This book is based on the lives of two remarkable real women, who I have shamelessly grafted into one person for my own purposes: Harriet Boyd (later Harriet Boyd Hawes) and Janet Jennings.
Those of you who have read Band of Sisters may remember Harriet Boyd Hawes as the real-life founder of the Smith College Relief Unit. As I wrote that book, I became increasingly fascinated by the career of that redoubtable woman: archaeologist, humanitarian, and occasional war nurse. What, I wondered, would make a dedicated classicist drop her career to run to Florida to nurse in the Spanish-American War? The question haunted me, and, as I worked on Band of Sisters, my fictional version of Harriet Boyd Hawes, Betsy Hayes Rutherford, began elbowing me and dropping little hints.
This book is the answer to that question.
Most of Betsy’s experiences are stolen directly from the real Harriet Boyd, who, like my fictional Betsy, won a place as one of two women in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, electrified Athens by swooping around the city on her bicycle, and locked horns with the director of the school, Rufus Richardson, who shook his head over the notion of women excavating and suggested she try being a librarian. Like Betsy, Harriet was invited by an acquaintance, the fascinating Aikaterini McCraith, to lodge in her home at 4 Academy Street, and through her was drawn into fashionable Athenian circles. Charles de Robecourt was entirely my own creation and bears no relation to the real de Robecourt family, but all the other details of life at Academy Street and the “treks” to Tiryns, Mycenae, and Delphi with Professor Sterrett are taken directly from Harriet Boyd’s biography and letters.
Like Betsy, the frustrated Harriet, thwarted at the American School and fired by the cause of Greek independence, took a nursing course, failed, called in favors, and went off to the front, where she nursed at Vólos and Lamia. Dr. Kalopothakes, like most of the other side characters in this book, is real and did assign the inexperienced Harriet Boyd her own hospital—possibly as revenge for pulling strings. The debacle of the hospital ship Albania was as described, as was the typhoid hospital at Lamia, the royal visit, and the icon sent by Queen Olga, who took a personal interest in Harriet Boyd and unsuccessfully contemplated marrying her off to her court physician. All details of Betsy’s nursing career in Greece are drawn directly from Harriet Boyd’s recollections. As far as I know, the real Harriet Boyd never had an affair with a fascinating but married Frenchman (although she did have a crush on a doctor in one of her hospitals) and certainly didn’t have a secret baby, but those were my only deviations from her remarkable career. I strongly recommend the wry and loving biography written by her daughter, Mary Allsebrook, Born to Rebel, where you can read all the incredible exploits I wasn’t able to fit into this book.
Trust me, I tried. Many, many details and many, many scenes were deleted during the editing phase. The bits that had to go included a description of stumbling into a wedding party at the village of Arachova and a lot of details about the various excavations, including the fact that Delphi was crisscrossed by train tracks put in by the French to haul away the mounds of dirt they needed to move to uncover the classical site beneath a modern village. (Why, yes, the original draft did include the exact number of cartloads of dirt removed.)
So why did Harriet go to Florida and why is it so quickly glossed over in her biographies? Not, I quickly discovered, because of a broken heart. Nor is the lack of mention because she was hiding something (at least that I was able to discover). In real life, Harriet Boyd arrived on the scene late, nursed in Florida rather than Cuba, and decided that rather than devote herself to nursing, she did want to go on with archaeology after all. The excavation at Gournia, which I attribute to my fictional Betsy, was Harriet Boyd’s triumph.
Betsy’s experiences in Cuba were drawn largely from the life of another woman, a reporter for the New-York Tribune named Janet Jennings who accompanied Clara Barton to Cuba, nursed in Siboney, found herself the sole nurse on the doomed transport Seneca—and created a firestorm when she went to the press and then the president, taking on the army and winning. Many of the descriptions of nursing in Siboney, first at the Cuban hospital, and then in a new Red Cross hospital, working around the clock as the wounded poured in, come directly from Janet Jennings.
As described in the novel, reporters from major papers rode with Roosevelt and even bunked with him. Women reporters, however, were not allowed along, and did exactly what the characters in this book did: they hitched a ride with Clara Barton and her Red Cross. While my Kit Carson was fictional, Katherine White (Mrs. Trumbull White) and Janet Jennings were not. Both accompanied Barton as a way to get around restrictions on female reporters and both found themselves undertaking heroic acts of nursing. My fictional Kit was based partly on Katherine White (Kit’s dispatches were inspired by White’s articles in the Chicago Record) and partly on Kathleen Blake Watkins Coleman, a Canadian journalist sent by the Toronto Mail and Empire who wrote under the name “Kit”—and who did her best to cover the Spanish-American War despite resistance from all the males in the vicinity.
I stole Janet Jennings’s remarkable ordeal as “Angel of the Seneca” for my own heroine. All characters on the boat other than Betsy, Holt, and Kit are real people, behaving as they actually behaved; aside from my fictional characters and their emotional dramas, everything on the boat happened pretty much as described. At the last moment, wounded were sent not to the hospital ship Relief but to a transport called the Seneca, which still had passengers on board—but no medical supplies. The two contract doctors sent to the Relief for supplies but got no response. On an impulse, Janet Jennings volunteered to go with them and found herself keeping a boatload of patients alive in impossible conditions on a journey that took double the predicted time. When the boat attempted to dock at Hampton Roads, they were refused, but supplies were sent on board, enabling them to make it to New York and quarantine.
I made some small tweaks for the sake of my story. Like my fictional Betsy, Jennings on impulse shoveled necessary supplies into a satchel—but she didn’t raid the hospital at Siboney. She took her supplies directly from Miss Barton’s ship, the State of Texas. There was a great more back-and-forth between the State of Texas and Siboney than I included in the book—partly because having the nurses constantly rowing out to the ship and being rowed back would take up a lot of narrative time to no purpose. In real life, it was Dr. Baird, not Dr. Hicks, who fell ill in the final days of the voyage. One final note: it was widely reported in the popular press that Jennings tore up her petticoats as handkerchiefs and bandages. A very irate Miss Jennings retorted that she had done nothing of the kind; she had brought bandages with her. Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist using the petticoat story for Betsy. It seemed like the sort of thing Betsy would do.
The hullaballoo about the Seneca was as described: reporters and spectators mobbed the dock when Jennings was released from quarantine in New York. Janet Jennings was a sensation, the Angel of the Seneca. The army quickly struck back, impugning her as a hysterical woman. Undaunted, Jennings spoke out to the papers and secured a personal meeting with President McKinley. Her testimony to the Dodge Commission helped ensure needed reforms. Jennings and the other Red Cross nurses who served in Cuba were instrumental in the creation of a professional army nursing corps, which came into being in 1901, following the recommendations of the Dodge Commission.
Surprisingly, one finds almost no mention of these groundbreaking female nurses—or the Seneca debacle—in any of the many, many books about the Spanish-American War. For the activities of the Red Cross, I relied heavily on contemporary newspaper accounts, including the articles of Katherine White, one of the journalists who traveled and nursed with the Red Cross; on Clara Barton’s The Red Cross in Peace and War; and on reports by the doctors who traveled with Clara Barton. While there aren’t any monographs on the subject, there are some excellent articles in both academic and local historical society journals about the women who went to the field in 1898.
All the instances in which Barton was snubbed, turned away, or told women nurses didn’t belong in the field were taken directly from the historical record—as were all the instances in which the army then turned around and begged for her help. Clara Barton, I am sure, would be both annoyed and unsurprised to have been written out of the story of the Spanish-American War.
For the plight of the Seneca, I relied heavily on the testimony of Janet Jennings and her shipmates to the Dodge Commission, the lively (if not always entirely reliable) coverage in contemporary newspapers, and John Evangelist Walsh’s comprehensive article “Forgotten Angel: The Story of Janet Jennings and the Seneca.”
Unlike the role of the Red Cross, the more martial parts of the Spanish-American War—and particularly the exploits of the Rough Riders—have been meticulously documented, both at the time, by the participants, who were aware that they were involved in the making of history, and, later, by historians recreating exactly what happened in that crowded hour. Some of the more absurd bits recounted here are entirely true: when the train designated for them didn’t arrive, Roosevelt and Wood hijacked a coal car and rode it backward to Port Tampa. Roosevelt also cut out two other regiments for a transport—but let the Vitagraph men board. General Joe Wheeler did deliberately leapfrog General Lawton’s troops, and also repeatedly forgot that he was fighting the Spanish instead of the Yankees.
Other than Holt, Paul, and Dr. Stringfellow, most of the characters you meet in Cuba are real people. Ham Fish died at Las Guasimas; Teddy Burke came down with fever and was carried to the hospital at Siboney by his Yale buddy Thede Miller; and Thede Miller (who happened to be Thomas Edison’s brother-in-law) died at San Juan Hill. Dr. Stringfellow, while fictional, was based on the Rough Riders’ actual junior surgeon, a Princeton man named James Robb Church, and many of his actions and comments (other than falling in love with Ava) are taken from his real counterpart. In real life, Dr. Stringfellow would have served at the field hospital to which Barton was urgently summoned by General Shafter after the fighting at San Juan Hill, but I needed him for my own purposes, so I seconded him to the Red Cross and kept him at Siboney.
While I tried to remain as true to the actual facts as possible (and those facts were pretty incredible), I was forced to cut out a great deal. For that, I offer my apologies to any Spanish-American War buffs who might notice where well-documented discussions or scenes are missing or have been truncated. To the military historians out there, I apologize for any liberties I took with the disposition of battles. There are very detailed accounts by multiple parties of what happened in those two frenzied hours at Las Guasimas. I put my fictional Holt at the center of the action in Troop L, where the first men fell and the Rough Riders took their worst pummeling, but there’s a delicate balance between portraying the truth of what we know now, pieced together later from multiple accounts with the benefit of hindsight, and what a man in the field would have experienced at the time. I tried to give a sense of the confusion without doing violence to the particulars of what we know to have occurred. Whether or not I was successful, I leave to you to judge.
For anyone wanting to know more about the Spanish-American War in general and the Rough Riders in particular, there are a plethora of options, from firsthand accounts like Burr McIntosh’s The Little I Saw of Cuba and Teddy Roosevelt’s classic work The Rough Riders to recent monographs like Mark Lee Gardner’s Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment, and the Immortal Charge Up San Juan Hill and Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century.
One final point: while this book is set around two conflicts that shaped the fates of nations, it became very clear to me while writing it that this was neither a book about Greece nor a book about Cuba. On the contrary, it is a book about Americans in Greece and Cuba, which is a very different thing. By including the conversations with my fictional de Almendares (who was based on a real Cuban officer) and the very real General García, I tried to convey something of the Cuban perspective, which was very different from the American one.
The Rough Riders’ motivations for going to war were a mixed bag. There were some, like Holt, who were deeply moved by the sensational articles in the press about Spanish brutality and the plight of the Cuban people. And then there were others for whom it was a grand adventure, a chance to prove one’s manhood by going to war—without much real thought as to what the war might be about. If there seems a great deal of discussion of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, that’s because there was a strong Ivy League contingent in Teddy Roosevelt’s volunteer cavalry—and if you read their memoirs, it comes as a bit of a surprise when you learn they’re off to war and not the Yale-Harvard game. It appears to have come as a bit of a surprise to some of them too.
For anyone wanting to learn more about any of the aspects of this book from the American School for Classical Studies at Athens in the late nineteenth century through the tragedy of the Seneca, you can find a bibliography on my website, www.laurenwillig.com.