We All Expected to Die: Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918-1919

By Anne Budgell

At the end of World War I, after four years of unimaginable man-made destruction, a swiftly killing virus travelled the planet. Up to one hundred million people perished in the most lethal pandemic in recorded history, the so-called “Spanish” influenza. More than half those who died were young adults aged between twenty and forty. Nowhere on earth was the flu more deadly than in isolated settlements on the far northeastern coast of North America.

In We All Expected to Die: Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918–1919, Anne Budgell reconstructs the horrific impact of the pandemic in hard-hit Labrador locations, such as the Inuit villages of Okak and Hebron where the mortality rate was 71%. Using the recollections of survivors, diaries kept at the time, Hudson’s Bay Company journals, newspaper reports, and government documents, this powerful and uncompromising book tells the story of how the flu travelled to Labrador and wreaked havoc there. It examines how people dealt with the emergency, when all were sick and few were well enough to care for others, and how authorities elsewhere refused to provide assistance. The story We All Expected to Die reveals is both devastating and haunting. It is a story of great loss, but also of human endurance, heroism, and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ISER Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781894725569

Anne Budgell

Anne Budgell is a journalist who worked with CBC radio and television in Newfoundland and Labrador for over thirty years. Her interest in Labrador history was encouraged by her mother, the daughter of a fur trapper; and her father, the son of a Hudson’s Bay Company factor. She is also the author of Dear Everybody, A Woman’s Journey from Park Avenue to a Labrador Trapline.

Book preview

Advance praise for We All Expected to Die:

Over the last 100 years, science and medicine have advanced considerably and much has been learned about influenza viruses from how novel viruses emerge to how pandemics can seed and spread. However, our understanding of both the immediate and the intergenerational impact of the Great Pandemic could not be complete without an equally rich understanding of the local community and population context. Anne Budgell’s meticulous research about the geographic isolation, and the socio-cultural and political environment that was Labrador (and the world around it) 100 years ago, provides the essential context that allows us to interpret the statistics and understand the severe and indelible impact of the 1918 pandemic. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources, she reveals the impact of colonialism and racism, including disruption of traditional lifestyles of the Inuit and settlers of Labrador. We cannot predict whether a pandemic of the same magnitude as 1918 will occur again; however, historic accounts such as this one highlight the impact of individual and societal factors on influenza severity. Time has not erased these health and social disparities, and if we are to be better prepared for the next pandemic, they are as important to address and plan for as are diagnostics, vaccines, and antiviral treatments.

—Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada

For those who died and those who survived.

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Labrador — Trackless, Unknown, and Wild

2 Our People Are Dying Out

3 The War and the Flu

4 The Centre of Infection

5 Sandwich Bay and Lake Melville, Autumn 1918

6 Let ’em Die

7 The North Coast, Autumn 1918

8 Hundreds Dead in Labrador, Spring 1919

9 In Some Mysterious Manner

10 Aftermath

Appendix A: Let ’em Die Again

Appendix B: The Lists of the Dead

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. Labrador and Newfoundland

Map 2. Sandwich Bay and Lake Melville

Map 3. Hebron and North

Map 4. Okak Bay

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have had kind assistance from many people in the process of writing this book, but I should thank Nigel Markham first of all. In 1978, he told me about the damage Spanish influenza had wrought in northern Labrador in 1918 and we decided to make a documentary film about it. The National Film Board of Canada production, The Last Days of Okak, was released in 1985. A few years later, the same film could not be made. Our elderly informants, survivors of the flu, would all be gone. The short film told some of the tale — how sickness struck and how people died and were buried — but I knew there was much more to the story.

Archivists at The Rooms, Provincial Archives Division; librarians and archivists at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University’s Queen Elizabeth II Library; and the archive of the Anglican Church in Newfoundland all helped. I benefited from a keen interest in the search for a forgotten telegram, letter, or diary. In Labrador, at the archives of Them Days magazine, editor Aimee Chaulk and her project researcher, Xingpei Li, were cheerful collaborators.

Two descendants of people who are important characters in this book were very generous and shared photos and documents. My thanks go to Karen Misik, granddaughter of Hayward and Sybil Parsons, and Roy Pieroway, grandson of Ernest Doane. Alex Saunders, son of survivor Maggie Gear Saunders, gave me useful comments on an early draft, as did Patty Way, the acknowledged expert on Sandwich Bay genealogy. I also received excellent comments and suggestions from my friends, Rosalind Gill and David Lough, and my brother, Richard Budgell. The Innu presence is very scant in this book — perhaps a research project for another writer — but for what I learned I owe thanks to Peter Armitage, Marc Hammond, and Adrian Tanner. Dr. Michael Worobey, at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Andrew Lang, at Memorial University of Newfoundland, checked my interpretation of the history and recent developments in flu science. I was well over my head, anxious about it, and relieved to get a passing grade.

Terence Ollerhead has my gratitude for dusting off his editorial skills and giving my manuscript a thorough going-over. I benefited greatly from his long experience. Moravian expert Dr. Hans Rollmann answered dozens of e-mails with great patience. I know how much he cares about getting it right and I hope the end product is up to his standard. Thanks also to Dr. Tom Gordon, professor emeritus at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s School of Music. When he was the principal investigator with the Tradition and Transition Partnership between the university and the Nunatsiavut Government, he encouraged me to approach ISER Books at MUN. I also thank the Tradition and Transition Partnership for assisting with publication.

At ISER Books, I am indebted to the academic editor, Dr. Fiona Polack, for early guidance, nudges in new directions, and talking me through the peer review process. Thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments, which also shaped the final form of this work. The managing editor, Alison Carr, was just as keen as me to see the book come out and handled it swiftly and professionally, as did the copy editor, Dr. Richard Tallman.

I should have known this story would have a personal connection for me because three of my grandparents were living in Labrador at the time of the flu. (My grandfather, Murdock McLean, born in Labrador, was fighting in Belgium with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.) It fully dawned on me in September 2016 when my cousin, Ruby (Learning) Durno, guided me on a visit to Cartwright and Sandwich Bay, where we received a tour of the bay from another cousin, George Bird, familiar with all its shoals and tides. We went to Dove Brook, the birthplace of my grandmother, Phyllis (Painter) Budgell, and her aunt, Elizabeth (Painter) Williams, who was the only survivor of the flu in North River. In the summer of 2015, my friends (probably also cousins) Judy Blake and her brother, Douglas, brought me to the head of Grand Lake, where the Nascopie River meets the lake. My mother, Ruby (McLean) Budgell, was born there and her family lived there for several years. We were looking for a grave marker placed by my mother’s aunt and uncle, Joshua (Jock) and Nellie (McLean) Michelin, who lost three young children to the flu. Douglas found the marker, lying flat in the moss. The carved stone slab was probably ordered from Newfoundland, a significant outlay of cash for the family of a fur trapper, and a lasting reminder of the short lives of Adeline, Clarence, and Milda.

INTRODUCTION

At the end of World War I in 1918, after four years of unimaginable manmade destruction and millions of deaths, when people believed they could safely begin to rebuild their lives, a swiftly killing virus travelled the planet, affecting as many as one in three people. It is estimated that 50 to 100 million perished in what is considered the most lethal pandemic in recorded history, the so-called Spanish influenza. The virus was exceptionally severe, claiming many more people than influenza usually did.¹ A frightening, new aspect of the sickness was that half the deaths were in young adults, aged between 20 and 40.² Historian Alfred W. Crosby wrote: Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period.³

The pandemic death rate was not uniform. Researchers have found wide variations from country to country. Two extreme examples often cited are Western Samoa, where between 20 and 30 per cent perished, and some villages of Alaska, where up to 60 per cent of people died.⁴ But nowhere on earth was the flu more deadly than in two tiny settlements located on the northeastern coast of North America, in northern Labrador: the isolated Inuit villages of Okak and Hebron have the unwanted distinction of experiencing a combined mortality rate of 71 per cent, ranking among the highest in 1918. In March 1919, the superintendent of the Moravian Mission, established on the coast in the eighteenth century, reported to his Mission Board in England that 207 people had perished in a population of 263 in Okak district. (Another Okak death attributed to influenza occurred in April 1919.) A later report from Hebron said 140 people in that district had died in a population of 222.⁵ If the same percentage of deaths had occurred in Canada, nearly six million people would have died in a population of over eight million, instead of 50,000.⁶ In nearby Newfoundland, where the population was about 250,000, 175,000 would have died instead of 901.⁷ Severe flu affected another part of Labrador, well south of Okak and Hebron. In the settlements of Sandwich Bay, people were overwhelmed by sickness and death. Sixty-nine died in a population of 320,⁸ a mortality rate of just over 21 per cent, similar to that of Western Samoa.

For 100 years, scientists have been trying to understand the Spanish flu. Its origin and unusual severity are two of the foremost biomedical mysteries of the past century.⁹ The geographic origin is still not proven. One thing known, for certain, is that it was not Spain. It seems the flu got its name because Spain was neutral during the war, and stories about flu were appearing in its uncensored newspapers before the pandemic became a story worldwide.¹⁰ A study by Mark Osborne Humphries in 2014 argues that the virus was first in China in the winter of 1917−18. Humphries shows that the flu may have been in military camps in the United States as early as December 1917.¹¹

The influenza is described as manifesting in three waves. The first wave in early 1918 was less deadly than the second wave in mid-to-late 1918. The third wave occurred in the first months of 1919. The first wave was not alarming and had a death rate typical of ordinary seasonal flu.¹² When the second wave broke out, it was not immediately recognized as influenza because it was sickening and killing people so quickly; reliable records were not kept everywhere, but the whirlwind progress of the disease was documented at Camp Devens, a military base in Massachusetts where 45,000 men were either training or in preparation to be sent to France. A camp doctor mistakenly diagnosed the first case in early September 1918 as cerebrospinal meningitis.¹³ Alfred W. Crosby says a dozen more cases were seen the next day and by 12 September the correct diagnosis of flu was made. Within three weeks, more than 12,000 cases were reported at the base;¹⁴ at the end of October, more than 17,000 men at Camp Devens were sick, 787 men had died of either flu or pneumonia, and the virus was killing people all over the world.¹⁵

This was a new strain of flu, not the familiar ailment that kept the patient in bed for a few days, but a virus that attacked suddenly and violently. Symptoms included inflamed nose, throat, and pharynx, headaches, body aches, fever, exhaustion, cough, chills, nausea, vomiting, and delirium. Some sufferers described terrific, agonizing pain. In advanced cases, as the body’s cells were deprived of oxygen, the skin would discolour, turning bluish, and then darker. Victims might hemorrhage from the nose, mouth, or eyes. It was so unlike ordinary influenza that it confounded doctors everywhere, who mistook it for malaria, typhoid, or cholera.¹⁶

As healthy young people died in shocking numbers, doctors soon acknowledged that this strain was especially dangerous to those in the prime of life.¹⁷ Seasonal flu does not work that way; some deaths are expected among the very young, the elderly, and anyone with health complications, but fewer deaths occur in healthy adults. Pandemic flu is caused when a new virus emerges from a reassortment of the virus, which occurs when multiple viruses infect the same host (human, bird, or other animal) and mix genes in new combinations.¹⁸ This occurred three times in the twentieth century — Spanish flu in 1918, Asian flu in 1957, and Hong Kong flu in 1968 — each causing death among not just the vulnerable, but also the healthy population, and in the case of Spanish flu, a disproportionate number of young adults.¹⁹

Research on the second-wave virus and why it was so deadly shows how far scientific methods have advanced. In 1995, painstaking work began on archived autopsy materials taken from 78 American soldiers, and later, on samples exhumed from one Alaskan Inuk woman, all victims of the pandemic.²⁰ In 2005, scientists published their breakthrough findings. From the highly degraded fragments of viral RNA (ribonucleic acid), they were able to reconstruct and identify the complete 1918 virus, confirming its connection to viruses that have arisen since.²¹ With the virus identified, subsequent researchers were able to track it by doing statistical analyses of hospital case and death records, and by examining results of blood samples taken from patients many years earlier.²² It had been previously thought that nobody had immunological protection from new viruses, but researchers saw evidence that the death rate for influenza depends on which strain of the virus a person is exposed to during her or his first infection in childhood. In 1918, the death rate was higher in populations that had not been exposed to earlier, related flu strains that would have given them some protection.²³ Building on this work, researchers can now predict with reasonable precision whether a person will have immunity against new influenza strains based on their birth year, which indicates the seasonal flu virus that was most likely to have caused their first flu infection in childhood.²⁴

Acquiring immunity by exposure to viruses happens easily in urban environments, but this was not the case in northern Labrador where winter ice conditions sealed the coast off from outside contact for about eight months of the year. Geographic isolation was examined in a 2009 study on 1918 flu transmission worldwide. This study concluded that the pandemic "was remarkable for high mortality, which was most marked in remote or isolated populations, at least in part because prior immunity was lacking in places that had not been recently affected by any form of influenza."²⁵ Variations were shown from country to country, with poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding being important contributors to the mortality rate, but the study pointed out that isolated populations without recent exposure to seasonal influenza seem more susceptible to new pandemic viruses.²⁶ Humphries and others have noted that populations exposed to the first wave experienced lower mortality rates when infected by the second wave.²⁷ As coastal shipping did not open until July 1918, the people of the north Labrador coast were not exposed to the first wave of the virus and whatever beneficial immunity it may have provided.

The combined efforts of epidemiologists, virologists, and social scientists around the world have shed light on the origins, spread, and severity of Spanish flu, but even with this knowledge, complacency about influenza remains. Jeffery Taubenberger and David Morens, in their 2006 article 1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics, give a sobering warning that even with all the antiviral and antibacterial drugs, vaccines, and knowledge at our disposal, the return of a pandemic virus equivalent in pathogenicity to the virus of 1918 would likely kill >100 million people worldwide.²⁸ John M. Barry, a renowned historian of the pandemic, agrees that we are as vulnerable — or more vulnerable — to another pandemic as we were in 1918.²⁹

• • •

How flu reached Labrador and who was affected is a multi-faceted story having to do with shipping routes and a geographic and political context specific to the place. Within days of influenza arriving on the Moravian missionary supply ship, Harmony, the Inuit inhabitants of Hebron and Okak began to show signs of illness; within a month, they had come close to being completely wiped out. Among the first flu deaths in Labrador were probably men in the Sandwich Bay settlement of Cartwright who met the freight ship, Sagona, and helped unload it. From Cartwright, flu travelled on the Sagona a short distance north to Rigolet, and from there was distributed around the Upper Lake Melville region. There were deaths, but not as many as in Sandwich Bay or on the north coast.

Not all of Labrador was affected by the deadly second-wave flu in the autumn of 1918. The fishing communities on the south coast of Labrador, places such as Henley Harbour, Red Bay, and West St. Modeste, had experienced first-wave outbreaks in the late winter of 1917 and the early summer of 1918. Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, founder of the International Grenfell Association (IGA) medical mission, briefly referred to influenza when he wrote his autumn 1918 report of the summer’s activities, sailing in the hospital ship Strathcona to numerous Labrador ports, but he was much more concerned about tuberculosis than the normal occurrence of influenza.³⁰ Grenfell sailed back to the Strathcona’s home port of St. Anthony, Newfoundland, at the end of the summer and was not in Labrador again until the summer of 1919. In the middle of October 1918, while other mission doctors and nurses were preparing reports for publication, it was noted that the St. Anthony hospital had many bad cases of influenza and thirty-three children were ill in bed at one time in the orphanage; no dates were given and no deaths were mentioned.³¹

The Moravian mission station at Hebron was established in 1830 and closed in 1959. (Moravian Mission collection, Them Days Archives.)

The Innu of Labrador are barely present in the written record of the pandemic. Record keeping in settled communities was spotty, but it was practically non-existent for the nomadic Innu. According to anecdotal accounts, the flu killed a large number of them, but no reliable evidence has yet been found to show that anyone died, or that flu was the cause; measles and either smallpox or chicken pox were also reported on parts of the coast that winter.³² If they were away from the coast when flu-infected ships came north from Newfoundland, and in the critical weeks following, they would have avoided exposure. Accounts written by people in the worst-affected places do not mention Innu being there at the time.

Okak, c. 1900. The Moravian mission station was founded in 1776 and closed in 1919. (Kate Hettasch collection, Them Days Archives.)

In the pages following, Chapter 1 will introduce the reader to Labrador of 100 years ago, a vast land with a small population of Indigenous people and settlers, understood to mean people of mixed European and Inuit ancestry,³³ completely dependent on their own efforts to fish, hunt, and gather food. Dominant in their local influence were the resident missionaries, whether Moravian, Anglican, or Grenfell Mission, who played a large role in suggesting, or imposing, their version of civil society. Also influential were the traders, especially those who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Less influential, and rarely present, were representatives of the government in Newfoundland, whose governor was assigned the care and inspection of the coast of Labrador, along with Anticosti Island and the Magdalen Islands, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763.³⁴ The government paid little attention to Labrador during the short cod-fishing season and none the rest of the time. The events that occurred during the pandemic were shaped also by Labrador’s isolation from the outside world for eight months of the year, when ice blocked all shipping, and with just one telegraph station, in southern Labrador, operating during the cold months.

As will be explained in Chapter 2, the Inuit of northern Labrador suffered influenza and other epidemic illness regularly. Published records of the Moravian Mission reveal repeated outbreaks of measles, smallpox, and typhoid, claiming alarming numbers of lives, and accompanied by a hopeless, helpless refrain from the resident missionaries that they were presiding over a people who were utterly doomed. This chapter will also briefly discuss how the Moravian missionaries were not unique in holding this view, one that Patrick Brantlinger calls proleptic elegy, the belief, both racist and sentimental, that regardless of what anyone might do, the primitive races were self-extinguishing.³⁵

All this was happening when four years of world war were finally coming to an end. The pandemic and the last months of the war overlapped and blended, to the extent that people perceived them as one event. Chapter 3 will outline how the war affected the power balance in Labrador between the German and English members of the Moravian Mission, how the sudden interest by the Newfoundland government in the German presence on the coast required military patrol visits, and how the important decision to base the Moravian supply ship, Harmony, in St. John’s because of the war may have affected the transmission of flu to Labrador.

The central, inanimate characters in Chapters 4 through 7 are the ships that sailed from St. John’s to Labrador ports, bearing virulent influenza infection. Influenza arrived and quickly spread around Sandwich Bay and into Lake Melville. Influenza reached the more northern settlements of Hebron and Okak a little later. By the time the ship departed Okak for its next port of call, Nain, three weeks after leaving St. John’s, infection had played out among the crew. No other Inuit settlements were affected by the deadly flu. The recollections of survivors describe how swiftly people died, how the few adults well enough to work struggled to keep houses warm and supplied with water, and how they managed the disposal of dozens of bodies.

Chapter 8 describes events when the people in the influenza-free communities south of Okak finally learned that hundreds of their friends and relations had died. The first sketchy reports of the tragedy reached the outside world in late March 1919 and the Newfoundland government was told the gruesome truth, that the epidemic had claimed nearly all the occupants of two Inuit settlements. Chapter 9 will examine the ways the story of mass death on the Labrador coast was told and how the government responded, first to a direct request for help and then to the news of nearly 400 deaths in Labrador. In Chapter 10, the aftermath of the epidemic is evidenced by the diminution of the Moravian Mission’s trading operations, the shifting of population from north to south, and efforts to build an orphanage in Sandwich Bay. Okak was abandoned. Inuit flu survivors were relocated to the more southern settlements, where they had fewer family connections and no hunting camps or fishing berths. A significant public health crisis and the loss of 30 per cent of the Inuit population of Labrador prompted no new policies or attention from the government, which was more interested in selling Labrador for a profit. The reflections of pandemic survivors, and even their descendants, testify to the fact that the ripple effects of the epidemic are still felt in the twenty-first century, especially among those with a connection to Okak and Hebron, where so many of their family members died.

• • •

The first-hand stories of the events in Labrador during the influenza pandemic have been passed down in the oral tradition, government documents, letters, diaries, newspapers, and other periodicals. Much is on the record, but not surprisingly in a piecemeal fashion, with gaps, inconsistencies, and errors. The few diaries that exist were hastily written, by exhausted, traumatized people who managed to make notes when they were not attending to the sick and dying, or after long hours burying bodies. The only resident doctor in Labrador, Dr. Harry Paddon, included the story of the epidemic in a memoir he wrote years later.³⁶ He was based at the IGA hospital in North West River, which opened in 1915 and operated year-round.³⁷

Hudson’s Bay Company factors made daily entries in their post journals, but unfortunately, some important records are missing. Five weeks of the journal for Cartwright were not written due to sickness. The journal for Rigolet, for nearly a year from the end of July 1918 to the beginning of June 1919, is inexplicably lost. The records that survive give important information on the arrivals and departures of ships, some names of people who were sick, who died, who were buried, and who buried them.

Moravian Bishop Albert Martin served in Labrador for 34 years. His last years were spent in Hebron. (Photo courtesy Dr. Hans Rollmann.)

The most reliably regular record keepers in Labrador were the Moravian missionaries, proprietors of stations that included trading operations on the north Labrador coast. They were obliged to write reports for their offices in London and Germany, from which extracts were published in a quarterly journal, Periodical Accounts Relating to Moravian Missions. One missionary in Hebron, Bishop Carl Albert Martin, kept a daily journal during the epidemic that reveals how frightened and alone they felt; cut off from all the southern communities, they naturally wondered if the same horror was happening everywhere.

Anglican priest Henry Gordon kept a diary during his time in Cartwright, from 1915 to 1925. A year of his journal, including his account of the influenza outbreak, was published in 1919 under the title A Winter in Labrador, 1918−1919. Comparison of that account with an abridged version published 50 years later as The Labrador Parson shows Gordon moderated, and also cut, some of his earlier commentary. Letters he wrote in 1919 are scathing in criticism of unhelpful government authorities, but he soon adopted a more neutral tone; if an orphanage is needed, you dare not criticize those who control the government purse strings. Stitching this story together required much reading between the lines.

Another interesting voice is that of a fur trader, Ernest Doane, who spent the winter of 1918−19 in Cartwright. Doane was a Nova Scotian who had lived in Labrador for many years. He was well known as the mailman who carried mail across the icy Strait of Belle Isle in April 1912 using a canvas boat and three dogs, a death-defying feat not repeated by anyone else.³⁸ In Cartwright, he worked for Porter’s Post, a New York company, and kept notes on events during the time of the flu. His diary, or memoir, was edited and amended years later. Doane’s family had sections of the diary, which appeared to be a letter sent to a friend, and these papers were published in the Labrador oral history quarterly, Them Days, with some editing and sections omitted. In the mid-1930s, Doane gave a copy of another journal to a Grenfell Mission volunteer, E. Catherine Cleghorn, who thought it could be published in a magazine.³⁹ In late 2017, a handwritten Doane journal, evidently amended, and the Cleghorn letters were placed at The Rooms Provincial Archives in St. John’s. In this book, all three Doane documents are used; the one from Them Days is identified as a diary, the one now held at The Rooms Archives as a journal, and the other as papers.

Fur trader Ernest Doane wrote a memoir of his experiences in Sandwich Bay during the epidemic. (Undated photo courtesy Roy Pieroway.)

A hundred years ago, if anything happened in Labrador, it would be a long time before anyone in the Dominion’s capital city, St. John’s, heard about it, and when they did, there was no guarantee it would be judged worthy of more than a moment’s interest. Documents and official letters supplement the story after a plea for help was sent to the government in Newfoundland, and files contain letters from Labrador describing events, on the north coast and in Sandwich Bay, in some detail. In those files, official documents give few comments on the news. The most interesting and lively discussion was conducted in the daily newspapers. Anti-government editors took full advantage of the allegation that a cabinet minister had callously dismissed Labradorians, but it was a campaign that gained little traction.

Historians and journalists in more recent times have commented that the pandemic, with a much larger death toll than the war, was an under-reported phenomenon. This accounts for the title of Alfred W. Crosby’s history of events in the United States, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. Crosby found that both baseball and liquor Prohibition occupied more column inches than influenza in periodicals published between 1919 and 1921. He scoured half a dozen best-selling college history texts to find only one mentioned the pandemic.⁴⁰ Crosby pointed out, however, that this lack of interest did not apply to medical studies and research into the pandemic: more than 4,000 articles and books on the subject were published in the decade after the flu.⁴¹ Explaining how people could so quickly move on from such a devastating event, Crosby says we must keep in mind that a hundred years ago people had lived through epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria. Flu arrived, and then was gone, without leaving behind ailing, disfigured and crippled citizens as reminders. Crosby points out that the demographic effect of so many young people dying was concealed within that of the war.⁴²

Henry Gordon on board the Rainbow, pre-1925, from an album labelled Labrador Diary. (Henry Gordon collection, Them Days Archives.)

Writers of Newfoundland and Labrador history, apparently like writers elsewhere, have paid little attention to the pandemic. Kevin Major, in As Near to Heaven By Sea: A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (2001), devoted a page to events in Okak and nothing to the Newfoundland story.⁴³ Bill Rompkey’s The Story of Labrador (2003) has two pages from often-cited sources.⁴⁴ In Patrick O’Flaherty’s Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland 1843−1933 (2005), the pandemic rated three sentences, including It hit Labrador with great severity.⁴⁵ Sean Cadigan, in Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (2009), devoted a paragraph to the pandemic, but misstated when he said, the flu plagued people throughout Newfoundland, but most deaths occurred in Labrador.⁴⁶ The death rate was significantly higher in Labrador, but there were more deaths in Newfoundland.

Two writers who have focused on Labrador history, Tim Borlase and Lynne D. Fitzhugh, have placed more importance on the Spanish flu and its consequences, and both are heavily dependent on the accounts of survivors that are published in Them Days. Thanks to the quarterly’s founding editor, the late Doris Saunders, her supportive board members, volunteer researchers, and interpreters, the process of interviewing flu survivors began in 1975. That Saunders’s mother was a flu survivor may have contributed to her interest in having the stories recorded and preserved.⁴⁷

Borlase is the author of two books written in a commendable effort to provide good source material for Labrador students. The first, The Labrador Inuit (1993), covers a multitude of subjects including Labrador’s ecology, Inuit origins, and Inuit culture from prehistoric into modern times.⁴⁸ On one page, the well-known story of a little girl who survived the Spanish flu, after everyone else in her family died, is presented in three versions. Students are asked to compare the three, decide what they think really happened, and then, Retell the story in your own words.⁴⁹ First-hand accounts are valuable, but memories can fail and even eyewitnesses can be wrong in details, such as the number of bodies that were buried in a mass grave, whether or not there was a doctor in the village, and if there was a sick sailor on board the Harmony.⁵⁰

Borlase’s second text, The Labrador Settlers, Métis and Kablunângajuit (1994), covers the rest of Labrador,⁵¹ and devotes a page to the pandemic in Sandwich Bay. The flu in 1918 is one topic of several in a brief section titled Spread of Diseases, surprisingly concise when you read that it was the most devastating tragedy faced by Labradorians.⁵² One young boy’s account of survival is reproduced, as is an unattributed death toll.⁵³

Based almost entirely on material from Them Days is The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (1999), by Lynne D. Fitzhugh, a sweeping overview of Labrador from discovery by Jacques Cartier to the mid-twentieth century.⁵⁴ Chapter 5 of Fitzhugh’s book tells the reader that all events lead to the 1918 pandemic, an episode that had dominated the collective memory of this region above all others;⁵⁵ it is documented by 40 pages of interview transcripts, many with flu survivors, with occasional citations from the historical record.⁵⁶ An uncritical acceptance of first-hand accounts requires careful reading of the heartbreaking words of men and women who were young children in 1918: children who could not leave the house, while infection raged and sled dogs rampaged, were not witnesses to all events, and many survivors relayed a great deal of hearsay information. However, the memories of what they experienced contain remarkable details: a man who brought wood into the house laid down and died; a door that could not be shut because a dead woman’s body was blocking it; a mother who died while breast-feeding her baby; a grandmother who died while using her sewing machine. Things happened so quickly: within days of infection, people were dropping where they stood. Fortunately, there are also accounts from survivors who were teenagers or young adults at the time, preserving important facts about what happened when the ship arrived in port, the locations where the disease struck, and the names of people affected.

The epidemic in Labrador has not often been the subject of dedicated study by scholars, but it has been mentioned by several, and those references are cited by many more. In an effort to explain the frequent observation that epidemics were often more severe among the Inuit, one predominant theme emerged early on: that they must be biologically different, even inferior. How else to explain it? One person often quoted is Moravian doctor Samuel King Hutton, who was not on the coast during the epidemic of 1918 but had witnessed a terrible flu outbreak in 1904. He believed that pure-blooded Eskimos possessed weaker constitutions than Europeans. Although he allowed they have an extraordinary power of withstanding fatigue and enduring cold, he claimed they had low resistance to disease. Hutton observed he had never seen a new attack [of influenza] occur in a person who has just recovered from the disease, although he also said there is no lasting protection given by an attack.⁵⁷ He wrote those words decades before different strains of the influenza virus were identified and ways of acquiring immunity were understood.

If certain races were less immune to disease, then it became necessary to define them, an exercise with many pitfalls and logical problems. Medical doctor Vojtêch Suk spent a few months in Labrador in 1926 and took great pains to categorize people as pure Eskimo, mixed breed, or Near White, a term he said was from the United States.⁵⁸ He cited Hutton as his source for the comment that the Inuit — Suk would have called them pure Eskimos — had weak constitutions and poor immunity, but in his examination of 100 children he found an exception: more tuberculosis occurred in those who he identified as mixed breeds. Suk, therefore, refined the theory, saying the Inuit constitution was not weak absolutely, [but] only in relation to new diseases acquired in recent years.⁵⁹

A young anthropologist, William Duncan Strong, came to Labrador with the Rawson-MacMillan Subarctic Expedition and visited with the Moravian Mission superintendent, Walter Perrett, at Hopedale in April 1928. Perrett gave him a briefing on all recent epidemics, the population decrease caused by the influenza, and a gradual increase of population in the decade since. Strong added his own limited observation, somewhat contrary to others, that the Eskimos and those with considerable Eskimo blood, are the most virile and numerous part of the population of the northern Labrador coast, hence the evidence of a population holding its own applies particularly to them.⁶⁰

Finnish geographer Vaïno Tanner’s comprehensive work on Labrador, Outlines of the Geography, Life and Customs of Newfoundland-Labrador (1944), raised the question, Are the Labrador Eskimos a vanishing race? Tanner cited Hutton and Suk, and drew on Moravian records to write a summary of illness and epidemics on the north coast, noting the drastic population decrease of 30 per cent among the Labrador Inuit, from 1271 to 875, caused by the 1918 flu.⁶¹ He thought civilization, especially the white man’s food and clothing, was undermining their health,⁶² although he credited the Moravian missionaries with keeping the Inuit true to their tradition in their way of livelihood.⁶³

In the 1960s, anthropologist Diamond Jenness cited Hutton, Suk, and Tanner and seemed in agreement with the view that the Inuit were a different race, physically inferior, and dying out. He also quoted Newfoundland Governor William MacGregor’s observation, from a decade before the epidemic, that races do differ in their resistance to certain diseases, and in northern Labrador, as in other parts of the world, we may observe how quickly such differences have helped to modify a population once composed of two separate races. Jenness said, Today we can hardly doubt the correctness of his reasoning.⁶⁴

Norwegian anthropologist Helge Kleivan spent a winter doing fieldwork in Nain in 1955. He understood that the epidemic struck Okak and Hebron, where only Eskimos resided, and the effect on the settler population, residing mainly in Nain, Hopedale, and Makkovik, was less, although he did not arrive at that conclusion because only a few settlers were exposed to the flu, but rather because he thought they almost always come through epidemics far more easily than Eskimos⁶⁵ — almost always because, as Kleivan reported, settlers in Hopedale fared much worse than Eskimos in the influenza epidemic of 1924−25, but that was a rare occurrence.⁶⁶

In a 1977 article, anthropologist John Kennedy returned to MacGregor’s comment that Settler deaths occurred far less commonly than did Inuit deaths, buttressing the generally accepted theory that Inuit lacked immunity, while Settlers, in contrast, illustrated the principle of ‘hybrid vigour’. Kennedy questioned how the deaths of 70 (mostly) settlers in Sandwich Bay, and thousands of people of European descent in Canada and Newfoundland in 1918, could be explained in the face of this generally accepted theory.⁶⁷ Lawrence Jackson, in a 1982 report, refers to those in Sandwich Bay with native blood being hit

Reviews for We All Expected to Die

[Rosemary Harvey · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Doubtless very well researched, but wow! Never mind the flu: the book starts with long chapters describing decades after decades of the miserable history of Labrador - cold, disease, rapacious missionaries, grinding poverty and despair.