Filthy and frightened, the three young children staggered up the beach. Their tiny frames were feverish and behind them, on board the small sailboat they had drifted ashore upon, lay the bodies of two dead men.

The group had been attempting to flee an outbreak of disease that had devastated their small, isolated village further upstream from the spot where they run aground on the Naknek River in Bristol Bay, Alaska. The three young survivors were quickly taken to a hospital run by a salmon canning company.

Their unexpected arrival at the Alaska Packer Association’s “Diamond O” cannery on the Naknek announced that “Spanish flu” had taken hold in this remote, largely ice-bound part of the world. The inhospitable winter weather conditions had prevented travel to the area between the months of September and May, meaning it had escaped the waves of influenza that swept the world during 1918.

By the time the pandemic had run its course, it claimed somewhere between 50 and 100 million lives – more than the total number of deaths from the terrors of World War One.

The arrival of the boat at the cannery on 4 June 1919 indicated the disease had finally found its way to the remote native Inuit communities that dotted the Alaskan coastline. The next day, the superintendent of the cannery dispatched a team to the children’s village to see if they could help.

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What they discovered was horrifying.

Reports from the men on the expedition described the village of Savonoski as being in a “deplorable state” and “wretched”. Nearly all of the adult population in the small cluster of around 10 houses were dead. Those still alive were gravely ill and told how their relatives had dropped even as they walked around. The team from the cannery buried the dead in a mass grave and brought those still alive back to the hospital in Naknek.

It was a picture that was repeated in villages all across Alaska. In just a few days nearly 200 people would die from the disease in the Bristol Bay area, leaving dozens of children orphaned. From some places, stories emerged of packs of stray dogs feasting on the bodies of the dead. In some communities, up to 90% of the population died and the mortality rates were some of the highest in the world.