The Speckled Monster (73 page)

Little Mary's long wait of ten days before the outbreak of fever is attested by Maitland, as is the summons of an “ancient apothecary.” Neither Maitland nor any of the later witnesses date Mary's inoculation any more precisely than the month of April; I have made the fever coincide with the birth of Prince William Augustus, the future duke of Cumberland, on April 15, 1721, to great (if typical) rejoicing.

The facts about Zabdiel Boylston's boyhood are nearly as fragmentary as the dream I have given him. Here's what's real: He was born March 9, 1680 in Muddy River, later Brookline, Massachusetts, to Dr. Thomas Boylston and his wife Mary. The only child, of twelve, to follow his father's interest in medicine, he was fifteen when his father died in 1695; there is no record of the cause of death. Judging by Zabdiel's account of the 1721 smallpox epidemic and by his business dealings, of all his siblings, he was closest to his youngest brother, Thomas.

As late as 1700, the hamlet of Muddy River spread across five thousand acres of fields, marshland, and forest; its population was below two hundred. It incorporated as the town of Brookline in 1705.

Family tradition has it that Zabdiel's father had an Oxford M.D., but the university has no record of granting him any degree whatsoever. The Boylstons, however, had apothecary relatives in both Birmingham and London; Zabdiel later visited several of them. I have made his father visit them first. I have found no firm record of Zabdiel's apprenticeship under Cutler: but there seems no reason to doubt this bit of family lore. He certainly completed an apprenticeship with a doctor who trained him well and helped establish him within Boston's medical community.

Zabdiel later wrote that he had nearly died during the 1702 smallpox epidemic. At that time, he was at or near the end of his apprenticeship, possibly already setting up on his own. He may well have deliberately contracted the disease, or have dispensed with any attempt to avoid it. Young doctors sometimes did so: they were otherwise virtually useless in an epidemic. Thomas Dover, one of Sydenham's famous protégés, for example, took notes on his own progress and treatment, just as I have had Zabdiel do. Before the shields of antisepsis and antibiotics, being a doctor was not for the faint of heart: repeatedly risking “putrid” fevers (typhus and typhoid, not then differentiated), dysentery, and various streptococcal infections, to name just a few of the common killers in colonial New England, required no small dose of personal courage. At least smallpox only had to be suffered once.

Zabdiel's father served briefly in the cavalry troop of Captain Thomas Prentice in King Philip's War, during the Mount Hope campaign against the Narragansetts. This tribe was supposed to be loyal or neutral toward the English, but the women and children were slaughtered anyway, when it became apparent that they were sheltering Wampanoag women and children. The elder Dr. Boylston, who probably served as a surgeon, seems to have removed himself after this first campaign, though the war dragged on. I have found no record that any of his sons ever served against the Indians (though they would have been too young for this war).

Zabdiel Boylston's character and habits as a doctor have to be pieced together from fleeting phrases and tiny shreds of evidence, as well as from his general reputation. Later, he exhibited open-minded interest in Native American medicine, using it, if briefly, as one of his defenses for being open-minded about African medical practice. I have presumed that this attitude was fostered in part by his father. Likewise, Zabdiel's record as a daring and unusually successful surgeon suggests that he was, for his day, unusually clean, quick, and precise, as well as unusually well versed in anatomy.

Jerusha Minot was born in Dorchester on January 28, 1679 (possibly 1680; the genealogies do not specify old or new style dating). Both her parents died of smallpox in Dorchester during the 1690 epidemic—her father on January 26 and her mother on April 6. Three of her brothers—Israel, Josiah, and George—are not traceable after that time, though the Minot family genealogies covering that generation are quite detailed; it is at least plausible that they died unrecorded during the epidemic. In 1702, she lost two young cousins in Boston to the disease. These exposures, plus the fact that Zabdiel never inoculated her, make it all but certain that she herself survived it, either in 1690 or 1702. References to her as “of Boston” suggest she went to live with her closest Bostonian relative, her uncle Stephen Minot—who was, as stated, a wealthy merchant—after she was orphaned in 1690.

I don't know any details of her courtship with Boylston, other than the date of their marriage, and their ages at the time: average for him, a little late for her. Boylston advertised or prescribed everything I have her encounter in his shop, however. Later writings show his interest in Indian remedies for rattlesnake bite, as well as ambergris.

I have taken Cotton Mather's diary entry from December 16, 1706—the day several men from his parish presented him with the slave he named Onesimus—and a letter he wrote to the Royal Society in July 1716, and reversed them to tell the events from Onesimus's point of view.

Mather repeatedly identified the man as “Guramante,” a classical term phonetically close enough to “Coromantee” to make the confusion of the two quite plausible on the part of an eager scholar such as Mather. “Coromantee” was a general and imprecise English (specifically West Indian) term for the Akan-speaking peoples of Africa's Gold Coast, now known as Ghana. The most famous and numerous of these peoples are the Asante or Ashanti. In the early eighteenth century, Coromantees were the most valuable and sought-after slaves among the British; they were also the most feared, thought to be prone to fomenting violent revolt.

The outlines of Onesimus's experience of the Middle Passage on a slave ship, his voyage broken in the West Indies before being sent up to Boston on a ship whose main cargo was not slaves, follows the general pattern of the triangle slave trade in the early eighteenth century. If Onesimus was, as Mather wanted, a young man worth £40-£50 on the slave market—then at or near the top of the pricing—he would have been a relatively unusual figure in Boston: unless specially reserved for a buyer of note, strong, healthy young men were skimmed off for hard labor in the West Indies or the Carolinas. Especially in the early years, Boston tended to get what were called “refuse” slaves: the young, the old, the frail, the troublemakers.

In Boston, unlike on the big plantations far to the south and the farms to the west, most slaveholders had only one or two slaves. Though they did heavy and dangerous chores, they were domestics. They lived in their master's houses, and were often treated as part—though a low-ranking part—of the patriarchal Puritan family.

I have borrowed various wonderings and observations from Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa (1745-97), another brilliant young African man whose unquenchable curiosity led him to observe in minute detail places, persons, and cultures that he could not yet understand, yet saw with a fine eye; he later wrote one of the earliest slave autobiographies to survive. From him come the interpretations of snow as salt and of books as boxes containing voices.

Mather's letter stands pretty much as he wrote it, though I have abridged and edited it slightly for the sake of readability, and lifted the sentence about “Small-Pox proving a great plague to us poor Americans” to appear higher than it does in the original. His thoughts are closely paraphrased or borrowed outright from his own words.

Mather and others recorded his struggles with a terrible stutter. He overcame it by forcing himself to speak extremely slowly and deliberately, and by learning to sing his words. At points of high stress, however, the stutter would return.

The story of Captain John Gore dying from smallpox within sight of home on November 7, 1720, is all documented, save for his wife Rebecca's farewell voyage out to the vicinity of his ship, which is my addition. Gore was eulogized as quoted by the Reverend William Cooper. Through his wife, Gore inherited property in Boylston's neighborhood of Dock Square. He seems, however, to have lived a little farther west, on the slopes of Beacon Hill: a favorite spot for seagoing captains, though well back from the water, because the whole spread of the harbor was visible from these heights. Gore, like Boylston, was a member of the Brattle Street Church; they were close in age. I have taken the liberty of making them friends.

There's plenty of evidence for the general outlines of the smallpox outbreak in Boston at the beginning of May 1721. The fragments are spaced widely enough, though, to allow for connecting the dots into a number of different specific stories. I have told what I think is the most likely tale.

In particular, there is a mystery—and at least one lie—in the matter of identifying the source of the epidemic. Boston's selectmen pointed repeatedly at HMS
Seahorse,
the sixth-rate ship, or frigate, assigned to run convoy with the merchant fleet between Boston and the West Indies. In what remains of the ship's official documentation, her commander, Captain Thomas Durell, never acknowledged his ship as the source of the infection, nor do either the master's log or the ship's paybook note any deaths or sickness due to small-pox. The paybook, however, does list several deaths as well as many desertions and discharges that are consistent with a smallpox outbreak on a ship whose crew was largely, but not entirely, immune through previous survival of the disease.

It would seem that either all six selectmen and Dr. John Clark—their appointed medical examiner as well as a representative to the Massachusetts General Court and at various times the speaker of the House and a member of the Governor's Council—were lying outright, or Captain Durell was lying by omission. I have concluded that one man lying by omission is inherently more likely than a conspiracy of seven lying outright: especially in light of further circumstantial evidence linking
Seahorse
to the Boston outbreak—namely, the Paxton family.

Here's what we know:

I have put an accurate examination of the
Seahorse
's surviving paybook and master's log into the hands of Dr. John Clark, the physician chosen by the selectmen to inspect the suspect ship; his discoveries and frustrations are those any modern historian might have while sifting through the surviving fragments. Thomas Gibson, ship's surgeon, was in a position to know the answers. Unfortunately, Gibson's log, like most surgeons' logs from eighteenth-century British naval ships, does not appear to have survived. In Clark's case, I have made Gibson (and his log) absent on the cruise after pirates (documented by both Captain Durell and his master, or navigator, though the only man explicitly named on that cruise is Lieutenant Hamilton).

On May 8, 1721, the selectmen asked Dr. Clark to inspect the
Seahorse,
having heard that one of the ship's sailors was sick with the smallpox in town: I have quoted the meeting's minutes in full, save an introductory phrase. The wording is open to several interpretations. It is possible, for instance, that the “certain Negro man” in from the Saltertudas aboard the
Seahorse
was one and the same man as Captain Paxton's servant. No member of the crew stands out as an obvious match, though two are possibilities:

Able seaman Hector Bruce joined the
Seahorse
's company four days after Charles Paxton. His name directly follows Charles Paxton's in the
Seahorse
paybook. Bruce was a slave owned by Paxton's father; his pay went to Captain Paxton's agent. When Bruce later ran away, the captain ran an advertisement describing him as an Indian, so he is probably not the “certain Negro” in question, however. Furthermore, pockmarks were commonly used identifying markers for runaways; if Bruce had been the sick man, it is unlikely that Paxton would have omitted mention of them in the runaway notice, given that Paxton took pains to describe Bruce's face, stature, and skill as a sailor.

The only other Seahorse with any clear connection to the Paxtons is able seaman Richard Kent. He joined the ship's company the same day as Bruce; his name follows Bruce's in the paybook. Like Bruce, his pay went to Wentworth Paxton's agent: except that the tag, “agent to Wentworth Paxton, agent” has been added, which may indicate that he was a free man, contracted with Paxton as his own agent. He was discharged by request on October 30, 1722. If he is the same Richard Kent to be found in the Thwing archives, he married the year of his discharge and became a shipwright and an innkeeper. He was certainly not a slave, though in 1721 he may have been some kind of servant, possibly indentured; he probably was not black.

The likeliest interpretation of the selectmen's minutes is that the black
Seahorse
sailor was a different man than Captain Paxton's black servant. In this case, that the selectmen did not order the sailor put under guard suggests that they did not know exactly where he was.

By May 12, Clark had reported back that “two or three” men were indeed sick with the smallpox on that ship, that “sundry others” were sick on shore, and that most of the crew had gone off on a cruise to chase pirates. I have written an inspection scene consistent with a discovery of this information.

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.