Last week, we began our look at the cholera epidemic of 1854 which bears frightening similarities to the threat of Ebola today. Early in the epidemic, the borough council mandated that the graves of victims be confined to the section of Lapeyrouse cemetery running along Colville Street, abutting the western wall. Less than a week later, gravediggers were swamped and emergency measures were mandated, compelling the opening of trenches as mass graves wherein the corpses were sprinkled with lime to smother the scent of death.Refuse carts were diverted to collecting the dead and trundling them to the cemetery. Symptoms of the dread disease included diarrhoea, fever and muscular pains. Sometimes a deathlike coma was the result and several unfortunates were buried alive. One hapless Indian was about to suffer such a grim fate when one of the soldiers near the trenches noticed movement in his limbs. He recovered and was given a job catching feral goats which roamed the town. His nickname ever after was Lapeau (short for Lapeyrouse).
The Government tried several remedies such as burning barrels of pitch to 'purify the air' and distributing ineffective medicines, since no one had yet made the vital connection between the sanitation of the city and the plague. One vivid memory of the epidemic is written by Lewis Osborne Inniss who lived through this ordeal as a child:"My first recollections are in connection with the epidemic of Asiatic cholera which visited Trinidad in 1854 and swept away thousands of its inhabitants. I was six years of age and distinctly remember rows of carts driving past our house at Newtown, piled up with empty coffins being carried out to Maraval and Diego Martin and the queer rumbling sound they made. I still have a cut-glass decanter in my possession which has a story attached to it. "It is this–In order to render first aid as soon as possible the Government Medical Department gave free to every householder who wish, a supply of two mixtures with directions for their use, and the decanter in question contained one mixture which along with the other was kept on the sideboard at our house. "I was the youngest of three brothers and imbued with the usual curiosity of small boys, we wondered what those mixtures tasted like."
In San Fernando, the dead were interred in trenches in an old cemetery on the slope below what is today the National Center for Persons with Disabilities. The borough council of that town even had to issue an ordinance to prevent the dead from being buried in private lands which was at the time a common practice in the town. On the sugar estates, the Indians died without count and in several areas, there are still mounds which mark their mass graves. Lapeyrouse cemetery still has many graves along its western wall which mark early victims' burial places but also a couple of the mass graves which were dug in 1854. These were later adorned with memorials from families whose loved ones were interred with strangers. A bare and empty space which contains the remains of many dead was endowed with a plaque to three children of Dr L A A DeVerteuil (1807-1900) who was one of the heroes of the epidemic and one of the grand old men of the 19th Century. He worked himself senseless attending to the sick and dying but the scourge struck his home, and three of his young children perished within hours of each other. The French-inscribed epitaph reads:"Marie Antoinette Clemence Nee le 18 Juin 1850, Marie Antoine Gaston de Verteuil Nee 6 Julliet 1848, Francois Marie Gaston de Verteuil Nee 9 Janvier 1854, Mort de 18 Septembre 1854. CHOLERA."
Cholera continued to devastate the island through October 1854. San Fernando was particularly hard hit with people being interred in private lands rather than the cemetery and on the estates, the Indians fell rapidly.In several countryside areas, there are mounds which mark the mass graves of the Indian labourers of the estates.November saw a wane in the disease with the daily death toll in PoS averaging ten to 15 a day, down from a high of 40 per day in early October. There are still no figures to give us an exact idea, but it is estimated that in the capital alone, nearly 2,000 people died and there is no count either for those who succumbed in the rural districts. One wonders today, if proper quarantine measures had been implemented, if so many would have died.
