qualifications: a doctor of medicine from Edinburgh, his surgical qualifications from there, qualifications for midwifery in Dublin. He wrote of Richard’s experience on the Bussorah Merchant and included letters from ship’s doctors and owners, including one from Nicholas Donovan.

  If the owner of the Jeanie Johnston was still smarting over Blennerhassett’s resignation, it did not show in the published commemoration of his one-time employee. “We can testify,” Donovan wrote,

  that nothing could exceed his care and attention to the emigrants under his charge, and his popularity amongst the people in this district, and his reputation for skill and humanity were so great, that one of the first questions asked before taking a berth by an emigrant, was “does Doctor Richard Blennerhassett sail in the ship this voyage?” Previous to sailing on our ship in 1848, Dr. Blennerhassett bore the reputation in his own neighborhood of being a well informed and clever medical man, and was generally liked and respected. We believe that few British ships taking emigrants to North America were ever supplied with a more efficient or careful medical officer.9

  APRIL 1900

  A new century. It was hard not to be excited by the prospect. Irish leaders were calling for a revolt against British rule. Queen Victoria—as beloved as ever among her own people—responded by forming the Irish Guards, a branch of the Royal Army. In America, Manifest Destiny had reached all the way to Hawaii, where the residents were now demanding representation. Electric buses were running in New York. Electric lights were illuminating much of Chicago.

  Daniel and Margaret Reilly had taken up residence in the latter city with their daughter Annie and her husband, John, a streetcar driver. Chicago at the dawn of a new century couldn’t have seemed more different from the Ireland where Daniel had been born eighty years earlier. The Industrial Revolution had been a success, and the world was moving faster than ever. For his part, Daniel was content to let it pass by. He had long since retired from the farm. His legs hurt; his heart hurt. And so he lay down.

  That had been over a month ago, and in the ensuing days, he didn’t notice the dark spot that formed on his foot. By the time it grew up his leg, there was little the doctors could do: senile gangrene moves quietly through an elderly body, killing the extremities before shutting down the circulatory system entirely. Daniel Reilly lived to see his son Nicholas’s fifty-third birthday and then died days later.

  Had he traveled to Minneapolis in his final days, Daniel would no doubt have been proud of his son, who had moved to one of the city’s first suburbs. The area around the saloon on Hennepin Avenue was falling into disrepair, becoming a skid row that would be demolished within the decade. Still, Reilly’s Bar was as pristine as ever, with its elaborate white molding a
nd columns, its mirrored walls and gleaming taps. The granite bar top was polished to such a state that patrons could see their reflection. Nicholas himself tended bar, a squat man in a pristine white shirt, neatly buttoned and topped with a small black bow tie. His hair was white and thinning, but his face was still round and ruddy. These days, he was often joined by his son Robert. Thirteen years old, he was the fourth of Nicholas’s six children, and everyone agreed that the resemblance between the two was striking. Robert had a natural aptitude for the work; more important, he seemed to like it. Nicholas couldn’t help but be pleased.

  In fact Nicholas couldn’t complain about anything, not even the knowledge that his brother-in-law, Jim O’Brien, up to his old tricks, had returned to Minnesota after escaping a string of bad business deals. Nicholas had a wife he loved, six beautiful children, a successful business, and a house in the suburbs. That, it seemed, was more than enough to keep him busy.

  30

  Down with the Ship

  1856

  AT SIXTY-EIGHT, John Munn had neither the stamina nor the will to muster the kind of dramatic showing needed to pull his yard out of financial ruin. He transferred the title of his house to his cousin Elizabeth, hoping to protect her from the debt that would plague him even after a death he knew was soon in coming. Each day he continued to visit the massive complex of buildings and timber yards a lifetime of shipbuilding had created, and he continued to follow the daily reports in the shipping news of his beloved vessels.

  The world was a very different place from when he sat down to craft the Jeanie Johnston and her three sibling vessels a decade earlier. Henry Grey, tired of the criticism over his policies, had resigned and now kept busy writing book after book defending them. Charles Trevelyan was casting his sights eastward, to a plum position serving as governor of Madras in India. The British Army was preparing to vacate its garrison on Grosse Île. And perhaps most dramatically, Irish immigration rates had fallen to pre-famine numbers. Those who arrived now did so largely by steamship, making the barque all but obsolete for human transport. Some of Munn’s barques had been commissioned as naval ships in the Crimea, where the world’s first truly modern war was in its last months. Others were serving their original function as cargo vessels on the North Atlantic. Even the Jeanie Johnston, after twelve successful runs that safely deposited more than two thousand immigrants on North American shores, had been retired as an immigrant ship. There just wasn’t enough money in it for Nicholas Donovan to continue, and so he sold the vessel to an importer in the north of England. Better, he decided, to do what he did best: move goods to and from Ireland.