This story, told by the children, prompted more speculation about the Thompsons. After all, people asked, why was Mary’s harmless aunt kept a prisoner in their home? And what about her declaration that she was “the real Mrs. Thompson?” Could this possibly be true? But before anyone could actively investigate the bizarre circumstances of the mystery woman, Colonel Thompson made a significant announcement. He told his friends and neighbours that Mary’s very frail aunt had passed away. According to him, she died peacefully in his arms during the early evening hours of September 20, 1846. (It was later learned that he had not been present when the woman passed away.)
Then Thompson did something that surprised many people. Although both he and Mary attended an Anglican Church, he now made arrangements for the dead woman to be buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery. Catholics who heard of his decision began to raise questions about the circumstances of the woman’s death and were distressed to learn that the Thompsons had not arranged for their relative to receive the last rites, a sacred ritual for all dying Catholics.
Local authorities soon found themselves besieged by people who demanded that they investigate the woman’s death. On September 29, 1846, their pleas were acknowledged, and a coroner’s inquest began at Hoyne’s Hotel, on Queen Street in Dartmouth. Fortunately, someone had learned that some of the army officers who had once served with Thompson were now located in Halifax. These men would certainly know whether the dead woman had been telling the truth about being the Colonel’s wife. With this intriguing possibility in mind, the body was exhumed. Two local doctors performed an autopsy and reported their findings at a packed hearing. They testified that there was no evidence the woman had met a violent death. They did, however, disclose that they had seldom seen such a shocking case of malnutrition and that there was little doubt the deceased woman had suffered from an advanced case of tuberculosis.
Next, two army officers took the stand. Both stated that they had known Thompson’s wife during the years when the Colonel, like themselves, had been stationed in Barbados. They identified the emaciated body as being that of their old friend, Catherine Thompson. The officers also testified that this gaunt corpse was only a shadow of the attractive woman who had lived with the Colonel during his time in the West Indies. Several days of confused and varied testimony by the Thompsons’ servants did little to help the jury come to a decision. Mary, the mistress of the house, had never been known to pamper her staff and more than one former housemaid was delighted to publicly disclose some of the distasteful aspects of her employer’s obnoxious personality.
Today, more than a hundred and fifty years later, the Public Archives of Nova Scotia retain the coroner’s report of that hearing. For a researcher, it presents another mysterious component of this fascinating story. The faded and dog-eared document states that the woman whose death was attributed to “lack of care,” was indeed Catherine Ann Thompson. But, strangely, this name has been scratched out and, in the space above it is written: “a woman whose name is to the jurors unknown,” and the verdict issued on October 6, 1846, states that “the jurors had strong reason to believe she was the wife of Colonel Thompson, but they were unable to account for her death.”
Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely decipher the faded writing on the inquest’s documents. This means that it would be a quite a challenge to determine on what basis the jury finally concluded that George Thompson and Mary should be found innocent of all charges. In the eyes of the public, the couple were criminals who had managed to avoid the justice they deserved. People felt that there were far too many questions left unanswered. For example, why had Thompson tried to prevent exhumation of the body? Why had he refused to allow any of his old army friends to visit his Dartmouth home? And how did he explain the frequent arguments he had with Mary? Servants insisted that they heard Mary demanding that he marry her.
The army officers had testified that Catherine Ann Thompson was of Spanish origin. Could this explain why some of the Thompsons’ servants had mentioned that the poor woman had spoken with “a foreign accent” and that she had frequently asked for wine? Colonel Thompson insisted that his wife’s “aunt” had never married, yet the doctors who examined the body were convinced that she had given birth to several children. Perhaps the most important flaw in the Colonel’s testimony was his statement that his first wife had died in 1835. The army officers who knew him were baffled by this declaration since they were adamant that they had met Catherine several years after this date.
Although Thompson and Mary continued to insist they had done nothing wrong, the public at large remained convinced that the woman buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery was George Thompson’s legal wife. They also believed the Thompsons were responsible for her death.
A few months later the Colonel sold his home and, with Mary, returned to England. Their departure did not end speculations about the case. Local writers, unable to rest until the truth was revealed, began to construct the true story of the dead woman who was left behind in a Dartmouth cemetery. Like amateur detectives, they searched for clues that would help them recapture some sense of Catherine Thompson’s lost identity.
Catherine Ann Thompson, it is alleged, was once described as being one of the most beautiful girls on the island of Gibraltar. The daughter of a wealthy Spanish merchant and his Scottish wife, she could have had her pick of any of the eligible officers stationed at the Spanish or English garrison. Sadly, she made the mistake of falling in love with George Thompson, a young, arrogant English ensign.
Thompson was addicted to gambling, and Catherine’s sizeable dowry was impressive enough to convince him to forsake his single life. But being a bit of a scallywag, once her dowry was spent, he neglected his wife and took no interest in the children born to them. Several years after their wedding, Thompson’s regiment was posted to Barbados. The posting came at a tumultuous time; the family arrived on the island during a period of widespread unrest. One night, while Thompson was away at his garrison, a new riot broke out. Hundreds of Barbadians rushed into the English section of Bridgetown. Soon houses were burning and many men, women and children became victims of mob mentality. One of the homes the rioters invaded was the Thompson family residence.
Terrified by the intrusion, Catherine had managed to hide two of her children in closets, but before she could find a hiding place for herself and her baby son, the angry mob was rushing up the stairs to the second floor. Kicking down a door, they burst into the bedroom where she was cowering. The invaders brutally tore her infant from her arms, and, as she watched in horror, they threw the child out of a window to the pavement below. When Thompson returned home, he found his wife murmuring incoherently, rocking the dead baby in her arms. The Thompsons returned to England a shattered family. Catherine was placed in a mental institution and their children sent to private schools.
The story might well have ended here except for the fact that George Thompson’s regiment was later sent to Ceylon where he met a young Irish woman named Mary Taylor. The widow of a sergeant who had served in Thompson’s regiment, she was only too eager to become the well-to-do colonel’s housekeeper. She soon developed an intimate relationship with him. Some writers report that while the couple lived together in Ceylon, she gave birth to a child. It is known that Mary gave birth to a son while she was living in Nova Scotia.
The birth of her first child was of momentous significance to Mary. Realizing her children would have no legal claims to their father’s estate as long as Catherine was alive, she decided that she must find a way to marry George Thompson. The opportunity she was looking for came when Thompson retired from the army and was considering moving to Nova Scotia. Mary eagerly endorsed the idea. She probably suggested they take Catherine along with the excuse that, if Mary cared for her, Thompson would be able to save a great deal of money. To avoid gossip, she insisted they tell people that Catherine was her aunt.
Why did Thompson agree to her plan? Probably because he knew there was no way he
could legally rid himself of Catherine, and he was tired of Mary’s demands that he “do right by her.” In Nova Scotia, he did nothing to prevent Catherine’s death and allowed Mary to neglect and mistreat his wife. Was Catherine murdered? It seems the nineteenth-century jury was not convinced.
Sadly, even the people who had once deplored her unnecessary death soon forgot Catherine. Ironically, across the ocean, a first cousin was enjoying the splendour of a royal court. She became the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, and earned a permanent place in history. Catherine’s fate could not have been more different. It was her destiny to witness the murder of a baby, to lose her remaining children and to suffer cruel neglect at the hands of two despicable people.
Today, all that is known about Catherine’s final resting place is that her mortal remains lie in an unmarked grave somewhere in a small Dartmouth cemetery far away from her Spanish homeland and from those who once truly loved her.
Dorothy Grant
* * *
The elegantly attired Cape Breton giant towers over a companion in this formal portrait. PUBLIC ARCHIVES OF NOVA SCOTIA
ANGUS MCASKILL
A GIANT AMONG MEN
It might be something in the salt air of the province, or perhaps it is the vast amount of seafood that Bluenosers consume. Whatever the reason, nineteenth-century Nova Scotia produced some of the biggest human beings ever to live. One of these was Angus McAskill. Born in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, Angus was a smallish child when his family emigrated to Englishtown on Cape Breton Island. One of thirteen children of Norman and Christina McAskill, he was unremarkable until the age of twelve when something strange happened. Young Angus began to tower over his classmates. Larger kids used to thrash him regularly in schoolyard wrestling matches. Now they started to run the other way, fast, when they saw Angus coming. He quickly gained the nickname of gille mhor or “big boy” in the Gaelic widely spoken in Cape Breton.
Soon Norman McAskill had to begin major renovations to his home, raising the ceilings and constructing a specially reinforced eight-foot-long bed for his young son. Angus was a gentle, patient and religious young man who usually took his share of teasing with great forbearance. One lapse is recorded, however. When he was thirteen and working as a cabin boy, he attended a dance in North Sydney. Following the nautical custom of the day, Angus was barefoot and simply chose to sit on the sidelines and enjoy the dancers and music. One prankster, however, found great amusement in repeatedly stepping on Angus’s unshod toes. After the third time, Angus could take no more. He stood up and punched his tormentor in the face, sending him flying to the centre of the room, out cold. Deeply sorry afterwards, Angus successfully prayed for his victim’s recovery.
Hard work on his father’s farm ensured that Angus grew not only in height but in strength as well. On one occasion, a neighbour bet Norman McAskill ten dollars he couldn’t plow one of his fields by sundown. The bet looked like a certain loss when one of the horses went lame until Angus harnessed himself cheek by jowl with the remaining horse and started pulling. Father and son would likely have won the bet, too, except that Christina McAskill felt that Angus looked too undignified in the traces. Rushing from the farmhouse, her skirts in a flurry, she made him stop.
On another occasion, Norman McAskill and two other men had tried repeatedly, without success, to lift an especially heavy log onto a rack for sawing. They left in disgust, but on their return they discovered the log in its place. Young Angus claimed to have completed the task single-handedly. At first the men refused to believe him, but the lad tossed the log back into the pit, then returned it to the rack as they watched incredulously.
By the time he was in his early twenties, Angus weighed nearly five hundred pounds, was seven feet nine inches tall, and wore size fourteen-and-a-half shoes. His fame began to spread, and he became a target for bullies trying to make a name fighting the lad. Being passive and gentle by nature, he generally refused, often rousing the ire of his antagonists. A three-hundred-pound American fishing captain became so rude and insistent that Angus finally picked him up and tossed him over a ten-foot haystack.
As more and more people heard about Angus, he received offers to go on tour to other parts of Canada and to the United States. On one occasion, bandits attempted to rob the train in which the giant was travelling. McAskill stood up to his full seven feet nine inches, glared at the bandits and flexed his muscles, sending the malefactors racing from the train. The giant frequently toured with the famous midget, Colonel Tom Thumb. Crowds loved it when Angus displayed his diminutive partner standing in the palm of his hand.
Angus later visited England and was presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. The ruler of the world’s largest empire chatted amiably with perhaps the largest of her subjects, and both were charmed. Victoria left Angus with gifts and her compliments.
While he was touring in the United States, several sailors challenged McAskill to lift an anchor that weighed in excess of two thousand pounds. He successfully accomplished the task, even taking the heavy object for a short walk around the dock. But somehow his load slipped as he was setting it down, and he fell, taking the full impact of the anchor onto his body. Some say he was never the same after this and that the injury may have hastened his demise. In any event, this was Angus’s last tour. In the early 1850s he retired home to Englishtown, now affluent from his earnings abroad, and opened a grocery and dry goods store. A kind-hearted and charitable man, he never let the needy leave his store empty-handed. Later, McAskill purchased a gristmill, ensuring its profitability by pushing the millstones himself when water levels were too low.
As time went on, Angus McAskill’s health began to fail. On August 1, 1863, he developed a sudden illness, and seven days later the largest and perhaps strongest citizen of British North America was dead at the age of thirty-four. His physician diagnosed “brain fever” as the cause of death. A contemporary medical reference (Buchan’s Domestic Medicine) describes this as a febrile illness characterized by “pain of the head, redness of the eyes, a violent flushing of the face…, blood from the nose, singing of the ears and extreme sensibility of the nervous system.” The volume states that brain fever or “phrenitis” often followed other infections, and this ailment likely represents meningitis in modern diagnostic terms.
It seems probable that Angus McAskill suffered from hyperpituitarism, with excessive secretion of growth hormone as the cause of his great stature. It is documented that even in adulthood, his hands and feet continued to grow, so we know he suffered from acromegaly, the adult manifestation of elevated growth hormone. His life expectancy, especially in the nineteenth century, would have been limited due to this ailment. People suffering from hyperpituitarism often develop congestive heart failure, hypertension and diabetes. General debility from one or more of these complications would have made McAskill even more prone to develop an infectious illness such as meningitis.
It took six hours and the labour of two carpenters to build Angus’s huge coffin. Three men floated the coffin to its final destination, a churchyard overlooking the scenic waters of Englishtown’s St. Ann’s Bay. A large group of friends and neighbours gathered for the final sendoff of their huge, gentle and well-loved giant.
George Burden
* * *
The Reverend John Cameron, a fiery preacher, proved equally adept at healing the souls and the disease-wracked bodies of his parishioners. BRIDGETOWN AND AREA HERITAGE SOCIETY
THE REVEREND
JOHN CAMERON DIPHTHERIA “DOCTOR”
The village of Elmsdale, Nova Scotia, where I practice, has European roots going back to 1785. That is when the first land grants were made to settlers at the V-shaped confluence of the Shubenacadie and Nine Mile rivers, where the village is nestled. For centuries prior to this, the area was a meeting place for the Mi’kmaq people who used the lakes and rivers of our province as a natural highway. After the Napoleonic Wars, settlers appeared in the region in greater numbers, b
ut the area contained only a few scattered farmsteads with no focal point until three fateful events occurred: the construction of a canal system, the building of a railroad and, not least, the appearance on the scene of a fiery and determined preacher, the Reverend John Cameron.
On September 17, 1844, just four days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, John Cameron was inducted at the one poor church in the area. He was the only clergyman for many miles around, and had inherited a parish with much lawlessness. The hard-drinking and profane denizens of the local gold mines and lumber camps patronized the saloons and licensed boarding houses in the community, making the streets unpleasant and sometimes unsafe for more law-abiding residents. In his first year, Reverend Cameron covered thirty-five hundred miles of trails on horseback, spreading the gospel to often-isolated households. Suffering ill health, he spent the winter of 1845 to1846 in Philadelphia. Realizing that there was very little available in the way of medical care in his home con-stituency, Cameron supplemented his knowledge of the Lord by attending medical lectures at Philadelphia medical colleges, obtaining information which was to prove invaluable in his later ministrations.
By 1858, the good reverend had whipped the lawless township into a God-fearing community. Even the miners knew better than to incur the wrath of Cameron and were behaving themselves. Not so Coryne-bacterium diphtheriae, the causative agent for diphtheria, which was ravaging the province. Records show that in the nearby community of Shubenacadie, a hundred and fifty people were infected and eighty died from the disease. The illness caused a greyish-white membrane to form in the throat of its victims, and in addition to blocking the upper airways, this bacterial growth produced toxins or poisons which spread through the blood stream to other parts of the body. The membrane made breathing difficult, if not impossible, and the toxin affected the heart and nerves, causing inflammation and damage to these organs. At the time, the only known treatment was the application of caustic soda to the infected tissues of the throat, which presumably shrank the thick membrane and kept it from obstructing the airway. (It’s ironic that I have patients now who absolutely refuse immunization against an agent which was killing their great-grandparents in such large numbers.)
Amazing Medical Stories Page 3