The Barbary Plague

stowaways who jumped overboard with alleged plague ravaging their bodies. It had been impossible to prove the diagnosis. Indeed, Kinyoun’s own lab analysis disputed it.

But now the memory of another ship haunted Kinyoun—the steamer Australia, which arrived from plague-stricken Honolulu in January 1900. It moored at the dock where the sewers from Chinatown emptied. The Chinese soon observed great numbers of rats dying on their roofs and in their courtyards. It seemed probable the rats had gained entrance to Chinese homes through the sewer pipes.¹⁵

Quarantine officers were always under pressure to grant ships a speedy permission to dock. Still, Kinyoun had always tried to be vigilant. In January 1900, he ordered ships coming from the infected zones of Hong Kong, Honolulu, Sydney, and Kobe to fly the yellow warning flag, the sign of a ship that has come from a plague port.

Kinyoun’s letters to Dr. Wyman in Washington warning of the plague threat had grown increasingly shrill. He feared that inbound military ships from Manila might be capable of importing the plague into San Francisco. He thought the authorities overseas were concealing the risk.¹⁶ Could he have missed something?

With Kellogg hovering at his side, Kinyoun peered through the microscope at the bacteria from Wong’s tissues and blood. He felt a throb of recognition. Yes, this was it—the rose-tinted rods, dark at the ends. To be sure of his diagnosis, Kinyoun had to isolate it in pure culture and inoculate test animals to replicate the illness of Wong Chut King. After filling a syringe with bacteria from the dead man, he injected a rat, two guinea pigs, and a monkey. If the rod-shaped germs were plague bacteria, the animals would sicken. If they died with the same symptoms, he would biopsy their lymph nodes. If he found plague germs in their lymph fluid, he would have his proof. He placed the test animals back in their cages, and then inside large earthenware vessels for safety, and waited.

Kinyoun wired the first of a string of telegrams conveying the alarming news to Dr. Wyman in federal code, using strange phrases like “suspected bumpkin.”¹⁷

Translated, the word bumpkin meant plague. Suspected plague in Chinatown. The encrypted messages eluded the Western Union operators and reporters hanging around the telegraph office. Singing over the wires, the messages traveled eastward over the cryptic signature of Kinyoun under his code name, “Abutment.”

Downtown, the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers ridiculed the plague scare as a comic opera, a bubonic opera buffa. Political pundits believed the quarantine was a bit of jobbery staged to win funds and clout for the city’s board of health. There were jokes about the “bubonic board of health.” Kinyoun was branded a charlatan. The San Francisco Bulletin lampooned him in a rollicking rhyme:

Have you heard of the deadly bacillus,
Scourge of a populous land,
Bacillus that threatens to kill us,
When found in a Chinaman’s gland?…

Well the monkey is living and thriving,
The guinea pigs seem to be well,
And the Health Board is vainly contriving
Excuses for having raised…¹⁸

Inside Chinatown, it was hell. Anxious, hungry, fearing for their lost wages and unattended jobs, the Chinese were sick with dread. Those who believed the disease was plague feared being trapped in the infected zone. Those who doubted that plague was real—by all accounts, the majority—feared that the quarantine was merely a pretext for more discrimination, a prelude to fire or demolition, imprisonment or detention. Discrimination was the bitter taste they swallowed with their daily rice, but who knew what new torments the whites might contrive? Outside the quarantine, whites chafed at the inconvenience of it all: Launderers, cooks, and laborers were absent from duty. Hostesses and hoteliers found meager pickings without their chefs and servants. Guests in downtown hostelries went hungry because kitchen staffs were trapped inside the barricades. Food, mail, and supplies were passed between the zones with difficulty or not at all.

After three days of quarantine, no new cases of the so-called plague had materialized. The test animals were still alive. Moreover, the Chinese were threatening to file a lawsuit protesting the blockade and asking for damages. The city health department now felt foolish and had no choice but to lift the quarantine.

Rumors of the blockade’s end brought people pouring into the streets of Chinatown in anticipation of freedom. At four P.M. on March 10, the cordons came down and cheers went up. Thousands of Chinese flowed from the quarantined zone into greater San Francisco. Food deliveries recommenced. Men went back to work in hotels and kitchens all over town. Whites, too, cheered the end of their disrupted dinners. The Examiner published a celebratory verse.

THE RAISING OF THE QUARANTINE

Sweet Fong is at his post once more
And cooking reigns supreme;
Once more upon the kitchen range
A wealth of viands steam,
And joyful Plenty smiles again
Where Famine’s hand was laid;
For, lo! The Board of Health has raised
The Chinatown blockade.¹⁹

But the poems and jokes, the cheers and celebration, were premature.

Two days later, on March 12, the scuffling and scrabbling animals inside the cages of the Angel Island lab went silent. When Kinyoun looked in, he found the rat and the guinea pigs lying cold in their cages. The monkey grew listless, hung his head, and died the next day.

The Boy from Catfish Creek

WHILE KINYOUN BROODED OVER his plague experiments on fogbound Angel Island, another doctor kept watch over the sunstruck Mediterranean from his post in Genoa, Italy. If Kinyoun was a prodigy, thirty-two-year-old Rupert Lee Blue was a late bloomer just coming into flower. He too had recently been dispatched by the Marine Hospital Service to a remote lookout for epidemics. On June 27, 1900, Blue picked up a local newspaper and read a report that made his pulse quicken: A dozen people had fallen sick and three were dead of bubonic plague in Greece and Turkey. He dashed off a dispatch to Washington.

“The bubonic pest is slowly marching Northward along the Levantine shore and invading Europe from the East,” he wrote to the surgeon general.¹ His prediction of an epidemic storming the gates of Europe was grippingly phrased to catch the eye of his boss, Walter Wyman, but it turned out to be a false alarm. A dozen cases on the Aegean coast didn’t herald the return of the Black Death to Europe.

Still, Blue was right to be on the alert. Since biblical times, plague had sown death around the world in sweeping pandemics—super-epidemics—three times over two millennia. As a Sunday schooler, Blue had no doubt read the Book of Samuel’s passage about a plague among the Philistines, who suffered “emerods in their secret