June 2nd, 1776
The quarantine camp being sufficiently in readiness, we assisted this morning in the transportation of the victims of pestilence from the Adonis to their huts. Many are in the most advanced agonies, and each motion of the carts increases their suffering. They moan most terribly; their encrustations are awful to behold.
How strange (I marvel) that a ship named the Adonis should be the place of disfigurement.
The inoculations of those who have not yet suffered the disease shall commence shortly. Among some, accustomed to this practice by long usage in Africa, there is stoical assent; but the most are struck with horror. Old Better Joe endorses the procedure to all who shall listen, saying it is a tremendous charm against the pox; which leads Charles in his contrariety to mutter to Slant that he should pay that old man no heed, for them gods are left behind, and not to hearken to superstition, for inoculation can lead only to death. Slant is beset upon by all the transports of terror at the prospect. Isaac the Joiner saith that the Lord shall smite down whom He wishes with His pestilential scourge; that no such vain practice as introducing fevers shall help a man escape Jehovah’s wrath.
I spake to Slant of the benefits of inoculation, which hath spared me the full ravages of the disease; to which he said nothing, while Charles replied, “We heard about your mother”; after which, my remonstrance ceased.
The Marines assisting in removing the sick from the Adonis, we discovered that twelve of our Regiment had died undetected of the pox while the ship lately stood at anchor off Gwynn’s Island. The command was for these bodies simply to be thrown overboard.
This heartless mandate was protested by my fatigue party, there being a strong belief among my companions — heathen and Christian alike — that when the dead and their burial grounds are abandoned, as in our flight, we condemn the spirits of the deceased to an eternity of oblivious, hungry wandering. The other men desired me, therefore, to write to Major Byrd as an intermediary and ask that he rectify this galling practice.
This I did, the black border on my mourning-paper being sadly fitting; I wrote to the Major, requesting as a sign of his beneficence that the bodies of such as die from smallpox be remitted to the charge of the various priests and enthusiasts of the Regiment, who should take care that the dead be disposed of according to the custom nearest their own dispensation.
Major Byrd replied to us favorably, if somewhat tartly, that we should find little resistance to a claim on the corpse of a dead, disease-riddled Negro, that being an object not universally relished; and that we might bury our dead as we pleased.
This word the Ensign delivered when we were at our supper. What followed then was debate upon how the bodies should be laid to rest, it being interdicted by ancient African practice that we should bury any victim of smallpox with other dead, and it being impractical to dispose of them as any African custom demands, either by depositing them in a forest or rendering them up to priests of the several smallpox gods. Thus, there gathered a loud convocation of such of our number as claim familiarity with appropriate rites of burial — a meeting of palaver-men, Christian New Lights, obeah priests, and new-made cunning-workers. There was much argument, and those sensations of fraternity and comity which at first brought our Regiment together at our dances gave way, I fear, to anger: “What signifies that?”—“He don’t remember.”—“He god no god at all.” Men muttered in small cabals or threatened one another by the fireside, cutting each other with their eyes and hissing, vaunting superiority in their familiarity with the Unseen. All claimed to recall a better rite, and none would brook the others’.
I feared there should be violence. Better Joe rose up and, his eyes closed, his arms out, began to cry curses in his own language.
It is a testament to our confraternity, however, that a curious ground of agreement was eventually reached: the necessity of concealing all mourning at the smallpox burials, and displaying only dancing and festival triumph.
This agreement struck me at first with astonishment; but when ’twas explained to us by Isaac the Joiner, glowing with compromise, I saw its rectitude, and the confluence was so appropriate in its measures that I was deeply moved: For those of the Regiment who maintain that the disease is spread among us by pestilential spirits, funeral celebrations are necessary to deceive these malicious beings into believing that we think them of no account, that they might pass on and leave the rest of us unharmed. For those who believe the smallpox is but the expression of the Christian God’s will, there is no cause for aught but celebration in a death, which is a liberation from this flesh.
And so, tomorrow night, we shall hold the first of these grim fêtes to inter the dead and trick the gods.