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Sickness in this boat!

Sāmoa’s Faama’i oti – Part 2

Ashburton Guardian 21 November 1918

Sāmoa had endured epidemics before. Measles arrived in 1893. Its impact remains disputed with the mortality rate said to range from zero to 10 percent. Some reports said it cost 25 lives but a Methodist missionary on Savai’i reported 1600 deaths. Most major diseases, including pertussis, dysentery, mumps and diphtheria called into Āpia. Quarantine ensured smallpox never made it in. Influenza had been a regular visitor, right from the time the LMS vessel Messenger of Hope arrived with it in 1830. Under German rule, regulations had set up a quarantine process with a 23-point questionnaire that had to be signed by a ship’s captain, first officer and ship’s doctor. It had been put to the test in May 1913 when the ship Michael Jepsen arrived in Sāmoa with 1039 Chinese labourers. Smallpox was diagnosed and the ship was quarantined. Plans were made to create a quarantine station on the small Nu’usafe’e Island on ‘Upolu’s southern coast. Instead everybody was kept aboard the ship for a month. By 1918, Sāmoa had four medical officers and four nurses. Logan had created a quarantine rule for visiting ships. They had to be met by a principal medical officer (PMO) who would check before advising the harbour master to grant free pratique.
Talune dropped anchor in Āpia harbour at 9.35am on Thursday 7 November. Two days earlier, influenza became a notifiable disease in New Zealand but Sāmoa was not told.

Administrator Robert Logan

The military administrator, Colonel Robert Logan was on the southern side of ‘Upolu, away from Āpia. PMO, Captain Frank Atkinson, who had no prior training, went out to the ship and made a brief examination of the passengers and crew who paraded before him. The ship’s second officer struggled out of bed to make the parade, and he went back to it after the examination. When Atkinson inspected the log nothing unusual was noted. When questioned, Mawson told Atkinson that as far as health was concerned, everything in New Zealand had been perfect.
‘We all went to Lyttelton,’ Atkinson later quoted Mawson as saying, ‘and everybody was off colour. We had sniffles, but nothing serious and we are all over it now.’

Six passengers were ill and one, a soldier (presumably Fraser who expected to be have been buried at sea), had to be carried off on a stretcher. Mawson said they had been seasick. Atkinson said that as well as being told of the seasickness, the others said there had been colds on board. No one mentioned influenza. He took the temperatures of those with a cold but found it normal. A passenger, Faasiusiu: ‘Dr Atkinson examined us and allowed us to land. He did not examine me by touching my body to see what was wrong. He only looked at me and said, ‘you can pass.’ Titipa, who paid double fee to join the ship in Suva: ‘…when we arrived in Āpia we were allowed to land without quarantine. There was an announcement in the ship that all the passengers had to dress when the ship was close to harbour and pretend they were not ill.’ Mawson did not mention the limited quarantine in Suva. Chief steward Sydney Almo told Atkinson that passengers had not been allowed ashore at Suva but said that ‘it was all right at Levuka’. It was Mawson’s last trip and for the voyage he was showing his replacement skipper, Arthur Davey, the ropes. Davey approved of Mawson’s deceptions: ‘We do not like to advertise these matters too much, but as a rule if the doctor inquires, and I think if there were enough reasons to quarantine the ship at the last port, mention would be made on the bill of health.’ Atkinson saw Ta’u and advised her to go home immediately as she was ‘dangerously ill’. Friends and family of those aboard were sitting on boats beside Talune. Tuatagaloa from Faleālili was meeting his daughter: ‘When the doctor was on board the ship and we were lying alongside Talune I heard Falielo, a Sāmoan native call out from the ship, “there is sickness in this boat!” Falielo died in the epidemic. . .When the yellow ﬂag was down I went on board the ship and the first thing l saw was a Sāmoan girl lying in a very weak condition. The name of the girl was Ta‘u. . . . l walked to where the girl was lying on the ship and she could not talk, she was breathing quickly. I saw there were many sick people on board.”
The warning had been heard by many Sāmoans that morning. Six ali’i were among those who boarded the ship when it was cleared. Four died within a month. Paul Cane went ashore ‘in a perfect state of prostration’, as he put it, unchecked by Atkinson. Cane went to the Bank of New Zealand and onward to trader, Olaf – ‘Fred’ – Nelson.
‘He looked very sick; in fact, he was foaming at the mouth, and his face betrayed the fact he had been suffering from some terrible disease for some time,’ Nelson said.
Cane told him he had Spanish influenza. He was taken to hospital and survived.
Logan believed that Cane was the agent who spread the virus through Sāmoa. It’s highly unlikely that he was the sole agent. Cane witnessed the epidemic in Savai’i, saying he could only watch as ‘the poor people were stricken dumb with grief and fear, no cry in them no complaint, just resignation to blind fate.’
Atkinson was called to the Churchward home where Ta’u’s condition had worsened. Complaining of heart pain, she soon died.
‘In one or two days there was a family of four including a baby of ﬁve months old ill and the baby died,’ he said. ‘I became a little afraid and wondered if anything had come by the ship. Of course, we knew on opening our mails that it was prevalent in New Zealand and got frightened then.’
Sāmoanische Zeitung editor James Ah Sue realised what was happening; ‘With the incoming steamer arrives the news of a serious outbreak of inﬂuenza in Auckland, the malady having assumed epidemic form.’ His brother John died. His father died the following month of influenza.

Samoanische Zeitung 7 December 1918

Andrew Richardson, the Āpia garrison commander, on 9 November inspected the soldiers at the Market Hall barracks on Beach Road. The soldiers all stood to attention except Private Reuben Ross, 26. He was lying down, saying he ‘felt a bit crook’. Richardson advised PMO General Sydney Skerman of the men’s condition. He checked them and decided they had influenza. The men revealed they had it before they left New Zealand and their transfer to Sāmoa had been delayed. Only at the last minute had the army changed its mind and had the soldiers sent on Talune. Skerman saw no reason to be alarmed; plainly the army were indifferent to it, so why not him? Next day a couple of men were sick and Ross was sent to Motootua Hospital where he died. Richardson then heard all the soldiers at the wireless station were sick. A girl arrived at the garrison with a message from an old matai Amatua. He had fought against Mata’afa in the 1899 conflict. The girl told Richardson he needed food and Richardson gave her a dixie of soup and some biscuits. Twelve hours later the girl returned and said Amatua wished to see the major as he was dying.
‘I went to him, and this is is what he said: “Capitani, I am dying. My wife die; all my people die.’ I replied “what nonsense!” He said “No nonsense! Look around the village”.’
Richardson saw Amatua’s house was closed up: ‘The shutters were all down, and about a dozen people were lying sick, with one or two children on their feet. I tore the shutters off, as the air was stifling. I went around the other tales (native house) in the village, and everywhere I went was the same thing – no kaikai [food], shutters were up, and no one able to do anything.’ Richardson went to the villages and found conditions to be horrible. The Chinese cooks who worked for the garrison were ordered to cook food for all.
Inaction prevented sparing Savai’i which had influenza within four days. Logan said the rapid spread resulted from the Sāmoan passengers off Talune going from the ship directly on arrival to villages all over Sāmoa.

Stratford Evening Post 21 November 1918

Death was gruesome. John Ryan McLane in Setting a Barricade against the East Wind: Western Polynesia and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, described death with cyanosis, the hallmark of severe influenza infection: ‘The lungs filled with fluid, a bloody froth which prevented the transfer of oxygen as the inflammatory pulmonary edema worsened. When patients moved in bed, serous fluid poured from their mouth and nose. A still conscious victim might cough up a litre of pus from their lungs daily, trying to keep the passages clear. Lungs became so full of fluid and silent to auscultation that doctors were convinced their stethoscopes were broken. First the lips and nail-beds of patients darkened, followed by ears, nose, and tongue; finally, further extremities such as the fingers and cheeks lost oxygenation. In some cases, the trunk actually turned an indigo color.’
People sometimes were dead within hours, hit by a cytokine storm, an immune reaction between cytokine or proteins and white blood cells. Young people mainly would have their immune systems overreact to the virus, flooding the lungs with fluid.