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| Orphans at Nushagak, Alaska 1919 Photo: Alaska State Library |
In the long
sad history of contagious diseases in Alaska, at least since written records have
been kept and until the invention of airplanes, all have come by sea.
European
contagions first arrived in the Americas with Columbus, and for the next four
centuries, sailors and passengers regularly delivered diseases to a population
of First Americans who had little immunity to them. The result was a seaborne genocidal disaster which
killed millions, and from which indigenous American cultures have never fully
recovered.
Europeans and
their ships did not arrive in Alaska until the mid-1700s, but the local inhabitants
were no better at surviving the new viruses and bacteria than their southerly cousins.
The first recorded
Alaskan epidemic was a respiratory ailment brought to the Aleutians by a
Russian ship in 1791 and subsequently spread to Kodiak Island. In 1802 a fever came
to Atka on the Russian ship Alexander Nevsky. Influenza ravaged Kodiak in 1804
when the Boston ship O’Cain arrived from California with a crew of returning Alutiiq
sea otter hunters. Well into the 20th century epidemics continued to
sweep Alaska with depressing frequency — influenza, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis,
and various unclassified fevers and coughs — all carried on ocean crossing ships.
An influenza
outbreak in 1819 is particularly well documented. It first killed about fifty
people in Sitka after its arrival from Java on an American merchant ship. In
November it sailed from Sitka to Kodiak on the Russian American Company vessel
Finlandia.
Within a
few days of the Finlandia’s arrival, nearly everyone in Kodiak was afflicted, from
babies to elders, and a few days after that, forty-eight people were dead, a
third of the local population. The symptoms, speed, and lethality of the
disease have led modern epidemiologists to believe it was a strain of the
influenza virus which has afflicted humans for millennia, and of which Covid-19
is only the latest variety.
Seymon
Yanovsky, the 31-year-old Russian American Company manager for Alaska, was in
Kodiak with his wife and infant son at the time. He wrote later that the
illness began with “a fever and a heavy cold, a cough, shortness of breath,
choking, and three days later death followed!”
Yanovsky
described the scene in a “kashim,” a large wooden communal structure, where
more than a hundred Alutiiq people suffered through the disease:
“Some were
already dying, their bodies growing cold, next to those who were still alive;
others were already dead: groans and screams tore at my heart. I saw mothers
already dead on whose cold breasts hungry children crawled, crying and trying
to find food for themselves, but in vain.”
At the
height of the epidemic there were not enough able-bodied people to bury the
dead, and corpses lay above ground until the survivors rose from their sickbeds
to do the digging. According to Yanovsky, “It was good the weather was frosty
because there was no smell.”
Yanovsky
nursed the sick with cammomile tea and warm food, accompanied by the Russian
Orthodox monk Father Herman. The future saint was in his mid-60s at the time
but remained healthy, and according to Yanovsky, “ceaselessly, tirelessly, and
at great personal risk, visited the sick, not sparing himself in his role as
priest- counseling those suffering to be patient, pray, repent, and prepare
themselves for death.”
Yanovsky and
his family got the flu and prepared their own selves for death, but after a few
days recovered and returned to Sitka. Father Herman went back to Spruce Island and
built an orphanage there for the children whose parents had not survived.
While the influenza
epidemic of 1819 is forgotten in Sitka and Kodiak, its return in 1918 and 1919 remains
a shattering cultural memory in western Alaska.
The virus
arrived in Nome in the fall of 1918 on the steamship Victoria from Seattle. Before
it burned through the available human kindling in mid-winter, it killed
hundreds of people in villages on the Seward Peninsula. The following spring it
came to Bristol Bay.
No one
knows what ship brought the virus— historians argue over a boat from Unalaska with
an infected priest or a cannery supply ship from Seattle. Regardless of its
origins, by July the flu had killed an estimated 40% of the adults in Bristol
Bay, orphaned hundreds of children, and destroyed the social fabric of dozens
of communities.
With 1919 still
very present in their minds, the people of Dillingham
recently asked the Governor to shut down this summer’s Bristol Bay salmon
fishery to prevent the arrival of Covid-19 carrying fishermen and processing
workers. Given the current low profile of the virus in the state however, not
to mention the economic weight of the fishery, the State has decided instead to
proceed with the fishery using protocols and mandates to maintain a Covid-free
salmon season.
Viruses defy prediction however,
and whether those edicts will prevent an outbreak is this summer’s
multi-million-dollar question. A few cases in Egegik in the next few weeks could
change the current calculus of risk and reward, of mortality versus money. For
now, just days away from the state’s first salmon opening of the year, in
Cordova, the only certainty is that humans have yet to outrun viruses and the power
they wield on individual lives and global history remains undiminished.
Sources:
Chills and Fever:
Health and Disease in Early Alaska, Robert Fortuine, 1989
An Epidemic, A
Governor, and a Saint (1819), Alaska Medicine, Fall 1990
Alaska Packers
Association Report on the 1919 Influenza Epidemic
Influenza in Bristol
Bay 1919, Maria Gilson de Valpine, Sage Journal, Spring 2015