1918: nälgivad koerad
cureventsis üks trükkis lõigu sisse Barry raamatust, peab tõdema, et see jäi mulle ka lugedes silma :S
From John Barry's: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History (The Story of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.)
One of the most chilling portions of that book IMO (Chapter Title: Tolling of the Bell; pp 361-362):
"On the opposite edge of the continent the story was the same. In Labrador man clung to existence with tenacity but not much more permanency than seaweed drying on a rock, vulnerable to the crash of surf at high tide. The Reverend Henry Gordon left the village of Cartwright in late October and returned a few days later, on October 30. He found "not a soul to be seen anywhere, and a strange, unusual silence." Heading home, be met a Hundson's Bay Company man who told him "sickness...has struck the place like a cyclone, two days after the Mail boat had left." Gordon went from house to house. "Whole households lay inanimate on their kitchen floors, unable even to feed themselves or look after the fire."Twenty-six of one hundred souls had died. Further up the coast it was worse.
Of 220 people at Hebron, 150 died. The weather was already bitter cold. The dead lay in their beds, sweat having frozen their bedclothes to them. Gordon and some others from Cartwright made no effort to dig graves, consigning the bodies to the sea. He wrote "A feeling of intense resentment at the callousness of the authorities, who sent us the disease by mail-boat, and then left us to sink or swim, filled one's heart almost to the exclusion of all else...."
Then there was Okak. Two hundred sixty-six people had lived in Okak, and many dogs, dogs nearly wild. When the virus came it struck so hard so fast people could not care for themselves or feed the dogs. The dogs grew hungry, crazed with hunger, devoured each other, and then wildly smashed through windows and doors, and fed. The Reverend Andrew Asboe survived with his rifle beside him; he personally killed over one hundred dogs.
When the Reverend Walter Perret arrived, only fifty-nine people out of 266 still lived. ...
In all of Labrador, at least one-third the total population died."