I am indebted to Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger, from which I first learned about the events on Grosse Isle. Robert Whyte’s journal of his passage from Ireland to Quebec (published in 1848 as The Ocean Plague) provided key eyewitness descriptions of conditions on the ships and on the island.
The Grosse Isle Tragedy and the Monument to the Irish Fever Victims, 1847 (compiled by J.A. Jordan and first printed on the occasion of the dedication of a monument honoring the victims of ship fever as the Quebec Daily Telegraph’s “Grosse Isle Monument Commemorative Souvenir”; later reprinted as a book by The Telegraph Printing Company, Quebec, 1909) is the definitive source for details of the typhus epidemic on Grosse Isle during 1847. The chapter “Medical History of the Famine” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History (edited by Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams) provided much useful information about the diseases—particularly typhus—that follow in the wake of famine.
Drs. Douglas and Jaques are historical persons, as are Buchanan and the doctors and clergymen Lauchlin Grant records as having died on the island. The remaining characters, including Lauchlin Grant, are fictitious.