One hundred seventy years ago, the seeds of what would become the most fatal plague in American history sprouted on a ship docked more than 1,000 miles from Norfolk.
The ship, the Benjamin Franklin, had been tied up in the Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, harbor that spring. And for months, yellow fever had hopped from ship to ship. The virus had attacked eight or nine of the Benjamin Franklin’s crew.
On May 25, 1855, a young crew member came to the Benjamin Franklin’s chief engineer and reported he wasn’t feeling well.
“He complained of pain in the head and also a pain in the small of his back,” the engineer, Jonathan Bowen, would recall. “His tongue was coated with a dark brown crust.”
Bowen quietly summoned the Franklin’s captain. From this point forward, every decision that Captain John Byram made would determine the fate of a city on the East Coast for that summer.
The captain pulled a small bottle of grainy white powder from his pocket, and they gave a dose to their shipmate. It was calomel, mercury chloride. The chemical would either cause a patient to expel the toxins and recover or drain him of fluids and kill the victim within days.
In this case, the crew member survived. So with yellow fever on board, on May 27, 1855, the Benjamin Franklin sailed out of Saint Thomas and headed north. The Franklin was a ticking biological bomb.
The ship was bound for New York, but along the way, it began leaking at the base of the mast. Byram ordered male pleasure travelers into the hold to work pumps while he cranked up the engines to try to make it to New York, but water kept gushing into the ship.
On June 7, the Benjamin Franklin pulled into Hampton Roads seeking repairs. The New York Times reported its arrival: “The steamer Ben. Franklin, from St. Thomas, put into Norfolk in a leaking condition and with yellow fever on board. There had been three deaths from the fever.”
Readers of The Pilot know the headlines from the epidemic that ravaged Norfolk and Portsmouth in 1855: After the Benjamin Franklin docked in Portsmouth, yellow fever broke out and spread like a wildfire throughout both cities.
The fever sickened nearly everyone in the two cities and killed more than 3,200 people. Of the 26,000 residents of both cities in 1855, an estimated two-thirds of the population fled. Among those who remained behind, one out of every three people died.
No epidemic since the Black plague in medieval Europe had a fatality rate of 1 in 3.
Residents know of the mass grave in Norfolk at Princess Anne and Hampton, they know of Quarantine Road near Old Dominion University, and maybe one or two other key facts.
What I’d like residents to understand is the sacrifice of regular people, ministers, doctors, nurses, bankers and city councilmen who risked their lives by staying in town that summer. These are the people who laid it all on the line for their fellow residents, the people who, no exaggeration, saved the two cities.
Times have changed, and we’ve forgotten what we should have learned: Distorting science for politics thwarts efforts to save lives; fear too often overrides common sense; ultimately, how people treat one another makes a big difference.
The people of 1855 are the story of Norfolk and Portsmouth’s yellow fever epidemic. When I wrote my book, “The Fever,” I was intent on honoring the heroes by finally telling their stories.
Like all history, the lessons are not in the numbers or the dates. The lessons are in the people, our ancestors, and in how they acted when the only things that mattered were life and death.
Lon Wagner of Roanoke is a former Virginian-Pilot staff writer and author of “The Fever: The Most Fatal Plague in American History.”
