It would begin with a feeling of ice in one’s blood and weakness in the bones. Two to four days later, red sores would infest the mouth and throat, followed by rashes all over the face and limbs. Within a few days, the hard, round beads all over the body would be undeniable: Smallpox.



It was July, 1892, and Victoria was being visited by its last great outbreak of one of the most terrifying diseases in history. Even before the arrival of white settlers, smallpox brought to the West Coast via Indigenous trade networks had depopulated the land now known as Vancouver Island with apocalyptic fury. When George Vancouver first visited the Strait of Georgia in 1792, he encountered whole villages occupied only by skeletons.



It had returned in the 1860s in a devastating outbreak that would primarily affect First Nations. In Victoria, thriving native camps in what is now James Bay, Ogden Point, Laurel Point and Cadboro Bay were so decimated by the disease that they never recovered.



And now, on the eve of the 20th century, smallpox visited a modern Victoria to reap one last tithe of death. While the current COVID-19 pandemic usually draws comparisons to the Spanish Flu of 1918, it’s also given Victorians a chilling taste of what it was like to live through attacks of the now-forgotten disease that profoundly shaped Victoria’s earliest days—a disease so foul, it’s incredible that it ever existed outside the world of horror fiction.



“The rubbing of pajamas on [the] skin felt like a roasting fire. By dawn, the body had become a mass of knob-like blisters ... it felt as if the skin was pulling off the body,” wrote author Richard Preston in the 2002 smallpox history The Demon in the Freezer.

The legs of a man suffering from smallpox, circa 1940s (Source).

What has made COVID-19 so dangerous is that it can be spread by people who do not even know they’ve been infected. Smallpox, by contrast, only became contagious after symptoms had begun to appear, such as sores in the mouth and throat. Once smallpox struck, however, it was far deadlier than even the highest mortality estimates for COVID-19; roughly one third of smallpox patients died.



No population on earth was immune from smallpox. Over thousands of years it has filled mass graves everywhere from India to Iceland. But it would strike hardest against the Indigenous peoples of North and South America. The disease and the resulting social collapse it brought to Indigenous societies dwarfed the carnage that the Black Plague had wrought on Medieval Europe. Some groups suffered smallpox-related mortality rates of upwards of 90%, and the disease is considered by many historians to be the singular reason why European colonists were able to quickly become the dominant population in North America. With smallpox having decimated Indigenous societies from Haida Gwaii to the Aztec Empire, there were few left to oppose the new settlers.



Victoria’s 1892 panic had started with smallpox reports emerging out of Vancouver. Just as with COVID-19, it had come out of Asia, travelling across the Pacific on Empress steamers from China or Japan; Vancouver’s first case had been a first class passenger on one such sailing.

The RMS Empress of Japan, which was ultimately identified as the likeliest vector for the outbreak (Source).

Fear escalated in June when ​The Vancouver World ​published a false rumor that nine people in Victoria had contracted smallpox. ​The Daily Colonist ​ responded to this almost mockingly, stating that only “[t]wo patients who were supposed to have the disease in its mildest form, have been removed to the Quarantine station at Albert head.” Still, after reports of more cases in Vancouver and Nanaimo, it seemed only a matter of time before smallpox crept its way into the BC capital.



In truth, however, it already had: On May 28th, Harry Farrer, a dock worker, reported his illness to the current health officer. Most worrying of all, Farrer’s case had been what we now call a case of “community spread.” He had no direct connection with any recent steamship travellers, indicating that whoever had infected him might have infected others.



Soon after came more: Two children, then a Mr. Burrows and a Mr. Niles. A Mr. Eckert, Mr. Foster, Mr. Marsh, Mr. Williams, Mr. Waitt; in hardly more than a month, smallpox had infiltrated over ten unsuspecting victims. It was a slow start, but just as the world has learned in recent weeks, in the world of infectious disease 10 cases can rapidly balloon into thousands.



Fatalities also began to mount quickly. A child was the first to die in early July, then Waitt and Burrows. By July 9th, with every day yielding a new batch of cases, a provincial health officer, Dr. J.C. Davie, was appointed to rein in the outbreak.

