The Speckled Monster (75 page)

All Mather's trials, his fears of smallpox hovering near, as well as his feelings of triumph and tribulation in communing with angels, are to be found in his diaries, voluminous writings, and Kenneth Silverman's biography. As much as possible, I have kept close to Mather's language in trying to follow his thoughts. In particular, I have dipped into another long diary entry for May 28. Mather himself named the smallpox “a destroying angel,” which he imagined looming over the town. For others, this might have been a poetic metaphor. Mather, however, is more likely to have meant it to approximate truth: he believed in angels and demons who could wield fiery swords and golden voices both for good and for ill.

Mather's writings on smallpox across the spring and summer of 1721 present quite a tangle. The clearest unraveling is George Lyman Kittredge's article, “Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather.” I have followed his lead with one major exception. Kittredge argues that Mather wrote only one letter to the physicians, while he manifestly wrote two. The first, requesting a meeting, he wrote on June 6. Its dated conclusion was reprinted twice in the ensuing pamphlet wars; that is the piece quoted here, via Isaac Greenwood. Apparently circulated in a single copy, the letter went first to Dr. Nathanael Williams (identified as a schoolmaster/physician) with a specific plea to forward it on to Dr. William Douglass, among others.

Kittredge believed that this letter included a transcript, or at least a lengthy abridgment, of both Timonius and Pylarinus. I think it more likely that this first letter was relatively short, requesting a meeting to read and discuss the articles in question. Mather certainly disseminated such transcripts, but I think he did so much later in the month. See the notes to “Fathers and Sons.”

At this point, Dr. Mather canvassed Boston's black population, with a clear interest in people born in Africa. He later claimed there was “an army of Africans” who could attest to the practice of inoculation; Douglass scoffed that there were only six or ten. The unnamed black man's description of the African practice appears in Mather's treatise on smallpox, later included as the twenty-second chapter of his medical magnum opus,
The Angel of Bethesda
. Other men might have produced such broken English as mockery of African ignorance; that kind of humor was beyond Mather's ken. Given his fascination with both the subject and its origins, this quotation is likely to be as close to word for word as he could get: and where language was concerned, Mather could get pretty close.

Some scholars have assumed this description came from Onesimus. I find that unlikely: Mather did not produce it for Dr. Woodward's perusal in his letter of July 1716 to the Royal Society, when Onesimus was his one and only direct source. Furthermore, by 1721 Onesimus had long since bought his freedom and was no longer living under Mather's roof. While I do not know that the reverend interviewed the free black men sent out to clean the streets in late May, they are one obvious source for his queries. (Onesimus was not one of them.)

I have drawn Dr. Douglass's attitudes toward Boston, Bostonians, money, smallpox, his fellow physicians, and especially Cotton Mather from his own writings, using his words where possible. Though his knowledge on many topics was encyclopedic, the man was hard pressed to write a single sentence that did not drip with scorn; where his reputation was concerned, he was prone to paranoia.

Douglass was also, however, a superb observer of both nature and human affairs, especially in the fields of medicine and botany; geography, weather, and history were also pet topics. Most of the statistical data about Boston's 1721 outbreak of “natural” smallpox (as opposed to inoculated smallpox) comes from his pen. In particular, he stressed the eighteen-day span from “seizure to seizure” as the disease spread.

For all his richly attested disagreeableness, Douglass seems to have been right about the eighteen days. This time span jibes with what's known about the transmission of small-pox: from one person's “seizure” (by which he probably meant the onset of the first fever) to the appearance of the rash takes about three days. After that, it takes roughly another three days for the pocks inside the nose, mouth, and throat to mature and begin to burst: at which point, the ill person spews thick clouds of smallpox virus with every breath. Anyone vulnerable who breathes in that infection then has about twelve days of symptomless incubation before their own “seizure” or onset of the first fever—for a total of eighteen days. Measured from rash to rash, as I have done here, the span is the same as from fever to fever. All the different stages, of course, can vary somewhat in length. Also, patients remain infectious for a long time beyond day three of their rashes, and they can become infectious earlier. As Douglass himself noted, the pattern of widening rings of infection is easiest to see at the start of an epidemic.

Boylston, Mather, and others wrote that Douglass retrieved from Mather the volumes containing the Timonius and Pylarinus articles, and that he locked them up, refusing to let anyone else, even the governor, so much as peek at them. This must have occurred after June 6, when Mather first spread their contents abroad, and before June 23, when Mather sent his treatise out to the physicians—after which such hoarding would presumably have lost most of its point.

Mather sent his first letter, summoning the physicians to a meeting, to Dr. Nathanael Williams, with a particular request to forward it to Dr. Douglass. (Apparently, it was a single copy meant to circulate among the town's physicians.) Williams's compliance with this request seems the most likely avenue for Douglass's discovery of Mather's meddling. As no one else seems to have seen the letter (other than Mather's later defenders, who likely had access to the author's draft copy), it seems reasonable to suppose that it was Douglass who squelched it, along with stopping the circulation of the books.

Douglass is not known to have possessed a house of his own before 1724. (Possibly, his profits from this epidemic materially helped him toward that purchase.) There are passing references in early histories to him living in rooms in the Green Dragon; later, he bought the entire building, though it seems he did not live there at that time. He mocked Zabdiel Boylston for riding horseback, implying that a carriage was more proper to a physician's status; presumably, therefore, he kept one himself. Given his concern with appearances, and with the appurtenances of rank, I have assumed that he also kept at least one slave, though there are no details; certainly, to keep a coach meant keeping at the very least one servant as driver and groom. Again, his mockery of Boylston and Mather reveals that he had no high opinion of African thought or practices.

In reverse, mockery aimed at Douglass suggests that he spoke with a strong Scottish accent, peppering his sentences with obviously Scottish vocabulary.

A number of witnesses said that the next “parcel” of smallpox rashes appeared in the middle of June; Douglass specified the “change of the moon, middle of June.” The new moon occurred on June 13. People then began fleeing the town in droves; Douglass claims that the refugees numbered in the thousands. As with refugee situations throughout history, housing prices in the suddenly desirable areas no doubt saw a significant spike.

The Boylstons' relationship is almost completely hidden from history. Jerusha, however, did leave town with the girls soon after the guards were taken off the houses in mid-June. It would appear that Tommy and John, as well as the young slave Jackey, were left behind in Boston with Zabdiel and his adult slave Jack (Jackey's father). Zabdiel junior seems to have been living outside the house, possibly already at college in Cambridge.

Zabdiel never clearly says where the girls went, or why the boys stayed. I have deduced that the women and girls fled to Roxbury from the following: Tom Boylston's wife Sarah was pregnant when the epidemic broke out, making her a high risk for complications. In October, she gave birth at “her lodgings” in Roxbury; at least two of Zabdiel's and Tom's nieces, the daughters of two different sisters, were present in the same house. Twenty-year-old Mary Lane seems to have been a fellow Bostonian. Rebecca Abbot, eleven, however, lived with her parents (Zabdiel's sister Rebecca and brother-in-law William) in Roxbury. It would seem, then, that many of the female relatives were gathered at one house in Roxbury as far out as October 1721. Since one of these families was resident in Roxbury, it may well have been their home. I have sent Jerusha and her three daughters to this same household, though it is possible the Boylston women were spread through several homes, or that Jerusha and her girls stayed with Minot relatives in Dorchester.

Until the disease spread from Boston into Roxbury, Zabdiel seems never to have gone there. After that point, however, he spent a great deal of time riding back and forth, as well as to adjacent Dorchester. He sporadically traveled to Charlestown, where his brother Richard lived, and to Cambridge, but his travels to Roxbury curtailed his house visits in these towns. He never, however, seems to have gone as far as his native Brookline (where two more brothers lived). Though he may have gone to Roxbury purely for medical business, it does seem that there was some other draw pulling him there, over and above Boston's other equally panicked neighbors.

Overcrowding in their country retreat seems as likely a reason as any for Jerusha leaving the boys behind. At thirteen, John was of an age to be expected to make himself useful. Six-year-old Tommy and two-and-a-half-year-old Jackey, however, are unlikely to have been held back voluntarily. In the normal pattern of everyday life, boys that young would have spent most their time with the women and other children. Apart from Zabdiel's fears for them, they would have been an unusual burden, just when he had no time to spare. Indeed, Benjamin Colman, whose house looked onto the Boylston garden, noted that the doctor's children were “too much exposed and neglected”—and in fact ran a little wild—due to Zabdiel's long hours away tending the sick.

Apparently, no one else was around to look after them either. From this, it has also seemed reasonable to suppose that Jack was out helping Zabdiel during the day, and that Moll was sent off to Roxbury to do for Jerusha and the girls, as well as to escape contagion herself.

Tommy and Jackey play games they are likely to have played: Jerusha Minot's home had indeed been attacked by a lone Indian and defended by a servant maid in the manner described. No laughing matter now, but it was surely a story the family children knew well and enjoyed the way American children later played cowboys and Indians. In 1721, Captain Bartholomew Roberts was the reigning terror of the seas, already legendary as an order-loving but flamboyant and sometimes heroic king of pirates, as revered by his men as feared by his foes. “Black Bart” was one of his nicknames; “the Great Pirate Roberts” was another. “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is a small bit of homage to William Goldman's
The Princess Bride
. Pirates were all over the Boston newspapers throughout May and June 1721; Roberts made a particular splash in the
Boston News-Letter
of May 15. Not quite a year later, in February 1722, he was killed off West Africa in action against the Royal Navy.

Mather noted his composition of both the smallpox treatise and the second letter in his diary. He also, the day before, noted his intention to help Dr. Perkins to some business. Touting Perkins seems as likely an avenue as any for the minister's discovery that his first letter had run afoul of Douglass, producing, as he later said, a fair amount of talk in the town, as well as his own clear determination that the second letter should not similarly go astray.

Boylston's description of his first three inoculations is a pretty bald statement of what he did to whom, and when. I have brought his sketch to life by adding particulars that fit with what we know of the man, his family, and Boston and its environs at that time.

Almost the only thing we know about him as a man, apart from what can be gleaned from his scientific writings and genealogy, is his extraordinary love for his horses. Even in an age when horses were a regular part of everyday life, he had a reputation as an unusually skilled horseman. I have given him, therefore, a trait of all the true horsemen and -women I have known: he seeks out a favorite horse when troubled and finds that his mind and heart settle to clarity while riding.

The landscape he rides through has almost entirely disappeared. Nineteenth-century Bostonians quite literally moved mountains: Beacon Hill, in Boylston's day mostly covered by fields and woods, has been significantly lowered; the other two peaks of the Tri-mountain or Tremount (from which Tremont Street takes its name) have been leveled, their earth sunk into the tidal basin of the Charles River to create the area now called the Back Bay. Present-day Washington Street follows the line of the old road south out of town (it was then called Orange Street), across the Neck, and into Roxbury.

Boylston agonized over the safety of his children, acutely aware that he would likely bring the infection home from the sickrooms in which he was spending so much time. The fact that none of the boys fell ill until he deliberately infected them, however, strongly suggests that he was scrupulously clean and possibly observed some kind of quarantine himself. Though no one understood how or why, it was well known that infected people and clothing (including wigs) could spread smallpox. I have therefore made him particular about washing up and changing his clothes on coming home.

Mather's letter to Boylston survived long enough to be printed in 1789; I've quoted it in full, altering only some punctuation for readability, and adding the word
Guramantees
. (The letter's editor notes an “illegible” word at the point where similar sentences in both the treatise written two days before and the letter to Dr. Woodward in 1716 have “Guramantees” or “Garamantese”—an obscure enough word to merit confusion, over and above messy or cramped writing in what was then already an old sheet of paper.) This letter reads like a form letter, and intimates an enclosure. Dated June 24, 1721, the day after Mather noted in his diary that he was composing a letter to the town's physicians, in turn the day after he noted writing his treatise upon smallpox, I have assumed that these are all related. This date is far more consistent than the first letter's (June 6) with Boylston's claim that he began the experiment “after short consideration.”