Atlantic Ocean
THE LADY JANE HAD BEEN AT SEA FOR NEARLY THREE WEEKS, WHEN THE Sullivan family noticed people sickening around them, coughing and spitting up and burning with ship fever.
The woman they had seen at the chandler’s office, Mrs Cassidy, had died a few days earlier. Her scrawny body had been committed to the ocean by the captain and his men, with a few prayers said by her fellow passengers. Her son, a sickly boy, soon followed his mother to a watery grave, for there was no doctor on board.
One of the Murphy boys, Michael, also had taken bad with the fever. He began to complain that his head was going to burst and then developed pains in his legs and all over his body. Within a day or two, he was covered with spots and awful sores.
‘Keep away from him,’ Mary scolded Con and her nephew. ‘Or else you will get sick too.’
‘But we are friends,’ her son pleaded.
‘Friends doesn’t come into it!’ she warned, giving him a sharp clip to his head to scare him into obeying her. ‘You stay far away from those Murphy boys.’
Fear stalked her that the ship fever would spread to her children and she kept them close to her and John. The boys grew scared when thirteen-year-old Michael Murphy lay quiet and still after drawing his last breath in his bunk. At midnight, his poor mother’s wailing at the loss of her once healthy boy woke them all.
‘We should never have come on this voyage to hell,’ Mrs Murphy lamented as her husband and younger sons tried in vain to comfort her.