THE H FILES Ban on rescuing men overboard
New Zealand’s worst natural disaster, in terms of deaths, was the devastating global influenza epidemic of 1918
When Private Terence Carroll, feverish and confused from influenza, “jumped overboard” to his death in the Atlantic Ocean, he left behind a ship’s deck littered with sick men.
Carroll, originally from the Coromandel Peninsula, was among the first of nearly 8600 Kiwis to die as the Great Flu swept the world near the end of the Great War, 99 years ago.
Except it wasn’t in New Zealand that he caught the influenza and died.
A new recruit, he was crammed onto the troopship Tahiti with more than 1000 others on their way to war in Europe in September 1918. A milder flu pandemic had begun, probably in a Kansas army camp, in March 1918 and circled the globe within months. A far more deadly second wave began in the trenches of the Western Front in July.
It quickly spread to civilians, and eventually killed more than 50 million people worldwide.
The fever was in full swing at Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa when the Tahiti stopped to resupply.
Within days the Tahiti, travelling in convoy to guard against German attack, was overrun with influenza and men began to die. Short services were held twice a day and the bodies, wrapped in canvas, slid down a chute into the sea. In total 77 died, including 21, the highest daily toll, on September 4, 1918, the day Carroll was lost.
Charles Davidson, a survivor, recalls the first delirious victim to go overboard.
“The soldier giving the alarm ran, jumping over the prostrate forms [of sick men] on the deck, yelling, ‘Man overboard’,” according to Davidson’s account, published in historian Geoff Rice’s book on the pandemic, Black November.
The ship circled back and stopped to rescue the soldier, by which time the convoy was “on the horizon”.
The captain got a blast from the convoy commander on the risk of a solo ship being attacked, and was told, “No more rescues”.
Davidson said a roll call revealed a certain soldier was not accounted for and was presumed to have gone overboard during the night. Carroll’s official war record stated he “drowned”, without mentioning influenza. But health researcher Nick Wilson identified the death as influenza-related after finding a reference, to his having “jumped overboard” and been lost at sea, in a 1918 Government medical report on the Tahiti epidemic.
Carroll’s niece Rosemary Brosnan, of Auckland, said her family always knew he had been lost off the ship, delirious with influenza. Her father, who was 12 at the time of his 20-year-old brother’s death, had talked about it. He had recalled his father telling his mother at their home, and her tears at the news.
It wasn’t until October 1918 that the second influenza wave hit New Zealand, first in Auckland, the virus then flowing down the main rail and coastal shipping routes to other areas. The country was overwhelmed. Rice tells of a person waking to find their partner lying dead beside them, the body cold, the skin black; and of children seeking food from neighbours because their parents had been “asleep” for two days.
New Zealand’s worst natural disaster, in terms of deaths, sought out otherwise healthy adults, and often killed swiftly. It is thought the characteristic black skin was linked to flu-related pneumonia depriving the body of oxygen and to an over-reaction from the immune system. Another Tahiti soldier, whose on-board diary is quoted by health researcher Jennifer Summers, noted: “The strange thing about this sickness is that the big strong men seem to get it the worst and are the ones that die.” In New Zealand schools, pubs and other meeting places were ordered closed, but it was too late. On Queen St in Auckland, massive crowds gathered on November 8 when most people deserted their work and partied all day and into the night after an international report — it turned out to be false — that the war had ended. When the real armistice was declared on November 11, no holiday was allowed for celebrations in the city. Large gatherings would be “most undesirable”, the Government’s acting chief health officer, Dr Joseph Frengley, said in the Herald. In Auckland, 1128 people died. The highest daily toll was on November 12, by which time the city couldn’t cope. Victoria Park became an overflow morgue and two special trains a day took bodies to Waikumete Cemetery where most were buried in a large open area. Few had a headstone. Seventy years later, a memorial plaque was placed. It pays particular respect to the “doctors, nurses and citizen volunteers whose selfless efforts to aid the sick resulted in their own untimely deaths”.