Spanish settlers called the Gulf of Paria, the body of water cupped in the embrace of the two strips of land that extended off the western coast of Trinidad, the northern entrance guarded by the Dragon—the Dragon’s Mouth—the southern by the Serpent—the Serpent’s Mouth. Like cotton, however, whaling had come to an end long before the century closed.
Chacachacare was not a seaside resort when Dr. Peter Gardner arrived on the island with his daughter, Virginia, who had recently turned three. And strictly speaking it was not a leper colony either. Though the leprosarium continued to operate on a small scale, it was officially closed in 1950 when the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, who had ministered to the sick there, left the island enfeebled by age and the relentless sun, and unable to replenish their ranks because of a world war that had halted recruits. The Dominicans were replaced by the Sisters of Mercy from America, but life on the island among the lepers proved more than the American nuns were willing to endure. Count Finbar Ryan, archbishop of Port of Spain, had left them no room for compromise. “Sign a blank check,” he counseled those who answered his call, “and honor whatever the Lord may write on it.”
The Lord wrote more than the new nuns could bear. They lasted barely five years, until 1955, not long after a fisherman found a nun’s white habit floating on the sea off Chacachacare, a suicide attributed to depression.
In fairness to the Dominicans, they had not abandoned their patients. By the time they left, new sulphonic drugs were halting the progress of the bacteria that caused nerve ends on the afflicted to wither and die, the skin to rot, and fingers and toes to fall off. Nevertheless, the lepers begged them to stay. “The doctors seem to give us up [to] death,” one of the patients wrote, expressing the sentiments of the others in a petition sent to the governor. “The Sisters on the contrary care for us. The more miserable, pitiful, sinful we are, the more they show us love. They care for us until they have closed our eyes.”
The Dominicans had come to Trinidad from France in 1868 at the request of the British government. The leprosarium that the British had established in Cocorite, on the outskirts of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, had failed to contain the disease. It was spreading like wildfire to the city and beyond, and the British colonizers were terrified.
They were responsible, of course. It was they who had caused this disease to run amuck on the quiet, idyllic island of Trinidad, where hibiscus and bougainvillea bloomed in the sun, anthuriums in the shade, and where, in the dry season, the hills were aflame with gold and crimson blossoms from the branches of the flamboyant and dotted with the brilliant reds, yellows, pinks, and whites of the poui rising beneath a sky dazzling blue, clouds white and fluffy as new cotton.
A man could feed his family with what he hunted and fished in those days. For if you saw Trinidad from the height of an airplane, what you saw was an island floating in the delta of the Orinoco, a sliver cut off from the rain forests of the Amazon, its flora and fauna stranded with the divide. There, unlike any other island in the Caribbean chain, agouti, deer, tattou, lapp, manicou, and cats ferocious as tigers ran wild; fish and crustaceans—shrimp, lobster, crab, oyster—everyday table food. National Geographic sent in scouts. Everything they could find in the Amazon, they could find here, and there were swampy mangroves, too, and sea the color of turquoise, beaches ringed with coconut fronds and the leaves of wide sea-almond trees.
It was greed that caused the epidemic. Slavery had been abolished and the Africans, scarred by nightmares of the horrors of the plantation, had fled to the cities. Left with no workers to cut the sugarcane, process it into sugar, and ferment the juices into alcohol, for which they had developed an addiction, the British raked the slums of their continental colonies in the east. Five acres of land after five years, they promised, if the workers wanted to stay, or passage back home. Thousands came from India. They came with the disease.
At first the nuns treated the patients topically with chaulmoogra oil from the seeds of tropical trees in Asia belonging to the genus Hydnocarpus, and with cod liver oil from codfish, but the oils did not work. The disease still gutted faces, lopped off limbs. So they injected the oils, once a day, in the afternoons, and startled birds from their evening roosts when bloodcurdling screams from children, full-grown women and men, too, rent the air. Then, from late afternoon until well after the sun had set below the horizon, the sky was filled with the frantic flapping of wings, and as far away as Cocorite across the sea, street dogs howled and tears sprang from the eyes of villagers.
They ran away. They would not stay, the ones subjected to these treatments. The cure to them, the searing pain of those injections, was a million times worse than the disease. So the epidemic spread. The nuns gave the colonial government a choice: a colony in Chacachacare or the end of Trinidad. The British sent in troops. One of the nuns’ diary dated May 10, 1922, records the day:
At 6 a.m., the patients were seized with horror when the news spread throughout the wards that the whole place was surrounded and cordoned off by policemen on foot and on horseback. A dead silence set in . . . since it was impossible to escape, all had to be resigned to their fate. Some were sobbing, others fainted, and others again were seized with fits. The sisters could hardly bear the sight of the distress. Even the policemen were moved with compassion. A crowd of onlookers gathered outside to see the patients being escorted by policemen to the Cocorite pier, where a steamer was waiting to take them to Chacachacare.
The sons and daughters of slave owners who had got rich on the cotton plantations on Chacachacare did not sob and faint, but it was no less difficult to pry them away from their vacation homes. Chacachacare was Crown land; it belonged to the British royal family. When the governor issued the order, the vacationers were obliged to leave. They were compensated, of course. Even today, the descendants of some of these slave-owning families hold rights to large plots of seafront land on the offshore islands. Ninety years they were given in exchange for a meager fee, and for at least one of them, a lease that would not expire until the year 2051.
In its own way, the clergy smoothed the way for the colonial government by fanning the flames of superstition already raging in the Caribbean. To most people in this part of the world, leprosy was a curse from God, a disease of the poor and the slovenly. Even after it was renamed Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian Armauer Hansen, who had identified it in 1874, it still bore this stigma that had its roots in the Old Testament.
But leprosy was caused by bacteria, not God’s curse, and it was not absolutely clear that it was sufficiently contagious to warrant the isolation of those infected from the rest of the population. In eighty-two years, only two of the nuns succumbed to the disease. To the religious, of course, this was not proof that the disease was not contagious, but, rather, evidence of Divine intervention, God protecting those who had given themselves willingly to Him in His service. In the case of Sister Rose de Sainte Marie Vébert, who, in the opinion of many, deserved to be canonized, there seemed to be merit in this faith they had in God’s mercy. It was said that the disease had so ravaged her that it took both her tongue and her sight, though for eighteen years she continued to nurse the sick.
When she died, the hand of God was evident. Another entry in a nun’s diary dated June 17, 1937, tells the story:
The sisters kept singing hymns and canticles by her bedside to help her regain her calm when the terrible fits shook her poor body. Finally she breathed her last, gently. The sisters transported her body to the chapel. While she lay there exposed, something extraordinary happened: all traces of the awful disease disappeared from her face, and it was looking most beautiful . . .
The sisters remained in Chacachacare for twenty-eight years. Few spoke English when they first arrived and they had to rely on hand gestures and drawings before they managed to pick up the rudiments of the language from the patients. But this was not their only challenge. There was no electricity or running water in Chacachacare, and during the war years, from 1939 to 1945, when there were constant fears of German U-boats patrolling the waters, which, after all, were British waters since Trinidad belonged to England, service between the leprosarium in Chacachacare and the mainland was often curtailed, and food was scarce. Patients, who in the past were not allowed to fish or cultivate the land, now fished and grew vegetables, and, troubling for the nuns, were also permitted to work side by side with members of the opposite sex.