Clive Cussler
The Invisible Killer
With deep gratitude - Dr. Nicholas Nicholas, Dr. Geoffrey Taffet and Robert Fleming
CRASH
Tasman Sea
Of the four sailing clipper ships built in 1854 at the Aberdeen shipyards in Scotland, one stood out in particular. The ship called "Gladiator" had a displacement of 1256 tons, sixty meters in length, ten meters in width along the average beam [Beam is a transverse beam that connects the sides and serves as the basis for the deck. (Hereinafter approx. Transl.)] and three tall masts pointing into the sky at a rakish angle. It was the fastest sailing ship ever launched. However, for those who found themselves on board in stormy weather, too thin lines threatened disaster. But the calm did not put them into hibernation. The Gladiator was able to sail in barely noticeable winds.
Unfortunately, which was impossible to predict, fate doomed this clipper to oblivion.
The owners of the sailing ship hoped to use it to make a business with Australian immigrants, since it was suitable for transporting both passengers and cargo. However, as the shipowners very soon learned, not many colonists could afford to pay for the sea voyage, so the sailing ship sailed with empty first and second class cabins. It turned out that it was much more profitable to enter into agreements with the government to transport convicted criminals to the continent, which was then considered the largest prison in the world.
The Gladiator was placed under the command of one of the sturdiest clipper captains, Charles Scaggs, whom even the old sea dogs who did not know the ranks of admiral respectfully called Bully. Bully Skags - this nickname suited him perfectly. Let’s say, Bully did not treat careless or disobedient sailors with a whip, but he did not have pity for either the other members of the crew or the ship itself, seeking the shortest possible time for the transition between England and Australia. And his efforts bore fruit. Returning to her native shores for the third time, the Gladiator set a record that has not yet been broken by sailing ships. He covered this distance in sixty-three days, and slow-moving merchant ships spent up to three and a half months on such a journey.
Skaggs competed in speed with the legendary captains of his time: John Kendricks of the fast Hercules and Wilson Asher, who commanded the famous Jupiter, and never lost. Rival ships leaving London a few hours before the Gladiator, when they reached Sydney Harbor, invariably found Skaggs' clipper comfortably ensconced at the pier.
The quick sea crossing was God's mercy for the prisoners who endured terrible agony on the way to hard labor. They were kept in the hold and treated like cargo or livestock. There were hardened criminals and political enemies of the ruling government among them, but the majority were those who were caught stealing food or pieces of cloth. A thick bulkhead separated men and women. They were not spoiled with any amenities. Dilapidated bedding on narrow wooden lockers, sanitary conditions worse than anything could be imagined, and poor nutritional food were their lot. Sugar was their only treat. During the day, everyone was given vinegar and lemon juice to save them from scurvy, and at night, half a pint of port to maintain their spirits. The prisoners were guarded by a detachment of ten soldiers from an infantry regiment stationed in New South Wales, commanded by Lieutenant Silas Sheppard.
There was almost no ventilation. Barred hatches served as sources of light and air in the hold, but they were always closed. When the ship reached the tropics, the prisoners sweltered from the heat. In bad weather, the suffering intensified: chilled, wet people in complete darkness rolled on the floor from side to side from the blows of powerful waves.
The ship carrying convicts was required to have a doctor, and he was on the Gladiator. Surgeon-police Otis Gorman monitored the general health of the prisoners and, as soon as the weather permitted, took them out in small groups on deck to get some fresh air and exercise. The pride of the ship's surgeons was that they reached Sydney without losing a single ward along the way. Gorman cared for the prisoners: he bled them, opened boils, treated wounds, gave laxatives, and made sure that latrines were sprinkled with bleach, clothes were washed, and urine pails were scrubbed clean. It was rare that, after landing on shore, the ship's doctor did not receive letters of gratitude from the convicts.
The bully Skaggs for the most part paid no attention to the unfortunate people locked in the hold. A record crossing - that was his goal. The iron discipline and assertiveness he established generously paid off with bonuses from satisfied shipowners, as well as legends that admiring sailors composed about him and his ship.
This time he went to sea with the firm intention of setting a new record. He sailed for fifty-two days from London, heading for Sydney, with a sailing ship carrying a cargo of goods and 192 convicts, twenty-four of whom were women. He squeezed everything he could out of the Gladiator, without furling the sails even in strong gusts of wind. The captain's perseverance was rewarded: in one day the sailboat covered an incredible distance - eight hundred kilometers.
And then Skaggs' luck ran out. Trouble came from beyond the horizon astern.
The day after the Gladiator safely passed the Bassaw Strait between Tasmania and the southern tip of Australia, the evening sky was overcast with menacing clouds that hid all the stars, and the sea was in earnest. Skags had no idea that a typhoon would hit his ship from the southwest, across the Tasman Sea. No matter how agile and no matter how strong the clippers were, they could not expect mercy from the fury of the Pacific Ocean.
In the memory of the South Sea islanders, that hurricane remained the most cruel and destructive of all the typhoons they experienced. Every hour the wind speed grew and grew. Sea waves rose like mountains and rushed out of the darkness, shaking the Gladiator's hull. Skaggs - it's too late! - gave the command to furl the sails. A gust of wind viciously grabbed the tightly inflated canvas and tore it to shreds, having managed to break the masts easily, like toothpicks, and with a crash, bring down scraps of panels and rigging with fragments of the spar onto the deck. And then, as if wanting to clear the rubble, a rolling wave washed everything overboard. The rearing ten-meter shaft hit the stern and rolled along the ship, crushing the captain's cabin into splinters and breaking out the steering wheel. The lifeboats, wheel, wheelhouse and galley were completely washed away from the deck. The hatches were blown apart and water poured freely into the hold.
A merciless monstrous wave of water in a single moment turned the once slender clipper into a helpless, crumpled vessel. The ship completely lost control and rushed like a log among the shifting waves. Unable to fight the hurricane, the crew and the convicts taken on board could only look death in the face and wait in horror for the ship to finally plunge into the violent abyss.
Two weeks after the Gladiator was due to dock at Sydney Piers, shipowners became worried. Several ships were sent to search for the famous clipper, but they failed to find anything. The ship's owners wrote it off as a loss, insurance companies paid for the damage, relatives of the crew and convicts mourned their deaths, and the memory of the sailing ship faded in time.
There were ships that were called floating coffins or devil ships, but the rival captains, who knew the Bully and the Gladiator through rumors, only shrugged their shoulders when they heard such talk. They put an end to the graceful sailing ship, considering it a victim not so much of the elements as of Skaggs’ vanity. Two sailors who once served on a clipper put forward the following version: a strong tail wind suddenly hit the Gladiator, at the same time a wave hit the stern, and the ship, under the influence of these elements, sharply went nose-first into the water and sank.
At Lloyd's of London, a well-known firm of ship insurers, the missing Gladiator was listed in the log line between the sinking of an American steam tug and a beached Norwegian fishing trawler.
Almost three years passed before the mystery of the clipper's disappearance came to light.
It's hard to believe, but after the terrible typhoon rushed further to the west, the Gladiator stayed afloat. Yes, the wrecked sailboat survived, but through the cracks in the hull, water began to fill the hull of the ship with alarming speed. The very next day, six feet of water accumulated in the hold, and the pumps could not cope with the elements.
Always hard as flint, Bully Skaggs never tired this time either. The team was sure that he alone would not allow the sailboat to sink with his tenacity. He assigned to the pumps those convicts who were not seriously injured during the terrible continuous shaking, and ordered the sailors to start sealing the cracks and holes in the casing.
The rest of the day and night were spent in attempts to lighten the ship: cargo, tools and utensils that could have been dispensed with were thrown overboard. Nothing helped. We spent a lot of time, but achieved very little. By the next morning the water had risen another three feet.
The Middle Ages saw a large number of different epidemics; some diseases were already known and even described in biblical stories, while medieval people encountered others for the first time. In my research, I decided to look at the two most famous diseases of that time - plague and leprosy. They gained their fame due to the large number of sick people and the terrible symptoms.
Contemporaries did not give the name Black Death to the plague; in documents of that time you can find the names: Great danger, enormous mortality, great plague. There are two hypotheses for the formation of the term Black Death, one suggests that the name is due to a translation error from Latin. Seneca called plague epidemics atra mors, but here atra is translated not as color, but as quantity, which can be correlated with Russian darkness. And in 1631 The historian John Pontan first uses the expression Black Death in his writings. But according to another hypothesis, the Black Death is formed due to characteristic buboes, black abscesses on the patient’s body. Based on this, the interpretation of the concept of the Black Death according to one and the other hypothesis cannot be wrong, since in the first case the plague really devastated entire cities and killed a colossal number of people, and in the second the name was determined by the presence of buboes and abscesses that have a characteristic black color.
The methods of acquiring the disease were so diverse that you couldn’t even count them: some died simply because they handled and ate with the sick; others - from just touching them; others - having been only in the house, and those - in the square; some, having fled from cities infected with the disease, remained unharmed, but brought the disease with them to the healthy; and there were also those who, despite all the fact that they lived with the sick and touched not only the infected, but also the dead, remained completely free from the disease; others, having lost all their children or household, although they wanted to die and deliberately treated the sick, were not exposed to the infection, since it would act contrary to their wishes. This plague, as it is said, continues to rage to this day 52 years, and has surpassed all previous plagues. Meanwhile, Philostratus is also surprised that in his time the ulcer lasted 15 years
About 100 million people died from this epidemic in the East alone, and another 25 million people died in Europe.
There is also a description of the plague in Gregory of Tours in the History of the Franks: And during the plague itself, there was such a mortality rate in the entire region that it is impossible to count how many people died there. And in fact, when there were no longer enough coffins and boards, ten or more people were buried in one grave. It was estimated that in St. Peter's Basilica [in Clermont] on one Sunday there were three hundred dead. And the death itself was sudden. Namely: when a wound like a snake appeared in the groin or under the armpit, the person was so poisoned with poison that he gave up the ghost on the second or third day. The strength of the poison rendered the person unconscious.
If we consider the factors contributing to the spread of the plague, we need to touch upon the ecological and socio-economic environment. Plague epidemics were usually preceded by cataclysms; documents from that time contain information about drought and famine in Central China, a locust invasion in Henan province and hurricanes with downpours in 1333. in Khanbylyk. These natural disasters could have influenced the migration of small rodents closer to human habitats, which contributed to the development of the epidemic. Also, multiple wars contributed to the spread of various diseases, which, although not as deadly as the plague, undermined the human immune system; hunger also weakened the general condition of people and many experienced symptoms of vitamin deficiency. And the movement of a large number of military units and active trade only increased and accelerated the spread of plague and other diseases. Endless crowds of vagabonds, beggars, fleeing their cities destroyed by the war, spread the infection over a large territory.
Personal hygiene of that time left much to be desired, and not because of the lack of any shower gels and other things that store shelves now abound with, but because of the religious side of this problem. In the Middle Ages, there was a widespread practice - alousia, which was the refusal of life's blessings to punish a sinful body; caring for it was considered a sinful act. “Those who are physically healthy, and especially those who are young in age, should wash as little as possible,” Saint Benedict warns against sin. In addition to these factors, there was unusually close contact with rats and a huge number of them in the cities, as evidenced by special instructions in one of the plague works, in case someone’s face was pinched or wet by a rat. As we see, everything contributed to the development of the epidemic and it was only a matter of time before the next outbreak occurred.
As for such a disease as leprosy, it was not as deadly as the plague, and did not devastate entire cities; it had its own characteristics. Leprosy has a long incubation period, which usually ranges from 3 to 5 years, but also ranges from 6 months to several decades. Therefore, a person can live peacefully for several years after infection and not suspect that he is sick, unlike the fleeting plague. If the plague spread at a high speed and killed at the same speed, then leprosy did not have the ability to mow down entire cities, and people suffered from it less often. But the attitude towards this disease was different. There was a hypothesis that lepers were servants of the devil himself and the Inquisition began to hunt for the sick. Before torture, they look for the devil's seal on the accused; they looked for it simply by examining the body, and then by sticking needles into suspicious places on the body (most often they differed in shade of color). But lepers at the sites of formation of ulcers and other neoplasms had a lower pain threshold, so most often the accused could not feel the injection, the pre-revolutionary historian S.V. writes about this. Tukholka: Even before the torture, the sorceress was subjected to an operation to find the stigmata of the devil. To do this, the patient was blindfolded and long needles were pierced into the body. Ya. A. Kantrarovich writes on the same topic: Medieval witch trials,” published in 1889: “If someone had ulcers or any traces on their body, the origin of which was unknown, then they were attributed to the devil. Therefore, first of all, they turned to the needle test. Often such a place devoid of sensitivity was actually found on the body. Doctors diagnosed diseases inherent in witchcraft and made a conclusion that played a decisive role in the fate of the sorcerer or witch. Most likely, the inquisitors wanted to prevent the outbreak of the epidemic, or they did it unwittingly, since the methods applied to the so-called witches are close to organizing quarantine. Separate prisons were created for witches, it was forbidden to touch the convicts, but often the executioner and the judge conducting the witch trials were subsequently accused. They have a high probability of infection, since they have direct contact with the accused.
Most often, relatives became infected, but they were also the first to rush to denounce a sorcerer or witch, for fear of being accused of witchcraft. Based on the first suspicion of a demonic connection of a relative, that is, the appearance of spots on the skin, ulcers, etc., the relatives of the infected person rushed to tell the Inquisition that a witch had appeared in their home. But more often, the inquisitors executed the entire family to avoid the development of an epidemic.
As for the description of the witches themselves, the English historian R. Hart, in his work History of Witchcraft, gives an example of how contemporaries saw a typical witch: They are crooked and hunchbacked, their faces constantly bear the stamp of melancholy, terrifying everyone around them. Their skin is covered with some kind of spots. An old hag, battered by life, she walks bent over, with sunken eyes, toothless, with a face furrowed with pits and wrinkles. Her limbs are constantly shaking. This is roughly what a description of a leprosy patient may look like in the medical literature; of course, there we will find a description in a scientific style, but this does not change the essence.
J. Le Goff in The Civilization of the Medieval West considers the category of lepers and witches together, without identifying witches as patients with leprosy, he writes: medieval society needed these people, they were suppressed because they posed a danger, there was an almost conscious desire to mystically transfer everything to them the evil that society sought to get rid of.
The Inquisition, not unreasonably, condemned witches and sorcerers; only after a doctor checked to find traces of leprosy did the judges pronounce a verdict. It can be considered that the inquisitors tried to prevent leprosy epidemics using such a radical method, since at that time the disease was incurable, and even now it itself is not fully studied, and the only measure in the Middle Ages was prevention, quarantine, which is what the Inquisition did.
Clive Cussler
"The Invisible Killer"
With deep gratitude - Dr. Nicholas Nicholas, Dr. Geoffrey Taffet and Robert Fleming
CRASH
Tasman Sea
Of the four sailing clipper ships built in 1854 at the Aberdeen shipyards in Scotland, one stood out in particular. The ship, called the Gladiator, displaced 1,256 tons, was sixty meters long, ten meters wide at the middle beam, and had three tall masts pointing skyward at a rakish angle. It was the fastest sailing ship ever launched. However, for those who found themselves on board in stormy weather, too thin lines threatened disaster. But the calm did not put them into hibernation. The Gladiator was able to sail in barely noticeable winds.
Unfortunately, which was impossible to predict, fate doomed this clipper to oblivion.
The owners of the sailing ship hoped to use it to make a business with Australian immigrants, since it was suitable for transporting both passengers and cargo. However, as the shipowners very soon learned, not many colonists could afford to pay for the sea voyage, so the sailing ship sailed with empty first and second class cabins. It turned out that it was much more profitable to enter into agreements with the government to transport convicted criminals to the continent, which was then considered the largest prison in the world.
The Gladiator was placed under the command of one of the sturdiest clipper captains, Charles Scaggs, whom even the old sea dogs who did not know the ranks of admiral respectfully called Bully. Bully Skags - this nickname suited him perfectly. Let’s say, Bully did not treat careless or disobedient sailors with a whip, but he did not have pity for either the other members of the crew or the ship itself, seeking the shortest possible time for the transition between England and Australia. And his efforts bore fruit. Returning to her native shores for the third time, the Gladiator set a record that has not yet been broken by sailing ships. He covered this distance in sixty-three days, and slow-moving merchant ships spent up to three and a half months on such a journey.
Skaggs competed in speed with the legendary captains of his time: John Kendricks of the fast Hercules and Wilson Asher, who commanded the famous Jupiter, and never lost. Rival ships leaving London a few hours before the Gladiator, when they reached Sydney Harbor, invariably found Skaggs' clipper comfortably ensconced at the pier.
The quick sea crossing was God's mercy for the prisoners who endured terrible agony on the way to hard labor. They were kept in the hold and treated like cargo or livestock. There were hardened criminals and political enemies of the ruling government among them, but the majority were those who were caught stealing food or pieces of cloth. A thick bulkhead separated men and women. They were not spoiled with any amenities. Dilapidated bedding on narrow wooden lockers, sanitary conditions worse than anything could be imagined, and poor nutritional food were their lot. Sugar was their only treat. During the day, everyone was given vinegar and lemon juice to save them from scurvy, and at night, half a pint of port to maintain their spirits. The prisoners were guarded by a detachment of ten soldiers from an infantry regiment stationed in New South Wales, commanded by Lieutenant Silas Sheppard.
There was almost no ventilation. Barred hatches served as sources of light and air in the hold, but they were always closed. When the ship reached the tropics, the prisoners sweltered from the heat. In bad weather, the suffering intensified: chilled, wet people in complete darkness rolled on the floor from side to side from the blows of powerful waves.
The ship carrying convicts was required to have a doctor, and he was on the Gladiator. Surgeon-police Otis Gorman monitored the general health of the prisoners and, as soon as the weather permitted, took them out in small groups on deck to get some fresh air and exercise. The pride of the ship's surgeons was that they reached Sydney without losing a single ward along the way. Gorman cared for the prisoners: he bled them, opened boils, treated wounds, gave laxatives, and made sure that latrines were sprinkled with bleach, clothes were washed, and urine pails were scrubbed clean. It was rare that, after landing on shore, the ship's doctor did not receive letters of gratitude from the convicts.
The bully Skags mostly pays no attention to the unfortunate people locked in the hold. A record crossing - that was his goal. The iron discipline and assertiveness he established generously paid off with bonuses from satisfied shipowners, as well as legends that admiring sailors composed about him and his ship.
This time he went to sea with the firm intention of setting a new record. He sailed for fifty-two days from London, heading for Sydney, with a sailing ship carrying a cargo of goods and 192 convicts, twenty-four of whom were women. He squeezed everything he could out of the Gladiator, without furling the sails even in strong gusts of wind. The captain's perseverance was rewarded: in one day the sailboat covered an incredible distance - eight hundred kilometers.
And then Skaggs' luck ran out. Trouble came from beyond the horizon astern.
The day after the Gladiator safely passed the Bassaw Strait between Tasmania and the southern tip of Australia, the evening sky was overcast with menacing clouds that hid all the stars, and the sea was in earnest. Skags had no idea that a typhoon would hit his ship from the southwest, across the Tasman Sea. No matter how agile and no matter how strong the clippers were, they could not expect mercy from the fury of the Pacific Ocean.
In the memory of the South Sea islanders, that hurricane remained the most cruel and destructive of all the typhoons they experienced. Every hour the wind speed grew and grew. Sea waves rose like mountains and rushed out of the darkness, shaking the Gladiator's hull. Skaggs - it's too late! - gave the command to furl the sails. A gust of wind viciously grabbed the tightly inflated canvas and tore it to shreds, having managed to break the masts easily, like toothpicks, and with a crash, bring down scraps of panels and rigging with fragments of the spars onto the deck. And then, as if wanting to clear the rubble, a rolling wave washed everything overboard. The rearing ten-meter shaft hit the stern and rolled along the ship, crushing the captain's cabin into splinters and breaking out the steering wheel. The lifeboats, wheel, wheelhouse and galley were completely washed away from the deck. The hatches were blown apart and water poured freely into the hold.
A merciless monstrous wave of water in a single moment turned the once slender clipper into a helpless, crumpled vessel. The ship completely lost control and rushed like a log among the shifting waves. Unable to fight the hurricane, the crew and the convicts taken on board could only look death in the face and wait in horror for the ship to finally plunge into the violent abyss.
Two weeks after the Gladiator was due to dock at Sydney Piers, shipowners became worried. Several ships were sent to search for the famous clipper, but they failed to find anything. The ship's owners wrote it off as a loss, insurance companies paid for the damage, relatives of the crew and convicts mourned their deaths, and the memory of the sailing ship faded in time.
There were ships that were called floating coffins or devilish vessels, but the rival captains, who knew the Bully and the Gladiator through rumors, only shrugged their shoulders when they heard such talk. They put an end to the graceful sailing ship, considering it a victim not so much of the elements as of Skaggs’ vanity. Two sailors who once served on a clipper put forward the following version: a strong tail wind suddenly hit the Gladiator, at the same time a wave hit the stern, and the ship, under the influence of these elements, sharply went nose-first into the water and sank.
At Lloyd's of London, a well-known firm of ship insurers, the missing Gladiator was listed in the log line between the sinking of an American steam tug and a beached Norwegian fishing trawler.
Almost three years passed before the mystery of the clipper's disappearance came to light.
It's hard to believe, but after the terrible typhoon rushed further to the west, the Gladiator stayed afloat. Yes, the wrecked sailboat survived, but through the cracks in the hull, water began to fill the hull of the ship with alarming speed. The very next day, six feet of water accumulated in the hold, and the pumps could not cope with the elements.
Always hard as flint, Bully Skaggs never tired this time either. The team was sure that he alone would not allow the sailboat to sink with his tenacity. He assigned to the pumps those convicts who were not seriously injured during the terrible continuous shaking, and ordered the sailors to start sealing the cracks and holes in the casing.
