Captain John Broderick and a Letter to Five Islands
Nova Scotia # 10 on a cover mailed at Halifax on January 6, 1866, addressed to Captain John Broderick, Five Islands, Cumberland Co., N.S. Stamp tied by a barred oval, with a manuscript cancellation. Backstamps: H(alifax) JA 6 1866; HORTON LANDING JA __ 1866; ?LONDONDERRY JA 7 1866.
A small Nova Scotia cover, mailed at Halifax on January 6, 1866, is addressed to a Five Islands shipbuilder who, with three of his children, would be dead by midsummer. Following it leads through the mail routes around the Minas Basin, a family’s working life in wooden ships, and the emigrant steamship that brought disease into Halifax Harbour that April.
The Cover
The letter is addressed:
Captain John Broderick
Five Islands
Cumberland Co.
N.S.
It carries a Nova Scotia 5-cent stamp, cancelled with a barred oval and a manuscript cancellation. The reverse has a clear Halifax postmark of January 6, 1866, a second circular mark that appears to read HORTON LANDING, and a third, much fainter strike that may be LONDONDERRY, January 7, 1866. How those last two marks are read turns out to matter.
The address poses a second puzzle. Five Islands is in Colchester County, not Cumberland. Was “Cumberland Co.” simply a mistake?
John Brodrick, Shipwright
The family name appears as both Brodrick and Broderick, sometimes within the same set of records. The cover uses Broderick; the 1838 census uses Brodrick. I have kept each spelling as its source gives it.
John Brodrick Jr. was born in 1806, the son of John Brodrick Sr. (1761–1846), a farmer from County Tyrone, Ireland, who settled in the Five Islands area. The Nova Scotia Archives’ 1838 census return for Parrsboro Township lists John Jr., then about 32, as a “Shipwright.” That is a contemporary record of his trade, not a later family reconstruction.
Four years later he was owning ships as well as building them. The registration for the schooner Friendship, built in 1842, names John Brodrick Jr. of Five Islands as shipbuilder and owner of 21 of her 64 shares, roughly a third of the vessel. The Five Islands shipbuilding lists also record the 26-ton schooner Aitken, built in 1862 with J. Broderick as builder and owner, only four years before this letter was mailed.
1838 — John Brodrick Jr., shipwright
1842 — shipbuilder and owner of 21/64 shares in the schooner Friendship
1862 — builder and owner of the schooner Aitken
January 1866 — “Captain John Broderick,” Five Islands
Nothing shows him as master of a vessel, and the “Captain” on the cover is best read as a courtesy title. In Nova Scotia’s shipbuilding communities, the title was often given to a man who built and owned vessels, whether or not he sailed them.
The Brodricks were well established in the district’s maritime trades. John Jr.’s brother William Allison Brodrick was also a shipbuilder, and other members of the family worked as blacksmiths and in other trades.
The 1866 death register gives the end of the story, and it is harder than the cover alone suggests. John Brodrick did not die alone. Between April and June 1866, fever killed him and three of his children:
April 20 — George L. Broderick, 12, son of John Broderick
May 15 — John Broderick, 60, married
June 6 — R. S. Broderick, 3, son of John Broderick
June 13 — Almira Broderick, 26, spinster, daughter of John Broderick
Each is recorded as dying at Five Islands of “fever.” John’s eldest son, Joseph Broderick, born in 1835, reported the deaths of his father, his brother George and his sister Almira. The John Broderick who reported R. S.’s death was probably another son, John William Broderick, born in 1850 and about sixteen that June. George and Almira are the two buried with their father in the Baptist Cemetery at Five Islands.
John’s wife, Mary Crane Ratchford Corbett, was born at Five Islands on October 16, 1814. Within eight weeks in the spring of 1866 she lost her husband and three of their children.
R. S. Broderick appears in no other record I have found. The register names John as his father, and he does not fit into the family as a grandson. The youngest of the couple’s previously known children, Henry Troop Broderick, was born in 1857, so R. S. was probably a late child, born around 1863 when Mary was about forty-eight. His entry in the death register may be the only surviving record that he lived at all.
The register lists John himself as a farmer, and gives Five Islands as his birthplace. The Halifax correspondent who wrote to “Captain” Broderick in January was honouring the shipbuilder; to the registrar in May, he was a farmer.
How Did the Letter Reach Five Islands?
The backstamps are a puzzle, and they point in two directions.
By 1866 the Nova Scotia Railway had run from Halifax to both Windsor and Truro since 1858. One route to Five Islands was by train to Truro, then by road west along the Cobequid shore through Londonderry. A LONDONDERRY JA 7 strike would fit that route: through the Londonderry office the day after mailing, then on to Five Islands.
The HORTON LANDING strike suggests another. Horton Landing lay on the south side of the Minas Basin, reached from Halifax by the railway to Windsor, and from there the way to Five Islands was across the water. Packet service linking Windsor, Horton and Parrsboro was long established. In 1860 the province offered $1,600 a year for four years for a steamer running three times a week between Parrsboro, Hantsport, Five Islands, Londonderry, Maitland, Petite, Kempt and Windsor. Five Islands was part of a water network as well as a road one.
Each route raises its own questions. Did anything cross the upper basin in January, when ice often limited navigation? And if the letter went by way of Truro and Londonderry, why would it pass through Horton Landing at all? For now I am leaving the question open. A clearer look at the marks, or other covers with January 1866 strikes from either office, may yet settle it.
Why “Cumberland Co.”?
The simplest explanation is error, but county history suggests another. When the 1838 census was taken, Five Islands lay within Parrsboro Township, which was then part of Kings County. That is why John Jr. appears in the Parrsboro Township return. In 1840 the township was divided, with one part annexed to Cumberland County and the other to Colchester. Parrsboro itself went to Cumberland; Five Islands went to Colchester.
By 1866 the new line was only twenty-six years old, and the county it placed Five Islands in was not much older. Colchester, the old Cobequid district of Halifax County, had become a county in its own right only in 1835. Its line with Cumberland was first drawn in 1838, part of it was not fixed and defined until 1897, and the boundary was still the subject of a Commission of Inquiry in 1946.
For the first thirty-four years of John Brodrick’s life, Five Islands and Parrsboro had been one township, and Parrsboro remained the main commercial and transportation centre on that shore. His father had died at Parrsboro in 1846. A correspondent who still thought of Five Islands as part of the Parrsboro district would naturally write “Cumberland Co.” The address may be less a mistake than an older map of the county lines.
Spring 1866: The England at Halifax
On April 9, 1866, the steamship England put into Halifax from Liverpool and Queenstown. She was bound for New York with more than 1,200 emigrants, but cholera had broken out during the crossing. By the time she reached Halifax there had been 160 cases and 46 deaths among the passengers, and her captain did not believe he could safely continue.
Halifax remembered 1834, when cholera killed roughly 400 people in a town of about 14,000. This time the response was organized. The England was kept out of the city and sent to quarantine at McNabs Island. The old naval ship HMS Pyramus became a hospital ship for the sick, and the healthier passengers were landed on the island. Doctors, soldiers, clergy and the Sisters of Charity went out to care for them. The city’s health officer, Dr. John Slayter, went aboard, caught cholera and died on April 17. Cases also appeared at Portuguese Cove, near the harbour entrance.
On April 25, Charles Tupper wrote to Dr. Charles Gossip, Slayter’s successor as quarantine officer, warning that infection may already have reached Halifax through clothing and bedding. He feared that bedding from the Pyramus had been thrown into the harbour and was washing up on the beaches. Contemporary accounts tell of people picking up material from the ship that had come ashore, including one family whose child later fell ill.
The England sailed for New York on April 19, leaving 52 sick passengers in quarantine, and by early May the outbreak was subsiding. The episode strengthened the case for a permanent quarantine station, which eventually came with the station on Lawlor’s Island.
Cholera or Typhus?
Every death in the Brodrick household is recorded as fever, not cholera, and the difference matters.
Cholera was hard to mistake. It struck suddenly, with violent diarrhoea and dehydration, and often killed within a day or two. It was well known by name in 1866, and a cholera death would very likely have been recorded as one.
The England carried more than cholera, however. Later reports on the passengers who remained in quarantine distinguish cholera from other illnesses among them, including “fever” and typhus fever. Typhus is a far closer match to Brodrick’s death record. It was the classic disease of crowded emigrant ships, so familiar that it was called “ship fever,” and it was commonly recorded simply as fever. It also developed more slowly than cholera, with illness usually lasting around two weeks.
Typhus fits Tupper’s warning in a way he could not have known. Epidemic typhus is carried by body lice, which live in clothing and bedding. For typhus, the fear that infected clothing and bedding could carry disease ashore was exactly right, although the louse would not be identified as the carrier until 1909.
A “fever” entry cannot rule out other possibilities, typhoid above all, which spread through contaminated water and food and was common in rural households. Typhus and typhoid alike could work through a family one member at a time, as this one did.
The Dates
April 9 — the England arrives at Halifax
April 17 — Dr. Slayter dies
April 19 — the England sails for New York
April 20 — George L. Broderick, 12, dies of fever at Five Islands
May 15 — John Broderick, 60, dies of fever
June 4 — John Nickerson, 31, dies of fever at Five Islands
June 6 — R. S. Broderick, 3, dies of fever
June 13 — Almira Broderick, 26, dies of fever
June 19 — Mary Fulmore, 65, born in Scotland, dies of fever at Five Islands
Set out this way, the dates change the question. The first death was George’s, eleven days after the England reached Halifax. Typhus usually appears 10 to 14 days after infection, and fatal cases run another week or two; typhoid is slower still. George was almost certainly infected in late March or the first days of April, before the England arrived. Whatever reached the Brodrick house, it was there before the ship was.
What followed looks like a disease passing through a household: a son in April, the father in May, two more children in June, spaced two to four weeks apart. By June it had reached at least two neighbours, John Nickerson and the elderly Mary Fulmore. That pattern fits typhus or typhoid spreading from person to person within Five Islands, not a single infection carried from Halifax.
What Happened at Five Islands
The register does not rule out every connection with Halifax. Fever may have arrived at Five Islands some other way, on another ship or with another traveller, and later cases could in principle have had more than one source. But the neat story, a letter’s route in January becoming the path of an epidemic in April, does not survive the dates. The Brodricks’ fever began too early to have come from the England.
That leaves a different and perhaps better question. Six people died of fever at Five Islands between April 20 and June 19, 1866, four of them in one household. What was the fever, and where did it start? The register lists everyone who died, not everyone who fell ill, and a local newspaper notice, a physician’s account, or the death registers of Economy, Londonderry and Parrsboro that spring might show whether Five Islands was alone.
The England belongs in this story as context. That spring, the whole province was watching Halifax Harbour for disease arriving from overseas. At Five Islands, the danger may already have been at home.
If you have covers with January 1866 Horton Landing or Londonderry strikes, or know of other records of fever on the Cobequid shore that spring, I would be glad to hear from you.
Sources and Further Reading
Nova Scotia Archives, 1838 Census Returns: John Brodrick Jr., Shipwright, Parrsboro Township.
Nova Scotia Archives, County Guides No. 2, Kings County: the 1840 division of Parrsborough Township between Cumberland and Colchester counties.
Colchester County, Nova Scotia (county history): Colchester established as a county in 1835; the Cumberland–Colchester line of 1838 and its later revisions, 1897 and 1946–1959. [Editor’s note: Add the original source behind this summary.]
Registration of the schooner Friendship (1842): John Brodrick Jr., Five Islands, builder and owner of 21/64 shares. [Editor’s note: Add full citation.]
Nova Scotia Ship Building, Five Islands entries, including the 1862 schooner Aitken.
Ottawa House Museum, Area History Timeline, including the 1860 steamboat service connecting Parrsboro, Five Islands, Londonderry and Windsor.
Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics, Deaths Registered, 1866, page 11, entries 140–145: George L., John, R. S. and Almira Broderick, John Nickerson and Mary Salmons, Five Islands, all “fever.” [Editor’s note: Add county, book and online reference.]
FamilySearch, Baptist Cemetery, Five Islands: John Brodrick (1806–1866), Almira Brodrick (1840–1866), George L. Brodrick (1854–1866).
Ian Cameron, “The shadow within the shadow: How was Canada’s sixth prime minister, Charles Tupper, as a doctor?”, including Tupper’s April 25, 1866 letter on the Halifax outbreak. [Editor’s note: Verify exact title.]
[Editor’s note: Add source(s) for the England: passenger numbers, cases and deaths, Slayter’s death, the 52 passengers left in quarantine, and the reports of typhus among them.]
[Editor’s note: Add source for the 1834 Halifax cholera figures.]
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