Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [94]
The list of the dead grew longer and longer. There were so many bodies that disposal became the top priority of the city’s Relief Committee, which now governed the city and had appointed subcomittees to manage burial, finance, hospitals, and other tasks. On Monday the burial committee resolved to begin burying the bodies at sea. All day long, fire wagons, hearses, and cargo drays hauled stacks of bodies to the city’s wharf, where crews loaded them onto an open barge. The city’s racial harmony began to erode. Soldiers rounded up fifty black men at gunpoint and forced them onto the barge, promising whiskey to help make the task of loading, weighting, and dumping the bodies more tolerable.
The day was hot. The barge was moored near the Pensacola, whose crewmen stood at the rail and watched intently despite the grotesque images and smells. Workers threw the bodies into the hold with little regard for modesty, until the bodies formed a tangle of swollen buttocks and rigid limbs. One body stood out. It was long and slender and wrapped ever so carefully in white linen. Someone had laid it on a portion of the deck that kept it raised above the other corpses, where it gleamed in the bright sun like a statue of white marble.
By late afternoon, the barge contained seven hundred corpses. A steam tugboat towed the barge to the designated burial ground eighteen miles out in the Gulf, but it arrived well after nightfall and the darkness made it impossible for the crew to work. They spent the night among arms and legs brought back to life by the gentle rocking of the sea. Dead hands clawed for the moon.
At dawn the men began attaching weights to the bodies—anything that would sink. Portions of rail. Sash weights from windows. They worked quickly. Too quickly, apparently, for by the end of the day bodies began returning to Galveston. The sea drove scores of them back onto the city’s beaches. Some had weights attached; some did not.
The burial committee found its choices limited. The morgues were already full, burial at sea clearly had not worked, and decomposition was making the bodies hard to handle. The whole business of carting corpses through the streets of the city was itself taking a toll. “It was realized,” wrote Clarence Ousley, of the Tribune, “that health, even the sanity of people in the streets, forbade the ghostly parade of carts to the wharf, and the only course was to bury or burn on the spot.”
The fires began almost at once and for Isaac and thousands of other survivors the quest to find the bodies of loved ones became nearly impossible. The scent of burning hair and flesh, the latter like burnt sugar, suffused the air. Phillip Gordie Tipp’s crew, managing a pyre at 25th and Avenue O½, burned five hundred corpses. The city’s lifesaving squad, led by Capt. William A. Hutchings, superintendent of the Eighth U.S. Life-Saving District, found and buried 181 bodies, and stumbled across an occupied coffin that had been shipped to the Levy livery company from New Orleans the day of the storm. They buried it too.
The dead gangs worked thirty-minute shifts, and in between were allowed all the whiskey they needed to keep going. “The stench from dead people and animals was so great that they couldn’t work longer,” one witness said. They worked in long sleeves and jackets and mohair pants, but did not let their discomfort show. They left their noses exposed.
Burning did not seem much of an improvement over the parade of corpse-filled wagons. The idea of burning the bodies of men, women, and children—especially children—was jarring. It seemed like sacrilege. Cremation as a routine mortuarial service was itself a brand-new idea in America. In Galveston the fires were everywhere. Emma Beal