Hawaii - James Michener [398]
Inspection teams were organized and every room in Honolulu was visually checked twice each day, to be sure that no new cases of the plague went unreported, and consonant with the missionary tradition from which they had sprung, it was the Hales and the Hewletts and the Whipples who volunteered for the particularly dangerous work of crawling through the Chinatown warrens to be sure no dead bodies lay hiding. It was a dreadful sight they saw, a fearful condemnation of their rule in Hawaii.
The streets of Chinatown were unpaved, filthy alleys that wound haphazardly past open cesspools. The houses were collapsing shacks that had been propped up by poles in hopes of squeezing out one more year's rent. Inside, the homes were an abomination of window-less rooms, waterless kitchens, toiletless blocks. Stairwells had no illumination and what cellars there were stood crowded with inflammable junk. No air circulated that was not filthy. After only two generations of use, Chinatown was overcrowded to the point of suffocation, all made worse by the fact that those whose homes had already been burned had managed, by one trick or another, to slip through quarantine cordons so as to remain with their friends rather than suffer banishment to the refugee camps, and with them they brought the plague. If one had searched the world, seeking an area where a rat bearing the fleas which bred bubonic plague could most easily infect the greatest number of unprotected people, Honolulu's Chinatown would have stood high on the list. The police had known of the pitiful overcrowding; the Department of Health had known of the unsanitary conditions; and the landlords had known best of all the menace they were perpetuating; but nobody had spoken in protest because the area was owned principally by those who were now inspecting it: the Hales, the Hewletts and the Whipples; and they had found that Chinese did pay their rents promptly. Now from this open sore the plague threatened to engulf the island, and as the inspectors bravely toured the infected areas day after day, exposing themselves to death and sleeping at nights in restricted tents lest they contaminate their own families, they often thought: "Why didn't we do something about this sooner?"
By January 15, 1900, eight substantial areas had been completely razed and innumerable rats that might have carried their infected fleas to uncontaminated sections of the city were destroyed; and it seemed as if a general eruption of the plague had been mercifully prevented. Three thousand Chinese were already in refugee camps from which they could not spread contagion, but unknown thousands were hiding out in the narrow warrens to which they had fled and they now began to accomplish what the rats could not. As the reports came into headquarters that night, each with tales of fresh death and new infection, it became hideously apparent to Dr. Whipple that the epidemic was not halted and that the fate of Honolulu hung in a precarious balance.
On the sixteenth he convened his doctors again, a group of exhausted men who understood how fearful the next week could be, for by their own inspection they had proved that the plague stood poised in upper Chinatown, ready to explode across the entire city, and they knew that on this day they must either take final steps to drive it back or surrender the general community to its ravages; and the only cure they knew was fire. Dr. Whipple was first to speak: "Our teams found twenty-nine new cases yesterday."
"Oh, hell!" Dr. Harvey cried in acute frustration. He folded his arms on the table and bowed his head upon them, retiring from this part of the discussion.
"All the cases this week, and most of the deaths,