“Captain Cary seemed out of sorts that night during the first watch. He said something to the helmsman, who couldn’t understand what he said. I was near at the time, time-keeping, and I couldn’t understand either; he spoke so thickly. Then the next day he fell really ill. He came down to breakfast dragging one leg and making a noise in his throat as though he was trying to swallow or trying to speak. He couldn’t do either; he couldn’t eat nor drink nor say what was the matter. At first they thought that something was stuck in his throat, but it wasn’t that. Mr. Dorney said he thought it was hydrophobia, and Mr. Hopkins thought it was more like lockjaw. There didn’t seem to be much pain, but he was frightfully distressed. He kept trying to explain what was the matter or what should be done, but nobody could understand what he said, and it weighed upon him frightfully that people couldn’t understand him. Mr. Dorney said he cried.
“They tried to get him to lie down, but he seemed worse, lying down. He was very much worse next day. You see, sir, he was an old man. He’d never been ill before and the worry of not being able to speak or swallow or sleep broke him up.
“Old Jellybags went aft to be near him in case of a call that night; so as to give the steward a rest. Old Jellybags was in a blue funk about it, because we all thought that it was hydrophobia and that he’d be bitten. Still, he said he wasn’t going to let any da . . . I mean any O.S., sir, look after Captain Cary, while there was anyone in the half deck to do it.
“We helped him shift his bed aft. We envied him having all night in. Wolfram saw him at the beginning of the first watch; he said that Captain Cary seemed quieter. I suppose that that was about a quarter past eight.
“The steward peeped in on them at coffee-time next morning. He didn’t like their looks, so he called Mr. Hopkins. Captain Cary was unconscious, but still fighting this thing in his throat; and poor old Jellybags had caught it: he couldn’t speak nor swallow, but seemed trying to clear his throat. I can’t explain it, sir, but it was horrid to see: they felt it so.”
“What was the passenger, this Father Garsinton, doing,” Sard asked. “Most priests in the tropics have some knowledge of medicine; couldn’t he help or suggest something?”
“Yes, sir. He said that he had seen nothing like it. He examined the patients and said that their hearts were very fluttery. He said that the poison must have come on board in the air, from the norther, the day we sailed. He said that it must have come from some very poisonous place away up north, where there is no sun to kill germs, and that it came in at the skylight.
“He said that it must have come in at the skylight because the first things it attacked were the geraniums just under the skylight, that then it attacked the canaries, close to, and then spread to Captain Cary, who was so often there, and from him to poor old Jellybags.
“Mr. Hopkins said, ‘We’re certainly carrying some tropical disease, it’s in the cabin where the Captain and Old Jellybags have been sleeping. We’ll sulphur out all the cabins.’
“So we sealed all the cabins, both fo’c’sles and both deckhouses and sulphured them out. Then when we unsealed them, we mopped them all over with carbolic solution. We reckoned that that must have disinfected the ship.