Washington [19]
George’s soaring success coincided with an alarming turn in Lawrence’s health. In May 1749 the latter had to relinquish his seat in the House of Burgesses due to a hacking cough—a telltale symptom of tuberculosis. That winter at Mount Vernon, George had intermittently helped to care for his brother. On one occasion, he wrote tenderly to Lawrence, “Dear Brother, I hope your cough is much mended since I saw you last; if so, [I] likewise hope you have given over the thoughts of leaving Virginia.”33 Instead, the cough only worsened, and Lawrence sailed to England to consult doctors there. In his absence, George commiserated by mail with his sister-in-law Ann and did his best to cheer her up. He couldn’t offer comfort in person at Mount Vernon because he himself had contracted a new ailment: malaria. “I am deprived of the pleasure of waiting on you (as I expected) by ague and fever which I have had to extremity,” he informed her.34
While George recuperated, Lawrence returned from England still in the terrible throes of tuberculosis. In desperation, accompanied by his younger brother, Lawrence decided to test the medicinal powers of warm springs in western Virginia (later the town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Infirm people had begun making pilgrimages to this natural spa to soak in the waters or drink them to regain their health. Later it was a fashionable place, but George found the warm springs dark, gloomy, and secluded and scarcely conducive to improved health. He grumbled that they “are situated very badly on the east side of a steep mountain and enclosed by hills on all sides, so that the afternoon’s sun is hid by four o’clock and the fogs hang over us till nine or ten.”35 While Lawrence sampled the waters, George distracted himself with surveying trips in the surrounding countryside.
As Lawrence’s condition deteriorated, he decided to gamble on a trip to Barbados, hoping the tropical warmth would revive him; at the time, people with consumption flocked to Barbados as an open-air sanatorium. Because Lawrence’s wife had just given birth to a daughter, it again fell upon George, nineteen, to accompany his thirty-three-year-old brother, acting as both nursemaid and companion. So grave was Lawrence’s prognosis that the brothers braved a season of severe hurricanes in the West Indies. On the boat to Barbados, George kept a ship’s log, in which he documented heaving seas and blustery weather. After an exceptionally rough thirty-seven-day passage, the ship docked at Barbados on November 3, 1751. In short order, Lawrence was examined by a Dr. William Hillary, who delivered the hopeful opinion that Lawrence could be saved.
This reprieve provided a fleeting opportunity for George to relish his only trip outside of North America. As the two brothers rode outside of town in “the cool of the evening” to seek their new lodgings, George seemed enraptured by the profuse tropical flowers and foliage and extolled the “beautiful prospects which on every side presented to our view the fields of cane, corn, fruit trees etc. in a delightful green.”36 His senses came alive to the island’s sights and sounds. He savored avocado and pineapple for the first time and marveled at the most gargantuan collection of fruits he had ever seen heaped on a dinner table. When he attended a melodrama by George Lillo entitled The London