My daughter keeps asking if coronavirus is like the plague and each time I respond, I start to explain “no, not really..” and I try and work my way through the virus v. bacteria debate and the severity of the illnesses and physical symptoms until I think I’ve got all the facts covered.
Then she blind-sides me and asks to write a ‘news report’ from the time of the Great Plague (one of the perks of lockdown schooling – picking her own topics to learn). So I look through the facts with her and wouldn’t you know it? It becomes harder to say “no, not really..” and I have to reframe my thinking.
Let me explain..
A familiar sight on the streets of London in 1665
THE PLAGUE
Plague and its wildfire-spread has been a constant bane of humanity since the first seafarers began exploring Earth’s continents. Known in the fourteenth century as the Black Death, Pestilence or the Great Mortality (amongst other dread-inducing descriptors), the bacteria spread from country to country via flea and rat, ship and cargo, passed rapidly through human populations via flea bites, bodily fluids, infected tissue and human coughs. The disease swept through Asia, Africa and Europe, over millenia, killing indiscriminately.
The bacterium Yersina Pestis has been recorded from Ancient Egypt, Neolithic Sweden, Bronze Age Russia, Iron Age Armenia, Roman Byzantine Empire, recurrent outbreaks in the Medieval Mediterranean, China and India and in every century since. The deadly bacteria still hovers menacingly in modern day Madagascar and sub-Saharan Africa, occasionally surfacing to wreak its special brand of havoc.
Yersina Pestis, carried by fleas, originated in North Africa, India and China, spread by Nile rats and Indian Black rats and Oriental rats as global trade increased with the industrialisation of the world. The rats hopped off in ports around the globe or merchants handed infected goods over, spreading the bacterium throughout global trade-routes. in many ways, the Plague was the disease of global trade. Nowadays, it’s treatable with antibiotics, if the people in need of the medicines can access them.
In the year 1665, an outbreak of the Plague arrived in England, this time known as the Great Plague. The United Kingdom’s response to the arrival of the plague is worth considering. Charles II had been restored to the monarchy after the death of Oliver Cromwell (whose head still stood on a pole outside Whitehall), Samuel Pepys worked for the Admiralty and six-year old Daniel Defoe (later to write about the plague with reference to his Uncle’s diaries) lived in City of London, which bustled with wealthy nobles and merchants, alongside the poorest city-dwellers. The plague had been raging in mainland Europe for many years and trading vessels arriving from infected cities had been quarantined on the Thames before arrival. The quarantine wasn’t enough to stop the spread of Yersina Pestis.
The Great Plague spread on fleas and rats in the early months of 1665, outwards from the docks to the poor parishioners of St. Giles and as rumours of suspicious deaths reached the Privy Council, Justices of the Peace were sent to investigate. Where the JP’s discovered plague-affected victims, entire households were sealed-up.
The year progressed and May brought warmer weather and further instances of plague-related deaths. The Privy Council closed ale houses and limited the use of lodging houses, but the number of cases in St. Giles continued to rise and constables began to quarantine the area.
The measures came too late and by July of the same year, the plague ran rampant through the City. Charles II fled for the country with his court, merchants and professionals closed their businesses and left London. The Lord Mayor remained to govern an eerily quiet London and others (including Samuel Pepys) chose to stay behind. Clergymen, physicians and apothecaries remained to carry out their duties, tending to the scared and sick inhabitants of London. As time passed, other city-dwellers wishing to leave, could only do so with a Certificate of Good Health, which became harder to obtain as the disease raged on.
It became illegal to go to theatres and football games and other group activities. People displaying signs of sickness were told to isolate in their own homes, eventually a red ‘X’ was to be painted on infected household’s doors. Fires were lit to cleanse the air, cats and dogs were killed in their thousands to try and prevent the spread of the disease, and plague doctors experimented with ‘cures’.
By September 1665, the Great Plague had peaked and Charles II returned to his London court in February of the following year (just seven months before the City would be ravaged by flame in the Great Fire of London).
Were there any details in the basic Great Plague list-of-facts worth comparing to Covid-19?
Well actually, yes.
Government Response to Plague Outbreak in London, 1665:
Quarantine
Self isolation
Closure of shops and businesses
Closure of ale houses and lodging houses
Banning of theatre, sports events and group meetings
Wealthy Residents’ response to Plague Outbreak in London, 1665:
Flee the City to take up residence in country homes
(or) Stay and wait out the disease
Poor Residents’ response to Plague Outbreak in London, 1665:
Banned from leaving the City
Banned from leaving their homes
Care-giving services response to Plague Outbreak in London 1665:
Continue caring for and comforting the vulnerable, sick and dying
Continue comforting and bringing hope to the residents of London.
Sound familiar?
This virulent bacteria has plagued the world population for a very, very long time. But it is not alone in its contagious, deadly spread. Bacterium and viruses alike want to spread and devour, to survive. Smallpox, measles, yellow fever, dysentry, typhoid, cholera, coronavirus.. Deadly diseases all, and largely managed (or avoided) through medical research and application.
The lockdown grocery shopper
THE CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19)
The common coronavirus ancestor is thought to have developed some 10,000 years ago, from a much older strain of the virus. It is usually carried in bats and birds but passes onto other animals and humans who have contact with virus-carrying creatures. Over the last twenty years, human coronavirus strains and diseases have occurred repeatedly in Saudi Arabia and China, spreading outwards at alarming rates before waning out and disappearing from the public perception.
This time, the Covid-19 coronavirus has spread across the globe in a matter of weeks through travel and trade. Holiday-makers, modern-day explorers, business-travellers and traders have brought the coronavirus back from their travels and the virus is thriving in human hosts from China to America. but the process is the same.. the virus hitches a ride and spreads through human contact.
Even so, this Coronavirus Pandemic that we are living through right now has taken us all by surprise. We hear the phrases ‘strange times’ and ‘unprecedented times’ over and over and we start to believe that we are the only generations who have had to live through these measures, but this is nothing new. The human response to deadly contagion has been established for centuries: Shield ourselves from the problem until it goes away (unless you’re a care-worker, chronicler, essential worker or a government official keeping order).
Our pubs and theatres are closed; businesses, shops and schools are closed; sports events and public meetings are banned; we are in lock-down, self-isolating in our houses with our families whether we are sick or not. And all the while, nurses and doctors tend to the sick; police and military personnel keep law and order; shop-workers keep our shelves stocked; kind-hearted individuals provide essential care to the vulnerable; councils run on skeleton staff and journalists document these ‘precedented times’.
There is something comforting, I think, in realising that we are not alone in history in facing the constriction of isolation and aiming to halt the spread of a deadly, indiscriminate disease. We are well-placed in these times, to ride out the course of the pandemic with hindsight to guide us and foresight to keep us positive and ready to take up our places in the world once the threat of the virus has subsided.
Patience is more easily achieved with a bit of perspective, service to our neighbours and a heavy helping of gratitude. And there’s nothing like the long-view over centuries and millennia of human existence to provide a strong dose of perspective.
Be it bacterium or viruses that threaten us, rest assured, we’ve lived through this as a species before, and every time the diseases are encountered, we learn more about them and learn to adjust our behaviours and become more prepared for future outbreaks.
.. And next time my daughter asks if living through the coronavirus lockdown is like living through the Great Plague, I’ve got my answer prepared.
Thomas Wilson was a reckless young jake, carousing and imbibing in the meanest taverns in London. The son of a Baronet, motherless since his 10th year, what did he have to lose? His brother WiIliam would inherit the Baronetcy, his brother Edward was destined to be ordained, his sisters wed for love into good families, his other brothers were settled in their ways. Thomas though, he felt the pull of something else, some edge of danger beckoned him, some devil on his shoulder that whispered of the delights of the night and the taste of ale and colonial rum.
Eastbourne, his home town, stifled him, made him feel small and unimportant. A surfeit of siblings had the same effect, wherever Thomas looked, he found no validation. He was one of many, unimportant, yet bound by his father’s protestant conscience and unflinching sense of duty. Thomas was supposed to be good and honourable.
But it was hard.
Cromwell was dead, stricken by malaria some fourteen years earlier. Charles II had been restored to the monarchy and Cromwell’s puritanical, sober rule had ended, now the King and the country celebrated. Too much, some would say. Revellers teetering past Westminster Hall could toast to Cromwell’s severed head, excavated from his grave after Parliament declared the execution of Charles I as regicide.
London was in recovery, from the devastations of the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, two consecutive years in London’s fateful history that saw hundreds of thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of homes destroyed and residents displaced. This new London was one of brick and stone with wide streets and a surfeit of coffee houses.
The year was 1675 and work was just beginning on the new St. Paul’s cathedral, Charles II was attempting to close down the coffee houses – hotbeds of sedition and scandal according to the crown – and the foundation stone for the new Royal Greenwich Observatory was set in place.
The social divide was as marked as ever, beggars and idlers lined the streets alongside orphaned children and shoeblackers, street hawkers and labourers, prostitutes and destitutes. Butchers, blacksmiths and brewers traded with lawyers, MPs and bankers. London was on the up, but only for some.
Amidst the social and structural turmoil, ruthless press gangers and spirits scoured the streets for young, unwary gullibles to lure onto ships bound for the new world or the wars of empire. The press gangers bundled men onto naval ships to fight for their King and country in foreign wars. The spirits kidnapped children and young adults and sent them to a life of indentured servitude in the colonies. Both were to be feared.
A press gang operating in London c.1780. Note the Tower of London and ships at the Thames Dock in the background.
William Bullock, in 1649, was recorded as stating that “..the usual way of getting servants, hath been by a sort of men nick-named ”spirits..”
The spirits operated a network of organised crime – backed by ships captains, merchants and corrupt officials, henchmen, fences and petty thieves. They targeted the poor and helpless, street beggars and street children, criminals and idlers. Cellars, attics and tap-rooms of London served as temporary prison cells where the stolen people were hidden until they could be passed onto ships at anchor in the Thames.*
Thomas, inebriated and out of his wits, was kidnapped and tossed on board a Jamaica-bound ship. The British had taken Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655 and now many of the British-Jamaican settlers were land owners invested in growing cash crops for trade – a lucrative business – but a back breaking and laborious one. Jamaican planters needed a workforce, and once they had worked through the willing labourers, they invited ‘spirits’ to ‘recruit’ fresh young blood for their enterprises.
Indentured servants were forced to work the land in insufferable heat as they worked out their term of servitude – ostensibly between four and seven years, though many were tricked into much longer contracts – or died before they achieved freedom.
The first Jamaican slaves (after the British takeover) were white, British men, women and children, expending their youth in the hard-baked Caribbean soil. They worked for free, had to buy the meagre clothes they were permitted to wear and accept their meagre food rations.
Pity poor Thomas Wilson of Eastbourne, son of Baronet William Wilson I, Sheriff of Sussex, as he sweated and ached in perpetual servitude on a plantation so far from home. His father, under no illusion as to his sons predilections for wine and women, thought his son lost even before his son was lost. William passed in ignorance as to his wayward son’s fate until a letter arrived at Bourne Place addressed to him from the colonies.
The letter was a dreadful tale of woe from a truly attrite son, practically prodigal in his desire for home. William Wilson the elder sought the counsel of his fellow townsmen and his pleas fell upon the ears of Captain Francis Scarlett, a native of Eastbourne with lands on the Wag Water River in the Parish of St. Andrews, Jamaica.
Captain Scarlett, having sailed to Jamaica, made enquiries about a plantation servant named Thomas Wilson and “succeeded in effecting his freedom.”* The unlucky Thomas, now blessed with release at the command of his father, bided a while with his saviour before returning to Eastbourne. Though it is not to be assumed that the young man changed his ways entirely, for a clause in William Wilson the elder’s will, read in 1685 on the event of his demise, mentioned ‘a sum of money to be employed for the benefit of the family of Thomas Wilson, a son, “until he shall become a civil and orderly person, fit to employ and manage money”.’
So concludes the curious tale of an Eastbourne man spirited away to Jamaica in the early days of empire.
More stories to emerge from the annals of Eastbourne history include tales from a Neolithic enclosure; Rituals at a Bronze Age settlement in the marshes, a Flotilla of fishing ships rescuing British soldiers from a beach in France after the Dunkirk evacuations and.. well.. you might just have to buy the book to find out more!
References:
Jordan, Don and Walsh, Michael, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, NYU Press, 2008
Here’s a short extract from a children’s novel I’m working on, based on the moon, space archaeology, space junk and climate change (and space mice!)
Chapter One: Footprints on the Moon
There’s a photo on the moon.
Solar radiation has made it a little blurry.
There’s a human family living on the moon, locked in time in a blurry photo.
A mum in a smart blue coat with a short, smart haircut; a dad wearing a white shirt and tie; a blonde boy in a smart shirt and striped tie, one hand casually stuffed into a trouser pocket; a boy in a red polo shirt and smart trousers: Smiling at the camera. They’re sitting on the moon, staring out into space and the great blue-green earth spiralling around them.
There’s a plastic bag on the moon, that houses a family locked in time in a blurry photo.
If you look up at the moon tonight, the family will be looking back at you, smiling from inside their translucent, plastic home. You could wave at them, if you like.
The photograph sits lightly on the dusty surface.
It casts its own shadow.
There’s a footprint near the photo, made by the man who took the photo to the moon. The footprint has been there as long as the photo has.
A tyre track curves past the photograph, there is no wind to blow it away.
The photograph, the footprint, the tyre tracks: they remain where man once stood.
That is not all humans left behind on the moon.
Humans left vehicles, flags and telescopes, cameras and bags of poo. Humans are clever and stupid: Clever to fly from their home planet and explore their neighbouring rocks; clever to forge metal and make engines that can withstand the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere and the chill vacuum of dark-space. Stupid to wreck other cosmic rocks with their debris and disorder; stupid to leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Clever and stupid and oh-so-human.
Those astronauts might return to the moon someday, to search for their left-behind things, their lost and forgotten things. They’ll say it was all an experiment, to see how materials fare on the moon, in the glare of the sun. They’ll say they had no other choice, that things needed leaving behind so they could make their way home.
They can say what they like, they’ll never find those things.
Well, they will find the photograph in its plastic bag.
[End of excerpt]
Thank you for taking the time to read this.. and if you do have any curious 8-12 year olds in your life, please share this excerpt with them and add their comments below.
My husband Jo has been creating some sketches for the illustrations for Moon Base Odin, I think they’re great.. will you let us know what you think about them?
I’m writing a children’s story, about the moon, space archaeology, space junk and climate change.
The story is told from the point of view of a colony of space mice (!) and offers up an opportunity for discussing animals in space.
It’s fun and informative, silly yet serious.
The story is aimed at curious 8-12 year olds and is illustrated by my lovely husband, Jo.
I’ve had a whiff of interest from a publishing company and am having a second edit on it to extend the story a little further.
I’ll be adding illustration samples and chapter extracts to this site very soon.. If there are any curious 8-12 year olds in your life, please ask them for their opinions and comment on the posts.
Her spirit drifted from her body in the darkness of night as she lay in sleep, breathing in then out, in then gone.
Her body lay cold and spiritless in the morning. She walks this earth no more.
All this is as it should be.
Her passing was as inevitable as night following day.
We gathered to remember and Grandma’s life was affirmed, her life had mattered to her family.
Family clustered to feel communal pain and loss and sorrow and we hugged each other and cried and parted.
And life goes on.
For us.
In our separate places, with our separate feelings and sorrow lingers.
And where my loving energy carried me through her death and the touch of her cold body and the fact of it all and supporting my mum who is suffering and my children who are barely able to understand and my extended family who are bereft, my energy has since stuttered and drained from me.
I am so tired.
Where I saw positivity and affirmation, I now see nothing.
I’ve missed something in the grieving process.
Guilt and regret dog me. Did I see her enough in her later years? Did I love her enough?
My heart is heavy and I look around me at those I love and I feel helpless. How is my love enough?
And then something fierce in me rises and shouts:
I am here, I am still here. I am living and breathing and loving and this is my life and though it – and I – am not perfect, I’m doing my best.
And love feels good and fills up what was hollow.
And if love lives on, it is memory and beauty and joy and it must be cherished.
Fare well, spirit of Grandma, wherever you may be.
I will hold my love for you in my heart and remember you always.
I promised a post about Drusillas Park. Here it is!
I love it. Literally. We come at least once a month – though it’s been once a week during these Summer Holidays. Some people I mention it to pull a face and say something like “oh the poor animals” or “zoos are so cruel” or something similar. Like visiting the zoo actually endorses cruelty to animals. It doesn’t.
The Drusillas animals are well loved, well fed and well cared for.
There’s an eight week old baby Macaque – we’ve visited him every week since he’s been born. Yup, he’s that gorgeous! He’s called Mango. Mango the Macaque! He cuddles his mum and tries to walk and climb and jump and peers out of his enclosure at all the crazy humans wandering round his home. He’s utterly contented. So am I when I stand gazing at the little Macaque family.
The baby Common Marmosets are nearing adult size but are still notably young – as are the Rock Hyraxes.
The baby Coatis are also up and about, climbing precariously around the branches of their habitat. The South Downs frame their view of the world, across sweeping fields of potatoes and sweet corn.
I haven’t caught a glimpse of the baby Kookaburra yet but I’m holding out hope.
For there to be baby animals in the zoo, the adult animals must be happy and contented.
Last year’s squirrel monkeys – everyone should spend time in their life watching baby squirrel monkeys – are full of fun and vim and tearing about the treetops.
I read an article in the National Geographic yesterday about Red Pandas being fertile for 24 hours once a year. Last year, the Drusillas Red Pandas gave birth to two healthy babies.
They’re doing something really right!
The young Spectacled Owls have tried to breed two years running, maybe next year they’ll figure it out.
The new ant eat eaters, Olivia and Diego are a treat to observe, as are the flamingos, the Lar Gibbons and the meerkats.
The capybaras are a sight to behold as are the beavers and otters.
The capuchin monkeys are a must-see along with all the other marmosets and monkeys and who couldn’t gaze in wonder at a party of ring tailed lemurs?
For my children, the fun never ends. They’ve been going for five years – with more frequency in the latter years – and their learning opportunities are endless. The outdoor play and soft play provide hours of exercise and temporary friendship and thrills and they’ve both learned to rock climb there.
I could extol the virtues of Drusillas over and over.
Actually, I’ve just convinced myself to go. Perhaps we could fit a couple of hours in later today..
Old age and illness
I promised a post about Drusillas Park. Here it is!
Annalie Seaman 
