*splash*
A body hits the water.
Days earlier,
armed military police had herded troops onto the Leviathan
sealing them in watertight compartments.
It was quarantine
of a sort.
If one trooper had the flu,
it would only affect the bunk mates sealed in with him.
It spread anyway.
There is no more room in the sickbay,
the mess hall or any of the other makeshift hospitals.
Patients lie on deck
in the sun and wind.
And bodies
only have one place to go.
At the rail,
a chaplain mutters a prayer.
*splash*
Another man disappears into the Atlantic.
*splash*
the war will be over.
*splash*
[Music] "Birth of the People"
Leviathan isn't the only plague ship.
There are many like it.
The New Zealand transports HMS Tahiti and Mantua
deliver the silent visitor to Africa.
Infected ships pass the flu to dock workers each time they stop to take on coal.
From there,
it rides the rail lines into the interior,
then spreads to the countryside on bicycles,
horseback,
or by car.
Each of the three waves of the virus:
the mild first wave,
the deadly second wave,
and the less lethal third wave
radiate across the globe.
It storms every continent
sparing only Antarctica.
Tracking the disease from the surgeon general's office in Washington, DC,
Welch's friend,
and replacement,
Victor Vaughan expresses alarm at the flu's progress.
"If this epidemic continues at its mathematical rate of acceleration",
he writes,
"civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth
within a matter of a few more weeks".
He looks at his map.
Kimberley,
South Africa.
When people speak about the flu,
they'll always remember the sound of hooves and wagon wheels.
It's the sound of the collection wagons
heavy with corpses.
The people of Kimberley knew it was coming.
Railway workers tracked its progress inland on the rail line.
It advanced a thousand miles within a week.
Kimberley is a diamond mining city,
the largest in South Africa.
And people here live and work in close quarters.
Migrant laborers sleep in crammed concrete bunk houses; famous for spreading sickness.
People begin to fear each other.
When someone sniffles in a shop,
people turn away,
veins turning to ice.
"The distinctive scent of the flu is like straw", they say.
"You can tell infected houses by the smell".
Fear leads to dark places.
Whites begin blaming their black neighbors for the disease
and within five years
their concern with
"hygiene"
will put forward a law that bans black South Africans from entering urban areas without a pass.
It's another brick in the rising wall of Apartheid.
Across South Africa, the trauma brings several village prophets to the forefront,
preaching religious and social revival
while describing visions they've had while in the grip of Spanish flu.
Some later ally with the African National Congress to fight for political rights.
They will be jailed or locked in insane asylums.
The flu, with no concern for politics, rages on.
It's good that the mining city of Kimberley is full of excavation equipment
because they'll need it
for the graves.
2,500 miners died in the autumn wave.
A quarter of the city's working population.
By the time the epidemic is over,
9% of Kimberley citizens are buried in the diamond-sheltering earth.
The country,
the worst hit in Africa will lose half a million people.
But another colony will see at least 20 times more death:
India.
Traditionally,
Indians cremate their dead on the riverbank
and release their ashes into the Ganges.
But there's nothing left to burn.
Dead bodies clog the wide river
gathering in clumps.
India is no stranger to outbreaks.
Just two decades before, the country had battled black plague.
But the behavior of the British Colonials during that time
had made Indians wary of Western medicine.
They'd herded people into
"health camps",
burned personal possessions
and sprayed carbolic acid into homes.
In other places,
they did nothing at all.
So, even as flu whipped through the country,
British officials offered little help and Indians accepted even less.
Western medicine was largely reserved for the rich colonials or those in the cities.
But there was an organization that tried to help
and often they were the only ones serving rural areas:
the independence movement.
In the rural villages,
college-trained activists deliver medicine via bicycle or horse.
Much of it is indigenous folk medicine that just managed symptoms,
but given that every Western institute
from Rockefeller to Pasteur in Paris to Koch in Germany
had failed to produce a cure,
It was no worse treatment than the ill received in the US or Britain.
The message was clear.
Articles in the Indian press
denounced colonial neglect, saying
British authorities cared little for Indians
and in their hour of need,
the only ones who stepped up
were the revolutionaries.
They had the grassroots support they'd struggled so long to secure.
And so,
India took another step
closer to revolution,
its independence movement gaining legitimacy
even as one of its most predominant leaders,
Mahatma Gandhi
was out of action.
The virus
nearly killed him.
According to recent estimates, between 14 and 20 million Indians died from the flu.
The most from any single nation.
And yet the flu killed on,
affecting each country in its own way.
Japan called it "sumo disease"
since the first outbreak exploded after a public wrestling match.
There, the wearing of face masks became so ingrained that it remains a practice today.
It possibly killed 4 million on the island of Java alone.
It raged through Russia and Mexico both of which were in the flames of civil war.
By 1919, it had penetrated even the most isolated regions:
the Wood River,
Alaska.
Coast guardsmen step on to the riverbank,
calling out to the Yupik village.
No one answers.
They're in one of the most remote places on earth.
Here, it's not unusual to meet people who still think Alaska is part of the Russian Empire
ruled by the Tsar.
Now, there is no Russian Empire much less a Tsar.
And though news of the revolution hadn't made it,
the flu had.
They've heard reports of devastation at the indolent villages.
The disease strikes native populations especially hard.
The guardsmen are here with a doctor to offer medical aid and assess the impact.
But the village seems deserted.
The ensign hears something moving in one of the earth houses,
and opens the door to investigate.
He slams it and backs away calling for a rifle.
He then smashes in a window and fires into the house
again
and again
and again.
He only stops when everything inside
no longer moves.
Then they doused the village with kerosene and burn it to the ground.
For the rest of his life,
he will never forget what he saw:
three enormous sled dogs
starving and feral,
fighting over the bones
of a dead family.
As the guardsmen discovered in Alaska,
Spanish flu proved to be especially deadly to native people with isolated immune systems.
It slewed its way across the Pacific,
hopping from island to island out of New Zealand.
In Fiji,
5% of the population dead.
In Tonga,
10%.
In Vanuatu,
it killed 90% of people in some villages
wiping out 20 unique languages.
And then, it reached Samoa.
Pago Pago,
American Samoa.
Commander John Poyer,
the naval governor of American Samoa
liked to follow radio reports on the wire.
It gave him news from the war.
From home.
He could keep his finger on things.
Suddenly,
one item stuck out to him:
Spanish flu
in New Zealand.
He'd been governor of American Samoa for about four years
and knew Western diseases posed special danger to Pacific islanders.
And with New Zealand having taken neighboring Western Samoa from the Germans,
there was probably ship traffic passing between Auckland and Western Samoa's port of Apia.
Poyer radioed his sister territory.
Why yes, they said.
There had been a ship from New Zealand.
And yeah, there was some local disease flaring up.
Why?
Poyer sent an order to the docks:
"No matter who comes, deny them the right to land".
"Dock them at the far end of the pier and move anyone ill to navy quarantine vessels."
"Work with the villages to form shore patrols and catch those who try to sneak in."
He radios a warning to his counterpart in Western Samoa,
and offers quarantine and hospital ships if needed.
The governor of Western Samoa,
offended by the aid offer,
hangs up.
a mail ship arrives from Western Samoa.
A US Navy vessel
intercepts it.
They can't land,
the captain says.
Nor will Samoa
or any American mail ship in its port
accept outside letters.
They must return to Apia.
Furious, the governor of Western Samoa cuts radio contact entirely,
freezing diplomatic relations.
By then,
people in Western Samoa are beginning to die sitting up in their homes.
Fields go follow as entire families are unable to walk.
There will be famine next year.
A whole generation of village elders
gets snuffed out.
22% of Western Samoa would die of Spanish flu
including 1/3 of the male population.
American Samoa continued its quarantine until 1920
until the last reports of Spanish flu subsided.
It would be the only place on earth
that registered no flu deaths.
The fever was beginning to break.
[Ending Music]