The Lepers, Chacachacare abandoned to vandals

The one remaining road climbing 835 feet to the lighthouse is well maintained, the rest are crumbling into the sea. Poles leaning at drunken angles and strands of wire are all that is left of – were these electric lines or telephone lines? Civilisation has come and gone; stealthily the bush reclaims the land, the cotton plantations, the gardens where once sugar apples and ground provisions grew.

Why has Chacachacare been abandoned? Is it the thought, the suspicion that Mycrobaterium leprae (the scientific name for the bacterium that causes leprosy) still infects an island that, until a mere 21 years ago, was a leprosarium, a place to house and treat lepers? No. The abandoned buildings have been, are still being, deliberately vandalised to provide fuel for beach barbecues – witness the missing boards in the convent gallery. The worst vandalism occurred, as photos show, when the stout cyp board walls of cells in the nuns’ convent were cut out with primacord to human shapes and used by the Regiment for target practice during war games with the US military some years ago.

Laventille today is home to thousands who probably have no idea that 160 years ago lepers lived there. They used to come into the city each day to beg. Governor Woodford, alarmed by fears of the disease spreading when lepers came in close contact with healthy people, proposed moving the leprosarium to Monos (the citizenry of that time were having none of that). Instead, a leprosy asylum was built in Cocorite where the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital stands today.

In 1868 Governor Arthur Hamilton, appalled at conditions in Cocorite, asked the Roman Catholic Archbishop to bring Dominican Sisters from France to care for the lepers. It was, at that time, a heroic calling. Today we know that leprosy isn’t very contagious, that most of us (ninety-five percent) have natural immunity to the disease. The leprosy that features so largely in the Bible is believed to have been a whole range of skin conditions. It was only in 1873 that Norwegian Dr Gerhard Armaud Hansen isolated the bacterium for leprosy proper. Ironically, it was during a medical conference also in Norway in 1915 that leprosy was declared a contagious disease, that anyone suffering from leprosy must be separated, shut away from society.

With 500 patients in the Cocorite Leprosy Asylum and numbers of cases climbing, the Colonial Government passed a law ordering all lepers to be shut up in their own homes or go to the Asylum in Cocorite. Those found wandering about were picked up and taken to Cocorite, whether they will or no.

However, keeping patients in the Asylum was easier said than done. At one time 300 lepers escaped. By this time (shortly after World War I) Port-of-Spain was spreading westwards; instead being out in the country and well away from the city, Cocorite had become a suburb of Port-of-Spain. Something had to be done to protect the population from the scourge of leprosy . . .

Early in 1921 an advertisement appeared in the Trinidad Guardian announcing that government intended setting up a leprosarium on Chacachacare. Understandably there were howls of rage from those who lived on the island, those who spent holidays in their island homes or in rented accommodation. A petition of protest was taken to London and presented to the Secretary of State for the Colonies — to no avail. The authorities were inflexible. On December 29, 1921 the Acting Governor T A V Best issued the following eviction order (I quote from Fr de Verteuil’s book).

"Notice is hereby given that in pursuance of the authority vested in me by Clause . . . ALL THE LANDS (exclusive of the property of the Roman Catholic Church) situated in the island of Chacachacare in the ward of Diego Martin which are not already Crown Lands have been appropriated for the purpose of establishing a Leper Settlement."

As usual, the well-to-do didn’t suffer because they had their own homes in Trinidad. It was the 300-400 small landowners and their families, who had lived there for generations, whose way of life was utterly destroyed. And, in hindsight, for what?

Although leprosy is "still not completely understood" (to quote one medical Web site) and there is, as yet, no vaccine to protect the vulnerable against the bacterium; it can be, and is, treated with a "cocktail" of three antibiotics. On average, treatment lasts between six months and a year, there is no need to segregate patients who (provided they don’t suffer unpleasant side-effects from their medications) can live a normal life while under treatment.

The disease is spread by sneezing; however, only those who aren’t getting treatment are a danger to the community. Leprosy isn’t easy to diagnose since it mimics other skin diseases but, provided it’s caught in the early stages patients no longer lose fingers, toes, noses, or eyes. Most cases occur in South East Asia, Central Africa and South America. In the US between two-and-three hundred cases of leprosy are diagnosed each year.

The plight of those evicted from their island home to make way for the leprosarium was pitiful but for the lepers, however well cared for by the Dominican sisters, it was infinitely worse because they were effectually imprisoned on the island. The able-bodied and labourers from the Ministry of Works toiled to build a church, a hospital, a convent, quarters for the chaplain, a chapel. Lepers lived in small cottages along the coast. Male patients lived in Coco Bay, females in Sanders Bay.

Readers who want to know more about the Dominican Sisters and the US Sisters of Mercy nursing sisters who cared to the patients should beg, or borrow Fr de Verteuil’s book Western Isles of Trinidad and Sister Marie Therese Retout’s book Called to Serve.

Last week we mentioned residents’ problems to get water in the dry season. Lepers were rationed to half a gallon (eight pints) a day for drinking only. All their clothes were washed in the Settlement laundry. Patients weren’t allowed to swim in the sea; they could bathe up to chest height, if caught in deeper water they served two days in the gaol on La Tinta Bay. The able bodied were compelled to work for the princely sum (in 1936) of 25 cents a day; the doctor reduced this wage to 12 cents, the lepers went on strike and two months later got back their 25 cents. Some patients cultivated gardens in the wet season.

The next event of note in Chacachacare was World War II and the arrival of the American forces. Six hundred marines were stationed on the island living in nine military barracks (three up by the lighthouse, two above Rust’s Bay, three close to the convent and one at Perruquier Bay — near La Tinta); the US built roads to link the barracks and fenced off the leper colony with barbed wire (see map).

The US military brought in guns, established a coastguard station. Wars can be mixed blessings. Thanks to the US military, lighthouse keepers got a jeep to travel to and from the lighthouse (today they have a nice, new pick-up), the Americans built a cableway to ferry goods from the jetty to the convent.

Wartime food shortages led to food rationing and the lepers’ three-month long strike for better food and increased wages for manual work. Meanwhile the rigid rule separating male from female patients was relaxed; births increased but babies were taken away from their mothers and sent to orphanages in Trinidad.

The marines weren’t the only Americans to come to Chacachacare. Determined to stamp out leprosy, government insisted that the nuns tending the lepers should also be qualified nurses. Archbishop Finbar Ryan persuaded the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy in Baltimore to send six nuns who were also registered nurses, to work alongside the Dominican Sisters and in 1945 government built a convent for the American nuns in Marine Bay.

On December 11, 1947, two years and seven months after the war ended, the US gave up the lease and Chacachacare became, once again, Crown land. In 1948 patients were treated with the new Sulfa drugs. As new drugs were developed, and more research proved lepers didn’t have to be shut away from the general population, the Leprosarium was closed down, the last patient departing in 1984 leaving Chacachacare to the mercy of vandals, war games, and official neglect.

Next week Huevos.