Possibly, the infection entered the town through a number of ships in the Saltertudas fleet, most of which had probably made some call in Barbados, but the selectmen chose to finger Seahorse alone. This still does not explain Durell’s reticence.
Able seaman John Dunn of the Seahorse died (without explanation) on May 4, 1721. Gunner’s mate Joseph May died (also without explanation) on May 14; I have identified May as the missing black sailor, though beyond the coincidence of timing, there is no evidence that he was.
The lone specifically identified and located man known to be ill with smallpox on May 8—Captain Paxton’s black servant—also points, if circumstantially, back to the Seahorse. For Captain Paxton’s son Charles was, as stated, a sailor on that warship, having been entered into the Seahorse paybook, rated “ord” for “ordinary seaman,” on December 1, 1720. A note next to his name states that he had shore leave from January 6, 1721 (the day Seahorse sailed for Barbados) through April 22, 1721 (when she returned); his pay was duly docked. He is the only sailor to be granted such leave while Durell was in command of HMS Seahorse; no reason is supplied. Other sailors appear to have been discharged altogether when they could supply legitimate reasons for leaving the ship, or they were marked as having run, and then later reentered, under different numbers, when they rejoined—or were forced to rejoin—the crew. The two most obvious reasons for young Paxton’s leave are illness or some kind of special privilege accruing from an agreement between Captains Paxton and Durell, possibly in light of his age, which was young—though not remarkably so. I have opted for the latter.
Neither of Paxton’s two men aboard Seahorse seems likely to have been either of the black men sick with smallpox. However, as both hustled (or were hustled) on board directly after the boy, I have tied them into the story of Charles Paxton’s shore leave, making them a sort of doubled payment-in-kind for the boy’s temporary release from the ship. Given the high desertion rate, Durell seems to have needed men more than money.
Epidemiologically, Paxton’s servant’s bout with smallpox fits precisely with the arrival of the Seahorse on April 22, and a presumed return of young Charles Paxton to the ship on or about the twenty-third. The virus’s average incubation period of twelve days following initial infection (anywhere from ten to fourteen being normal), followed by three days of fever before the telltale eruption, dovetails with exposure on April 23, duly followed by the appearance of the rash on May 7 or 8. The man may well have been exposed while returning Charles to the Seahorse, or possibly while carousing with sailors ashore. Since the Seahorse remained in the relative isolation of a mooring off Castle Island until April 27, when she removed to an anchorage off Boston’s Long Wharf, I have opted for the first explanation.
The name of this servant, probably a slave, was never recorded by any of the authorities. Slaves, in particular those newly shipped over from Africa, were named by their masters. While pious Bostonians—like Cotton Mather—tended to opt for Biblical nomenclature, classical names such as Scipio, Caesar, and Pompey were popular among more worldly, self-consciously cultured gentlemen and merchants. I have given Captain Paxton’s servant the name of the black slave who was one of Judge Samuel Sewall’s most trusted personal servants.
The official records remain silent about whether or not Charles Paxton came down with smallpox at this time. Since he was born in 1707, five years after Boston’s last bout with smallpox, he was vulnerable. If indeed the Seahorse was infected and Paxton went aboard, odds are vanishing to none that he escaped infection himself; I have assumed that he was one of the “sundry others” from that ship sick on shore, and that his name was kept out of the record. It is notable that both people specifically scapegoated as the first to fall ill were black men.
The young Paxtons’ father, Captain Wentworth Paxton, had been the commander of an earlier, smaller Seahorse in 1701; he appears to have resigned his naval commission after being refused a larger ship. His proud temper later got him memorialized in Samuel Sewall’s diary, as the judge once fined the captain for beating another gentleman in the street with his cane. After leaving the navy, Captain Paxton married well, gaining the hand and the fortune of the widow Faith Gillam Middleton, who inherited a third of the merchant empire of warehouses, wharves, and houses owned by her father, Captain Benjamin Gillam. Most successful Boston merchants of the period left trails of deeds, buying and selling properties all over the town; Paxton’s deeds are almost all sales. Possibly, he wished to consider himself a gentleman unsullied by trade, living off investments; possibly, he was not terribly successful in business, and was gradually forced to sell off his (or his wife’s) assets.
Captain Durell would seem to have been well thought of, at least by the Admiralty, who promoted him, giving him larger and larger ships. He had a long and solid navy career. Not surprisingly, his surviving letters from this period are obsessively focused on pirates, mostly in the Caribbean. His work-a-day job was to sail convoy. His letters reveal, though, that he yearned for more daring action, pitting his men, his ship, and his seamanship whenever possible against the wily robbers of the sea. During the spring of 1721, the ship was severely damaged off Barbados during one such chase, by the wind and the sea rather than by enemy fire. From this, I have extrapolated a character of some rashness, zeal, and intense focus.
Durell was indeed enamored of trumpets. He recruited a trumpeter on May 16, 1721 (a sixth-rate ship was allowed one). In 1724, Judge Samuel Sewall visited the captain to request that he not sound the ship’s trumpets on Saturday nights, as Bostonians kept the Sabbath from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, and found the trumpeting “offensive.” Durell promised to comply.
Boston did indeed have laws governing quarantine; they specifically grant to the selectmen and their medical examiners the powers to inspect and quarantine ships. I have not been able to find any description of how such inspections worked day to day, though it seems likely that they would have been based on or even linked to the customs bureaucracy already in place.
Boylston had the personally rough fall and winter described; the Boylstons’ eighth child, Josiah, was born on July 11, 1720, but had almost certainly died by the time of the smallpox epidemic, since Boylston never mentions him among his other children at that time. I have deduced the furor over cancer treatments and the mastectomy (the first known in North America) from newspaper advertisements, which appeared as quoted (save for some minor editing for readability) in Boston’s two papers, both weeklies appearing on Mondays: the Boston Gazette and the Boston News-Letter. If the advertised Mrs. Winslow was, as I believe, the Sarah married to Captain (later Major) Edward Winslow of Rochester, then Boylston’s operation truly was successful: she survived to the age of eighty-five.
In New England, many adult slave men were trained as highly skilled assistants to their masters. Although we do not know about Jack in particular, there were other black slaves who were physician’s assistants. Jack would also have been responsible for such heavy chores as hauling wood and water and mucking out stalls. That he was a slave is clear from Boylston’s first reference to him in the Boston Gazette.
While I do not know that Tommy Boylston pulled his father away from work to see the ships, it seems reasonable behavior for a six-year-old late on a Saturday afternoon. The names of the ships and their captains are real. On March 31, 1721, the Seahorse counted fifty-nine vessels in her convoy. Though a few probably peeled off to other destinations before reaching Boston, the convoy was a spectacularly large one by North American standards of the time.
Caging the Monster
This chapter’s anchorholds in fact are the quoted minutes and newspaper articles, as well as entries in Cotton Mather’s diary and the master’s log and paybook for the HMS Seahorse. As with the previous chapter, these fragments reveal a lack of candor and detail, as much as anything else. Here are my reasons for taking the paths I chose from fact to fact:
As their minutes of May 12 show, the freeholders of Boston voted in a full t
own meeting to require the selectmen to approach the governor about the Seahorse going to Spectacle Island. Dr. John Clark, the inspecting physician, seems as likely a person as any to demand that quarantine be complied with to the full letter of the law. The selectmen’s minutes record that Seahorse was headed for Bird rather than Spectacle Island. Rather than either surprise or dissent with this shift, they record a substantial offer of help to Captain Durell in securing the ship’s hasty removal. I have put into the mind of William Hutchinson my own suspicion that somebody somewhere, made a deal.
To a man, in May 1721, the six selectmen of Boston were deeply invested in the mercantile interests of the town, over and against royal and religious concerns. Elisha Cooke was widely recognized as the leader of this pack. (There were supposed to be seven selectmen, but the seventh, Dr. Oliver Noyes, had died just days after being elected in March.) The others were William Clark (of the North End; brother to Dr. John Clark), Ebenezer Clough (of the North End), Thomas Cushing (of Dock Square in the center of town), and John Marion (of the South End). On May 12, Captain Nathaniel Green was chosen to replace Oliver Noyes.
The council room on the upper floor of the Town House, with its three east-facing windows, still exists. The Bunch of Grapes Tavern, once at the head of the Long Wharf, on the corner of King (now State) Street and Mackerel Lane (now Kilby Street), has long since disappeared beneath massive bank towers. The Bunch of Grapes seems to have been one of the favorite haunts among the rich and powerful of Cooke’s town (or popular) party, while the Royal Exchange, across King Street and farther up from the wharf, served the same purpose for the governor’s (or court) party. This division held into the Revolutionary era.
The early form of billiards the selectmen indulge in had, by 1721, been popular in England for fifty years; it reached Boston by 1730, when public billiards rooms (that is, tables in the large common rooms on a tavern’s ground floor) were advertised as drawing points. I have installed a more discreet table in a private upper room in the Bunch of Grapes a few years earlier.
On May 10, two days before these meetings (and two days following the selectmen’s request to Dr. John Clark to inspect the ship), Captain Durell discharged three able seamen from his ship, apparently no longer quite able. “Unserviceable” was what he noted in the paybook against the names of two strangers (as Boston called noncitizens): Gilbert Anthony and John Wilkinson. It was not a remark Durell handed out with frequency. Save for one further man, on June 1, 1721, he did not use it again while in command of the Seahorse (though in 1723, he discharged several men for “Sickness”). The third man, James Mansell, had joined the ship in Boston and was probably a local. He was discharged by request (Durell’s standard, almost unvaried, reason for discharges that were not straight to other navy ships). I have equated these three sailors with the “two or three” men Dr. Clark reported sick aboard the Seahorse. Discharging them at this time would have removed the evidence for quarantine, just before Dr. Clark was to make his formal report on May 12.
There were many reasons a man might be discharged as unserviceable: weakness due to scurvy, syphilis, or any of a host of chronic diseases common to sailors, or debilitating injury, for example. Captain Durell did not, however, use this explanation outside the limits of the dates his ship stood in Boston Harbor, suspected of carrying smallpox and admitting nothing. Furthermore, May 10—ten days into a port call and nowhere near departure—seems odd timing for discovering men to be unserviceable. Outside fingers pointing at the ship as the bearer of smallpox make this disease a very strong candidate as the culprit.
The two “strangers” were later warned to leave town—as were all indigents whose welfare Boston did not see it had any responsibility to underwrite. However, Wilkinson was not told to leave until May 19, and Anthony not until May 23: depending on the stage of smallpox they may have reached by May 10, these are dates consistent with recovery and release from quarantine.
On the fourteenth of May, Durell noted Joseph May’s death in the paybook, once again giving no explanation. It may have been a coincidence that he died the very day that the ship moved out to an anchorage off Bird Island. However, sheer numbers suggest that May had gone ashore a few days earlier with most of the rest of his shipmates; in that case, he may well have only been discovered to be dead the day that the ship was to leave. Given the town’s fears, I have presumed there would have been a dockside search for any and all missing Seahorses.
With nigh on half her complement of men away, the Seahorse would have needed some help to weigh anchor and maneuver with precision through the sea lanes and shoals of the inner harbor, even if the remaining half of her sailors had all been hale, hearty, and truly able. Captain Timothy Clark and a body of Boston’s civilian mariners helped remove the Seahorse to Bird Island in accordance with the selectmen’s request, and were duly paid for their help.
The newspaper reported the door-to-door search of the town on May 20. I have added the hogreeves to the list of officers included in the search: mostly because I find the need to elect a body of hog catchers each year both amusing and highly descriptive of Boston’s street life.
Cotton Mather’s third wife, Lydia, was a strong-willed woman, accustomed to luxury and pampering; it is possible that she was just fed up to the screaming point with Dr. Mather, and he assumed that displeasure with him must stem from madness or possession. However, the fact that he sent his two much-loved daughters to live out of the house in order to escape their stepmother suggests that the problem was not merely sweetness and light gone a little sour in the face of rigid piety. Lizzy, like Sammy, was Mather’s child by his second wife, Elizabeth, née Clark, sister of Dr. John Clark and Selectman William Clark. At this time, Lizzy was living with her uncle John and his family. Although Mather did not divulge his source for the information that smallpox was loose in the town by May 26, his daughter is an obvious link to the man most likely to know.
All Mather’s trials, his fears of smallpox hovering near, as well as his feelings of triumph and tribulation in communing with angels, are to be found in his diaries, voluminous writings, and Kenneth Silverman’s biography. As much as possible, I have kept close to Mather’s language in trying to follow his thoughts. In particular, I have dipped into another long diary entry for May 28. Mather himself named the smallpox “a destroying angel,” which he imagined looming over the town. For others, this might have been a poetic metaphor. Mather, however, is more likely to have meant it to approximate truth: he believed in angels and demons who could wield fiery swords and golden voices both for good and for ill.
Mather’s writings on smallpox across the spring and summer of 1721 present quite a tangle. The clearest unraveling is George Lyman Kittredge’s article, “Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather.” I have followed his lead with one major exception. Kittredge argues that Mather wrote only one letter to the physicians, while he manifestly wrote two. The first, requesting a meeting, he wrote on June 6. Its dated conclusion was reprinted twice in the ensuing pamphlet wars; that is the piece quoted here, via Isaac Greenwood. Apparently circulated in a single copy, the letter went first to Dr. Nathanael Williams (identified as a schoolmaster/physician) with a specific plea to forward it on to Dr. William Douglass, among others.
Kittredge believed that this letter included a transcript, or at least a lengthy abridgment, of both Timonius and Pylarinus. I think it more likely that this first letter was relatively short, requesting a meeting to read and discuss the articles in question. Mather certainly disseminated such transcripts, but I think he did so much later in the month. See the notes to “Fathers and Sons.”
At this point, Dr. Mather canvassed Boston’s black population, with a clear interest in people born in Africa. He later claimed there was “an army of Africans” who could attest to the practice of inoculation; Douglass scoffed that there were only six or ten. The unnamed black man’s description of the African practice appears in Mather’s treatise on smallpox, later included as the twenty-second chapter
of his medical magnum opus, The Angel of Bethesda. Other men might have produced such broken English as mockery of African ignorance; that kind of humor was beyond Mather’s ken. Given his fascination with both the subject and its origins, this quotation is likely to be as close to word for word as he could get: and where language was concerned, Mather could get pretty close.
Some scholars have assumed this description came from Onesimus. I find that unlikely: Mather did not produce it for Dr. Woodward’s perusal in his letter of July 1716 to the Royal Society, when Onesimus was his one and only direct source. Furthermore, by 1721 Onesimus had long since bought his freedom and was no longer living under Mather’s roof. While I do not know that the reverend interviewed the free black men sent out to clean the streets in late May, they are one obvious source for his queries. (Onesimus was not one of them.)
Demonic Wings
I have drawn Dr. Douglass’s attitudes toward Boston, Bostonians, money, smallpox, his fellow physicians, and especially Cotton Mather from his own writings, using his words where possible. Though his knowledge on many topics was encyclopedic, the man was hard pressed to write a single sentence that did not drip with scorn; where his reputation was concerned, he was prone to paranoia.
Douglass was also, however, a superb observer of both nature and human affairs, especially in the fields of medicine and botany; geography, weather, and history were also pet topics. Most of the statistical data about Boston’s 1721 outbreak of “natural” smallpox (as opposed to inoculated smallpox) comes from his pen. In particular, he stressed the eighteen-day span from “seizure to seizure” as the disease spread.