The Worst Pandemic in American History: Philadelphia, 1793
In order to prepare for my long stay in America during the covid pandemic, I decided to make a trip to an epic calamity of the past. If I could make it through a more horrific pandemic, 2020 would seem like a walk in the park. I’m speaking, of course, about the yellow fever epidemic of Philadelphia in 1793.
This disease turns your skin and eyes yellow. You vomit black sludge. At the time, the cause and treatment of the ailment were unknown. The pestilence hit the city and ravaged the streets, turning Philadelphia into a hellscape. Madness descended as doctors and mortuaries were overrun and ill prepared to deal with the scale and severity of the problem.
Philadelphia at the time was the nation’s capital. George Washington, the first President of the United States, lived there and could be seen strolling the walkways beside the river.
In the summer of 1793, there was a mass influx of refugees from the formerly French-controlled island of what you know as Haiti. The first successful slave revolution in history freed the people of the island from their imperial overlords. As a result, people of the island fled to America in fear. With these new French-speaking immigrants, Philadelphia was becoming a trilingual city. The city spoke English naturally, as well as German because of previous German immigrants.
This was a fresh and vibrant time for the young city. A bubbling new culture was emerging from the streets.
A commonly unknown fact about this period is that people in America spoke with heavy Jamaican accents. So just keep that in mind whenever you think about the colonial-era US or read a George Washington speech.
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Usually when I travel to the past, I make sure to learn extensively about the culture I’ll be visiting, in order to blend in and not give myself away as an unnatural creature of the time. For this trip, I felt no need to make my usual cultural precautions. I didn’t need to assimilate too much to the times or try to blend in with the crowd. When I spoke, because there were so many new immigrants in the city, residents just assumed I was from Romania or something and didn’t question my accent or strange manner. This was a perfect time traveling city.
Helltown
Helltown was a neighborhood near the harbor. It was the first red-light district in the United States, an enclave where debauchery reverberated from the taverns and brothels through drunken, cobblestone alleys.
For an authentic experience in this rambunctious neighborhood, I stayed in one of the many flophouses, sharing a room with three pillaged artifact smugglers. When one of my roommates started developing early onset yellow fever symptoms, it was time to switch habitation. I didn’t want to stay in one one place in this neighborhood for too long as I might’ve gotten shanked with a disease ridden blade. So for the remainder of my time, I simply wandered around, staggering in an absinthe induced trance through the lively streets. Through the chaos of the deadly pandemic, I noticed the cat-and-mouse match between runaway slaves and contracted bounty hunters — and noticed, as well, the unaffected, still cheerfully healthy Haitian immigrants who lived through such a calamity back home and seemed to boast a supernatural immunity.
French and Haitian doctors knew how to treat this disease, so the people of these communities were more protected, as they sought treatment from experienced doctors; whereas the native Philadelphians, who were skeptical of this immigrant community and its skilled professionals, relied on barbaric methods of treatment by American doctors who never treated yellow fever.
Where we left off, I’d been wandering the streets after my flop mate’s eyeballs turned a bloodshot, stained urine yellow. I had nowhere to stay for the night.
Fear not, a local, Quaker teenage boy who walked thirty-two kilometers that morning from New Jersey to sell vegetables and numerology readings at the market and collapsed in the street out of sheer exhaustion on the way to his aunt’s parlor, sensed that I was out of place and reached up and grabbed my ankle.
He staggered to his feet and secured me lodging for the night on a bed of hay in the back of a horse stable.
In the morning, I had a skull piercing migraine. Searching for coffee and a bucket of water, I stumbled into a tavern serving breakfast.
At this time, Philadelphia was an international port city on the Atlantic. Among the legitimate products being imported into the New World, there were also illegal contraband, drugs, firearms, other weapons, and even people being smuggled in and out.
A key trademark of this city is largely unknown to the modern public. What I’m referring to is what I stumbled into one hungover morning in Helltown: the Helltown Tunnels.
A large underground tunnel network ran from many entrances in Helltown straight to the harbor. People used these pathways to transport all the illegal things under the sun. And once these people emerged in the streets of Helltown, they distributed the contraband throughout the city and even throughout the country. And vice versa; if people wanted to smuggle things out of America into the Caribbean or Europe or even as far as China, a safe way to get these items onto a ship undetected was through the Helltown tunnels.
One morning, my head feeling like I’d been curb stomped, I wandered into one of the secret entrances into this tunnel system. Looking for the bathroom in a tavern, I opened up a door that led to a back alley with a peculiar hole in the ground. Seeing flickering golden light emanating from this crevice, I pulled back a gate cover revealing a ladder going down about ten meters. Of course, I climbed down there and discovered:
- Walls lined with lanterns
- Shafts, long corridors, boarded up doorways and crevices
- Boxes of produce, gunpowder, a crate of glowing purple stones from mythical Chinese cliff sides
After marveling at the tunnel system, I got the sinking feeling that I shouldn’t be down there, that maybe I’d seen too much. If I was spotted, I might be taken and interrogated. Plus, I can’t use my time machine underground; I need an overhead clearing to operate and launch it.
I heard voices approaching. I slid myself inside a tight opening in the wall.
The voices reached where I was hiding. All I could make out was a woman with a scar across her face and a man with a dog.
Quickly the dog picked up my scent. It began sniffing and scratching the section of the wall I was behind. My immediate reaction was panic which turned into a calm resignation after realizing I was irreversibly caught for the moment. My guard dropped and I calmly came out of the wall and faced my assailants.
MAN WITH DOG: You’re from the future, huh?
They stared at me inquisitively.
ME: Who are you?
MAN WITH DOG: We usually hunt slaves, but this time it’s you.
ME: So you’re not also from the future, then.
I have a few escape techniques for tight situations like these. When in doubt, show a person something they’ve never remotely seen before and their brain will lock.
ME: Before you capture me, check this out.
I pulled a handheld item from my time out of my pocket; a device that warps matter. Wave it through the air and space entangles with residue, creating beautiful particle emanations along with the most entrancing harmonious sounds straight from the Music of the Spheres.
I created a two-minute window for myself to escape the tunnels. The slave hunters were trapped in wonder. With that, I ran.
After reaching a couple dead-end sections, I managed to make it to a mouth of the tunnel which spat me out into the docks at the harbor.
The sudden sensory change shocked my constitution, stopped me for a moment and made me reassess the situation. The sights and smells of the harbor filled my attention; the boats, sailors, pirates, goods loaded and unloaded, the-
-And then suddenly, I went blank.
Peale’s Museum
I woke up in chains behind a glass plate.
After trying to viciously to break free, I was tamed by the entrance of four people… Man With Dog, Scar Woman, an unknown man dressed smartly… and an old nemesis of mine. Seeing this woman on the other side of the glass made things a bit more clear. She was the one who tipped me off to the slave hunters. She knew who I was. But this is not the time to introduce her in detail… The four of them looked pleased to see me in this situation. My old companion gave me a smug smirk and strutted away. The unknown man handed the slave hunters a large sack and they quickly exited.
The man walked up to the glass and knocked. He opened a slit in order to speak to me.
UNKNOWN MAN: Sir, nice to meet you. My name is Charles Willson Peale. I am an artist.
ME: Hmm.
PEALE: You must be wondering where you are.
ME: I guess.
Peale: This is my museum… Take a look around.
I slowly rose to my feet, pressed my face to the glass and looked to the left.
The room was filled with paintings, sculptures, exotic taxidermy and other rare artifacts and archeological objects.
Beside me, the wall was lined with glass display cages filled with live creatures including birds, monkeys and even a large bear.
ME: So what do you want with me?
PEALE: You will be my greatest exhibit: Man From Future.
And thus began my imprisonment in Peale’s Museum during the yellow fever pandemic of 1793.
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