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Island Castaways, New England’s Huddled Masses Yearning to Get Well

Island castaways don’t have it easy. Just ask Robinson Crusoe. Yet, for centuries, medical and political authorities relied on the general inaccessibility of islands to isolate patients for whom they had no effective therapies.

In that tradition, New England governments made routine use of coastal islands to isolate patients and to protect the mainland populations from potential contagion and epidemics.

Here are seven islands, once home to island castaways in New England.

Rainsford Island

Tiny Rainsford Island in Boston Harbor may get even tinier as rising seas threaten to cut it in two. But at one time its eleven acres held a quarantine hospital, an almshouse, a reformatory and a pauper’s graveyard. The quarantine hospital moved to Rainsford in 1737 from nearby Spectacle Island. A smallpox hospital was added to Rainsford in 1832.

Even as public health practices improved and vaccines for many communicable diseases became available, the island continued as an offshore dumping ground for delinquents, unwed mothers, the indigent, the mentally ill—in other words, society’s undesirables.

Today, according to a recent Boston Globe article, the island still holds the remains of 1,777 of “Boston’s poor, diseased, and unwanted from Colonial times to the dawn of the 20th century.”

Quarantine hospital on Rainsford Island

Spectacle Island

The Boston Customs House maintained a quarantine hospital on Spectacle Island. In April 1721, a British ship arrived in the harbor with smallpox cases onboard. The infection spread ashore before authorities could move the ship and quarantine the infected crew and passengers at the island hospital.

The Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, noted in his diary, “The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town.”

Spectacle Island.

Mather had other worries. He advocated a primitive method of inoculating people against smallpox. Called variolation, the technique involved exposing healthy people to the exudate of other smallpox patients in the hope of producing a mild, manageable form of the disease.

The idea was wildly unpopular, and angry mobs threatened Mather and his allies. It was, in effect, the beginning of the anti-vaccine movement in America. Not until 1796 did Britain’s Edward Jenner use cowpox exudates to develop the first safe and effective vaccine against smallpox.

Noddles Island Castaways

Noddle’s Island doesn’t exist anymore. It belongs to the artificial peninsula that makes up Logan Airport. But once it was an island and the site of a hospital for the French naval fleet. During a smallpox outbreak in 1764, the island served as the site for an inoculation hospital.

Variolation inoculation against the pox was dangerous. So, an island seemed like the best place to contain the inoculated patients. It also kept out the anti-inoculation public.

In 1802, Harvard’s Benjamin Waterhouse used the island hospital to experiment with some of Jenner’s new cowpox vaccine. Waterhouse vaccinated 19 children with cowpox, then took them to the Noddle’s hospital to expose them to smallpox patients for 20 days. (They had no “informed consent” forms to sign in those days.) None of the vaccinated children developed smallpox.

Benjamin Waterhouse, 1833 painting by Rembrandt Peale.

Six years after the Noddle’s Island cowpox experiment, the Massachusetts Medical Society reported…”persons who undergo the cowpox are thereby rendered as incapable of being affected by the virus of smallpox as if they had undergone the latter disease.”

Deer Island

Deer Island in Boston Harbor lost its island status when the 1938 hurricane filled in the channel between it and the mainland.

But in 1677 it was an island and a convenient spot to establish a quarantine station for holding smallpox cases. It evolved into an important quarantine hospital in the late 1840’s as vast numbers of Irish refugees arrived.

Many already suffered from typhus and dysentery. Between 1847 and 1849 the island hospital received some 4,800 people. A few years later, the facilities expanded to support Boston’s regular population of criminals, delinquents and paupers—very much like the earlier residents of Rainsford Island.

Almshouse, 1851

Widow’s Island

Almost lost in the archipelago of Maine’s coastline off North Haven is Widow’s Island, sometimes written as Widow or Widows. In the 19th century, the U.S. Navy built a quarantine station on the island to house sailors suffering from a tropical disease called yellow fever. A deadly infection, it regularly caused epidemics in the tropics and in American cities as far north as Boston. Scientists didn’t know what caused yellow fever or how it spread from person to person.

The Navy built a temporary facility in 1885, and then an imposing 50-bed hospital in 1888. But it never quarantined yellow fever patients on the island. An 1892 report from the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery noted various repairs to the island hospital. But “no cases of yellow fever have been received at Widows Island.”

After describing the cleaning, fumigating and disinfecting of two ships in the New York Navy Yard, the report reached a conclusion. “It is probable that ships in the future infected with yellow fever will enter the quarantine port at New York….”

So much for Widow’s hospital.

Aerial view of Widow’s Island

In 1900, researchers in Cuba discovered mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever. So the elaborate and expensive efforts to disinfect and decontaminate ships and cargo was both unnecessary and useless. Eliminate the mosquito and you’ve eliminated yellow fever. The Widow’s Island hospital got torn down in 1935.

Gallops

Back in Boston, a 2018 winter storm exposed the forgotten graves of hundreds of smallpox victims on Gallops Island. Like many other islands scattered about Boston Harbor, the city used Gallops as a quarantine station.

NOAA map of the Boston Harbor Islands, home of countless island castaways.

A hospital for immigrants was built in 1866, and by 1886 the staff was examining over 33,000 passengers annually. A smallpox outbreak during 1872-73 sent a hundred Boston-area patients to the island. In 1873, two additional buildings were erected for cholera and yellow fever patients. In 1878, another hospital went up for passengers suffering from ‘ship fever,’ otherwise known as epidemic typhus. The following year, the old smallpox hospital was torn down and replaced.

Construction on the island, and the numbers of passengers with a variety of illnesses, hint at the vast number of immigrants passing through the port of Boston in the 19th century.

Despite the large number of ship passengers to examine and patients to quarantine and treat, the island also served as a site for the production of experimental anti-toxin. In 1891, German bacteriologists prepared anti-diphtheria anti-toxin in the blood of horses. They then used it to treat a patient dying of diphtheria. It worked, and serum-based anti-toxins, or ‘passive immunization’ became the standard treatment for many bacterial infections until the discovery of antibiotics.

(Passive immunization is now being revived to treat some COVID-19 patients.)

The Federal government took control of the island hospital during World War I and finally closed it in 1937. Today, the dead still remain at Gallops, now an island park.

Two lepers refused entrance to town, 14th century.

Penikese

Stranger than a yellow fever hospital in chilly Maine is a leper colony in Massachusetts. The U.S. has never had a large number of cases of leprosy, now called Hansen’s Disease. Still, the social stigma associated with leprosy, and scientific ignorance about its transmission and pathology, compelled local, state and federal governments to quarantine anyone suspected of having this ancient affliction.

Massachusetts was no different. The first known case in the state occurred in 1875. The infected man was isolated on Gallops Island. Immigration brought more cases and Massachusetts began looking for a site to build a leprosarium. But no one wanted it at the state’s infirmary in Tewksbury or on Cape Cod. In 1905, the state bought the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay.

For the next 16 years, 36 patients and their doctor lived on the island in a smattering of buildings and cottages.

The patients were prisoners, but not criminals. Communicable disease has often permitted that tricky distinction. Yet, the Penikese patients—mostly immigrants—were not abandoned entirely. Doctors tried to treat their disease. A 1976 research paper described experimental “drug therapy at the Massachusetts Leper Colony, 1905-1921.” The invention of wireless radio in the 1910s also gave the islanders a link to passing ships and the Marconi News Service broadcasts.

The National Leprosarium in Carville, La., opened in 1921. The Massachusetts governor wasted no time packing the Penikese Island castaways onto a southbound train. The state fumigated the island’s emptied buildings and then dynamited them.

For the next 50 years, the island served as a bird sanctuary. Then between 1973 and 1980 the island again became a place of isolation for some of society’s troublesome members. The Penikese Island School for delinquent boys found a temporary home among the graves and wreckage of the vanished leper colony.

Island Castaways Remembered

Penikese Island in 2005.

Penikese may be an obscure island that once housed a small number of people with a rare infection, but it has not been forgotten. A book about the island’s inhabitants was published in 1997. The poet, Eve Rifkah, wrote Outcasts in 2010. She listed information about the island’s individual residents in the back of her book.

Islands often appear convenient solutions to all manner of problems. Alcatraz held criminals. Elba held a would-be emperor. Robben held apartheid’s political prisoners. North Brother held Typhoid Mary.

The islands all eventually gave up their inmates and patients to become parks, sanctuaries and tourist attractions.

For more information: See Paul Cyr’s The Exiles of Penikese Island: Politics, Prejudice and the Public Health. See also Richard J. Kahn’s The Widow’s Island Yellow Fever Quarantine Hospital in Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1885-1904: A Medical, Political, and Social History.

The author of this story about island castaways, Edward McSweegan is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history.

Images: By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2007_02_19_iad-bos_41.JPG, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2180315, and Widow’s Island courtesy Google Maps. This story updated in 2023.

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Exactly How New England’s Indian Population Was Decimated

Even before European colonists thinned the Indian population in New England, war and disease had already begun their dirty work.

A team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists studied the health of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere over 7,000 years. Native American health had declined even before Columbus came to the New World, they concluded in a book published in August 2017, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers found Indians’ health got worse because they came to depend on corn. They also began to live in denser communities, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly.

Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century.

Indians lament death by disease.

About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17^th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians.

A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct.

This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population.

Indian Population Before the Pilgrims

The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16^th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later.

Early map of the Grand Banks.

By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000.

The 1616 Plague

In 1616, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague.

Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’

As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants.

John Smith

English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him.

“God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.”

Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’

Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’

Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks.

That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem.

Wampanoags

The plague of 1616-1618 cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston, but was far less severe south of Plymouth.

King Philip

A year after the Pilgrims arrived, their Indian visitor Samoset told them, ‘about foure yeares agoe, all the Inhabitants dyed of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor childe remaining, as indeed we haue found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claime unto it.’

“Thousands of them died,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor. “They not being able to bury one another, their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.”

Enough Wampanoag Indians survived to resist the colonists’ land grab during King Philip’s War in 1675.

But disease persisted among the tribe, weakening it further. By the war’s outbreak, the Wampanoag Indian population fell to 2,500 from as many as 5,500. Those who weren’t killed in the war were sold into slavery, moved to praying towns or migrated west. King Philip’s War virtually obliterated the Wampanoag.

Narragansett

Roger Williams with Narragansett Indians

The Narragansett were the biggest tribe in New England, with 7,800 members including 300 on Block Island. Protected by Narragansett Bay, they didn’t come into contact with the white invaders as early or as frequently as northern tribes. The great plague of 1616 didn’t affect them.

Because the Narragansetts were so much larger, Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace with the Plymouth colonists to ally them against his Narragansett rivals.

The Narragansetts’ first epidemic was smallpox in 1633, which killed 700 of them. Chronic ailments further reduced their numbers to 5,000 by the outbreak of King Philip’s War. Wrote Roger Williams in 1643,

They commonly abound with children, and increase mightily; except the plague fall amongst them, or other lesser sicknesses, and then having no means of recovery, they perish wonderfully.

Infectious disease terrified the Narragansetts. “I have often seene a poore House left alone in the wild Woods, all being fled, the living not being able to bury the dead, so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but Houses and the whole Towne take flight,” wrote Williams.

The Narragansetts tried to stay out of King Philip’s War, but after English colonists massacred as many as 1,100 of them at the Great Swamp Fight in 1675, they had no choice but to fight. After King Philip’s War fewer than 500 Narragansetts remained. They were allowed to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, R.I., where they frequently intermarried with African-Americans and Indians from other tribes.

The Nauset

The Nauset, a tribe of about 8,000 on Cape Cod and the islands, were also apparently unaffected by the plague of 1616. But other diseases gradually reduced their numbers. The 2,100 Nausets on Cape Cod were down to 1,250 by 1700, and all had been converted to Christianity. By 1660, they had been driven into the Mashpee Reservation; the population of 2,100 Nausets fell to 1,250 by 1700.

Disease had also reduced the Indian population of 6,000 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket by more than half, to 2,330.

Connecticut’s Indian Population

Before the English arrived, an Algonkian tribe that became the Pequots moved into Connecticut from the Connecticut River to the Rhode Island border, displacing the people who lived there. There were about 3,000 of them, and the population remained stable with little European contact and in the absence of war and severe epidemic disease.

War devastated the Pequot Indian population.

Then English colonists and Mohegan warriors attacked them in the Pequot War of 1637. Hundreds were killed or captured and hundreds more fled to southwestern Connecticut and Long Island. Only 200 were left by war’s end, and they were absorbed into the Mohegan tribe.

Shortly after the Pequot War in 1643, there were about 2,200 Pequot-Mohegans. Smallpox, flu, diphtheria and measles reduced their numbers to 750 by 1705. By then, the colonists had already herded them into Connecticut reservations at Ledyard and Groton.

One Connecticut tribe tried to protect itself by building a fort. A thousand Mattabesic Indians sealed their fate when they enclosed themselves in a palisade fort in Hartford County. By 1634, smallpox and plague killed all but 50 of them with terrifying swiftness.

Of the 3,000 other Connecticut Indians in the vicinity – Podunk, Mattabesic, Hammonasset and Wongunk – most who survived sold their land and moved away.

Reservations

During the 17^th century, life was short for the English colonists as well as the Indian population. By 1700, life expectancy in New England rose to 45-50 years, 15 years higher than in old England.

The Europeans had large families, and the colonist population grew 3 percent a year, doubling every 23 years. The land-hungry colonists pushed the remaining Indian population into warfare, and then into reservations and to parts west.

Before the Europeans arrived, about 10,000 Penobscot Indians lived in what is now Maine. The population collapsed from infectious diseases and fighting between the Iroquois over the fur trade. The Penobscot sided with the French during four Anglo-French wars, which the French ultimately lost.

The Indian Population Makes a Comeback

Both the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy ceded their land to Massachusetts (which later became Maine). They had only a reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. By 1800, the Penobscot Indian population fell to 500.

Many Indians converted to Christianity and moved to one of 14 praying towns. Indians moved to reservations in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and Fall River in Massachusetts.

During the 20^th century, New England’s Indian population made a comeback. But that is a story for another day.

With thanks to The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century by S.F. Cook and to The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose. This story about New England’s Indian population was updated in 2022.

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William Fry, Pirate, Finds a Permanent Home – Gibbeted on Nixes Mate

In July of 1726, William Fry stood trial in Boston for murdering a ship’s captain and embarking on a monthlong piracy spree. The trial lasted but two days, and Fry was convicted. Within days, he would be paraded to the gallows and hanged.

But he didn’t go as most did, remorseful and tearful. Rather, when the cart arrived to haul him off, he jumped up and enjoyed the parade, waving flowers in one hand. When asked for his final words, he sought no forgiveness. Rather, he warned other ship captains to treat their crews well if they wanted to avoid being killed at sea.

And as the hangman dropped a poorly made noose over his head, Fry scoffed at the man. He informed him: ‘You do not know your trade.” Fry adjusted the noose and slipped it into place before dropping to his death.

The flamboyant Fry’s body would soon hang on Nixes Mate, a small island in Outer Boston Harbor near Long Island. It serves as a navigational aid to sailors.

William Fry

Fry’s story elicited tremendous public interest, as did all cases involving pirates. The prolific minister Cotton Mather had tried desperately to coax a confession and repentance from Fry. Mather took pride in his reputation as a minister who could convert hardened criminals to religion as they headed to the gallows.

Crowds attended the sermons he preached at hangings, where he tried to serve up a cautionary tale for young people. He would often furnish the condemned men with prayers to recite as they went to the gallows.

In Fry, however, he met his match. Fry had a history as a boxer in Jamaica. Though he had sailed with pirates before, he signed on the Elizabeth Snow as a legitimate boatswain. It’s not precisely clear what caused him to turn pirate and lead a mutiny, but he spelled out the facts at trial.

Nixes Mate

Fry and two other men seized control of the ship. They offered the captain a chance to jump overboard, but he pleaded for his life. So Fry and his compatriots shoved him over. As the struggling captain grabbed at a line to save himself, one of the attackers cleaved off his hand with an ax, sending him to his death.

The mate fared no better. When he fought for his life, he was struck with the ax across the shoulder and sent tumbling into the sea.

Poor Pirate

Fry turned into a remarkably poor pirate. After seizing the Elizabeth Snow in May, he attempted to seize another vessel, but ran it aground off North Carolina. He seized a second vessel, but the pilot on board outsmarted him. The pilot deliberately sailed past Martha’s Vineyard, claiming he didn’t know his location. Then, as the vessel neared Boston, he overpowered Fry and with the help of other captives sailed the ship into Boston Harbor. That set Fry’s appointment with the noose.

Cotton Mather

Fry’s standoff with Cotton Mather was equally fruitless. Though Fry never buckled on the gallows, Mather publicized his case in a pamphlet and made him look every bit a dunce. Though Fry insisted he had suffered “bad usage” at the hands of the Elizabeth Snow’s captain, Mather never publicized his complaints. Some historians have noted that the vessel was a slave ship, and the captains of such ships were often ruthless with their crew. Others note that many sailors who turned pirate were impressed into service, inspiring their decision to step outside the law.

Regardless, Mather had his own uses for Fry’s story. He used it to highlight the end that comes to depraved, wicked and stupid people. The town officials had an even more gruesome use for the pirate. Gibbeting was the practice of stringing up a corpse and hanging it in the harbor as a warning to other would-be pirates. And that’s exactly what happened to Fry, on the island of Nixes Mate. (Then called Nick’s Mate.) His bones rattled in the winds for many months.

Display at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. Replica of Edward Jordan’s gibbet.

Nixes Mate

The island itself, now part of the Boston Harbor Islands owned by the National Park Service, has a curious history. Granted to harbor pilot John Gallop in 1636, he used it for grazing sheep. At that time it was reported to be 12 acres in area. Over time, however, the island has been reduced dramatically in size to its present area of about 200-square feet. Upon which stands a granite base and a wooden pyramid that acts as daymarker for sailors trying to navigate into the harbor.

Legend says the island was named for a Captain Nix or Nick, murdered by his first mate. The mate was tried and hanged on the island. In his final words, he protested his innocence. If he was hanged, he warned, the island would sink into the sea as testament to the wrong done to him.

The island did disappear after his hanging.

But a better explanation for the island’s disappearance: People quarried the island for rocks used as ballast in sailing ships.

The actual origin of the name remains lost.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Nixes Mate By Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA – Nixes Mate, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44427125. Gibbeted pirate By Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada – DSC07278 – Gibbet, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66916336.

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