The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [43]
“I must get up, doctor,” Waring complained. “The president is waiting for this report.”
“Colonel,” the doctor said quietly, “you’ve got yellow fever.” George Waring died twenty-four hours later.
The 1878 epidemic remains a mystery today, as do most other major yellow fever epidemics. What causes the fever to change from an endemic form with a few isolated cases to a full-blown urban epidemic? In 1878, the question might be answered by an extraordinary set of circumstances: The virus may have arrived directly from Africa, which could account for the high number of cases among locals in Brazil and Cuba, as well as blacks in the American South; and an El Niño cycle that year allowed for twice as many mosquitoes in play. In the decade following 1878, the underground slave trade would finally cease in Brazil and Cuba. Sanitation would radically change in cities like New Orleans and Memphis, doing away with the breeding grounds for the mosquito. Fewer immigrants would venture south. Though New Orleans would suffer another epidemic in 1905, it would never travel farther north. And so, 1878 remains the last great epidemic of the American plague on North American soil.
Amid the devastation in the South and the long road toward rebuilding it, Americans barely noticed another significant event of 1878: Cuba finally lost her fight for independence from Spain at the close of the Ten Years’ War. American politicians turned their attention to the tropical island, a major shipping port and supplier of sugar.
In 1898, just twenty years after the crushing yellow fever epidemic, America would find herself in Cuba to fight an old enemy, but it wasn’t Spain; it was yellow fever.
PART THREE
Cuba, 1900
The prayer that has been mine for twenty or more years, that I might be permitted in some way or sometime to do something to alleviate human suffering, has been answered!
—WALTER REED, December 31, 1900
CHAPTER 9
A Splendid Little War
On a still and starless night, Captain Charles Sigsbee felt the ship beneath him shudder.
He had just taken a seat at his wooden desk, straightened a piece of paper and begun to write a letter to his wife. It was a warm night, and the cabin mess attendant had delivered Sigsbee’s civilian’s thin coat to wear in the heat. As the captain reached into his pocket, he pulled out an unopened letter, dated ten months ago, and addressed to his wife by a friend. Sigsbee sat down to write an apology for forgetting to deliver the note; he wrote the date at the top of the letter, “February 15, 1898.”
The sorrowful notes of taps penetrated the metallic walls of the ship to the quarters below. “I laid down my pen,” he later wrote, “to listen to the notes of the bugle, which were singularly beautiful in the oppressive stillness of the night.”
Most of his enlisted men had already fallen asleep, rocking in their hammocks, suspended like cocoons between the heavy beams of the ship. To those on the shore, the ship appeared as a great garrison of steel, measuring 319 feet, 6,683 tons and housing 328 souls. Two massive smokestacks towered over the decks, and in the scattered moonlight, water sparked as it lapped against the hull.
As Sigsbee folded his letter and slid it into the envelope, he felt the ship rise as though an enormous ocean swell had passed beneath her; then he heard the inhuman wail of twisting metal followed by the sound of screaming men. The lights went out on the USS Maine.
On the seafront of Havana, in homes and cafés, the explosion from the harbor shook furniture, shattered windows and unhinged doors. Every light in the city went dark, and people ran into the streets, drawn to the show of rockets and fireworks. Debris flew 150 feet in the air, raining paper and fragments over the ship. Gray smoke billowed in the coal-black sky, while orange flames licked below. They watched as one of the twin smokestacks of the Maine heaved over, and the bow disappeared into the blackness as fire consumed the ship. The reflection of the inferno on the water turned