Quarantine and the British Foreign Legion

A quarantine station

Throughout the 19th century Halifax faced repeated outbreaks and quarantines. A smallpox outbreak in 1800 killed 182 people, and one in 1827 killed around 800. Outbreaks like these were common in 19th-century North America. It was an era of mass migration, and dirty, overcrowded ships were ideal breeding grounds for cholera, typhus, smallpox and yellow fever.

In Ireland, British persecution and the poverty that followed drove people out in huge numbers. Between 1815 and 1846, 800,000 to 1 million Irish people emigrated to North America, many landing at Halifax.

With no war to fight, Melville Island was all but abandoned. Through the mid-19th century it stood empty except for short spells when a makeshift quarantine hospital was needed. The first came in May 1818, when records show 38 people were sent to the island on the orders of Lord Dalhousie on account of what was suspected to be cholera.

For the next decade the island was again left to decay. In 1826 a young Joseph Howe, decades away from becoming one of Nova Scotia’s most influential politicians, wrote a wistful poem about it:

Where groups of buildings sinking to decay,
Throw their dark shadows o’er the narrow bay…
The large red building which appeared alive
Some twelve years since, a perfect human hive,
Crowded and busy, where the eye might see
All save the calm contentment of the bee,
Now with its dreariness the heart appals,
So still and lifeless are the silent walls.

Joseph Howe, “Melville Island,” 1826 (excerpt)

In 1829 Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia described the island’s buildings as “in a state of neglect and decay.”

As fear of disease grew, Halifax introduced inspections of incoming ships. In April 1832, suspecting cholera, officials sent a group of newly arrived Irish immigrants to Melville Island. It turned out to be smallpox, and the patients were well by the end of May.

The famine year, 1847

The most dramatic episode came in 1847, the year of the Great Famine, when at least 100,000 Irish emigrants fled starvation. It remains one of the most significant waves of migration to North America in the 19th century.

About 1,200 of these emigrants arrived in Halifax, and between May and October many were sent to Melville Island. Of 203 recorded patients, somewhere between 30 and 37 died, and were presumably buried on Deadman’s Island. The quarantine was strict: even the surgeon and nurse could not leave the island.

Accounts from the time are grim. A report to the House of Assembly said that Dr. Matthias Hoffmann, the health officer in charge, had to lift an inmate’s body into a coffin himself, which suggests how short-staffed the station was.

The matron, a nurse named Mary Fitzgerald, petitioned the House for more help. Her petition describes damp, cold buildings, no fuel for light, no candles and too little bedding. Local papers reported that most of those who died were “very aged persons.” After four months the island was once again left empty.

The British Foreign Legion

In 1854 Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire went to war against Russia in what became known as the Crimean War. Britain saw Russia as upsetting the balance of power in Europe and set out to defend the Ottomans against Russian expansion.

That year Britain passed the Enlistment of Foreigners Act, and the army recruited hundreds of German, Italian and Swiss mercenaries to fight in Crimea. Joseph Howe, by then an active politician, was asked by Lieutenant Governor Sir Gaspard Le Marchant to travel to the United States and enlist as many men as he could.

American neutrality laws forbade recruiting Americans to leave the country to enlist. Howe travelled between Washington and New York, placing discreet newspaper advertisements that appeared to be for railway workers, and used aliases while building a network of recruiting agents. Willing Americans were given cards marked “NSR,” good for free passage to Halifax. NSR could stand for Nova Scotia Railways or, more accurately, Nova Scotia Regiment.

A receiving depot and training camp was set up on Melville Island. The first group of 66 men arrived on April 6, 1855, but refused to join the legion: they had taken the cards for a free trip to Halifax. By May, though, at least 71 willing recruits were in the refitted barracks. Howe’s success strained relations between the American and British governments.

That June the British abandoned the plan. Howe returned to Halifax, and the recruits were moved to the Citadel before being shipped to Britain. The British Foreign Legion, which drew hundreds of recruits from many countries, never saw action: the war ended in 1856. Melville Island had been a brief stop in one of the stranger episodes in British military history.