Ship Fever

Ship Fever (1996) is a collection of seven short stories and one novella by Andrea Barrett. The book won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1996. A few of the stories fall into the genre of historical fiction and all of them draw inspiration from Barrett’s training in science and the history of science. Several of the stories are set in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and some in the twentieth. Beyond science, Barrett also plays with ideas of feminism, broken families unhappily stitched together by marriage, and rivalries between naturalists.

The character of Linnaeus, a naturalist famous for categorizing species of flora and fauna, is woven through at least three stories. In “The English Pupil,” an elderly Linnaeus, who suffers from dementia and barely recognizes his own family, remembers his pupils and their adventures throughout the years. Many of those pupils or “disciples” are dead, having suffered misadventure in pursuit of science. His last pupil, Rotherham, is the one who will survive Linnaeus. This story deals with regret and mortality, a theme encapsulated by Linnaeus saying, “The death of many whom I have induced to travel has turned my hair gray, and what have I gained? A few dried plants, accompanied by great anxiety, unrest, and care.” This is the story he features in prominently, but he exists only in references and letters in “Rare Bird” and “Birds with No Feet.”

Barrett also writes about women who are too big for the gender roles society creates for them, especially when they approach middle age. Haunting these stories is the feeling of isolation: what happens to intelligent women in a world that values only male intelligence? In “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” a woman with connections to Mendel takes back her story from her husband, a university professor who mangled the story of the abbot’s research every semester. Antonia’s grandfather had met and befriended Mendel, and even had a letter that Mendel had written and given to him, and she recounts the story in full to a young man named Sebastian, one of Richard’s favorite students.



These themes are even stronger in “Rare Bird,” which is set in the mid-eighteenth century. Sarah Anna is a spinster who had been educated along with her brother by their naturalist father, but not allowed to be intelligent otherwise: “Sarah Anne inherited her father’s brains but Christopher inherited everything else, including his father’s friends.” The old naturalists tolerate and are amused by her, Linnaeus is a distant pen pal who discounts her theories, and her brother just fears that she’s going to be his responsibility for the rest of his life. When he marries Juliet, an elegant young woman with more manners than brains, Christopher’s disdain of his sister’s intelligence and willfulness increases. Sarah Anne eventually meets a widow named Catherine Pierce who is as intelligent and scientifically inclined as Sarah Anne. They run away together to parts unknown.

Difficult families also feature prominently in the short stories. In “The Littoral Zone,” two scientists, Ruby and Jonathan, meet during a summer research trip, fall in love, and shortly lose everything except each other. Both are married at the time, lose their jobs and children, go through messy divorces, and finally remarry each other. The story picks up fifteen years later. Their families never truly forgive them, and both Ruby and Jonathan feel but refuse to express the regrets of their actions because their relationship would break. Instead, they tell each other stories made of lies and myths about their relationship and keep telling those stories until they believe them. Yet the disappointment is palpable: “Neither likes to think about how much of the thrill of their early days together came from the obstacles they had to overcome. Some days … she can’t believe the heavyset figure pruning shrubs so meticulously is the man for whom she fought such battles. Jonathan … sometimes stares at Ruby’s sleeping face and thinks how much more gracefully his ex-wife is aging.”

Another story, “Soroche,” is about a young woman who marries a much older, richer man, who eventually dies after about twenty years, leaving her everything. She spends years caught between their families—her greedy, working-class family who are jealous of all the money she married into, and his children who resent their young stepmother. Shortly after marrying Joel, she suffers a miscarriage, and her husband (then in his forties) tells her that he does not want more children, and his children were never thrilled about the possibility of a baby, either. Joel leaves her more money than she could ever want, and she decides to give it all away to everything except family. She donates to charities and causes and funds a start-up business that goes bankrupt. By the end of the story, she is happy. She has shed all her wealth and most of what she owns and works as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.



The novella and title story of the book is “Ship Fever,” about a young Canadian doctor named Lauchlin Grant who decides to spend a summer in a quarantine station treating waves of Irish immigrants. Lauchlin keeps a journal, and entries are woven into the narrative. He thinks that he will only be dealing with a few cases of dysentery, and perhaps the effects of starvation. He quickly realizes that he has misjudged when he works on newly arrived ships: “Already Lauchlin felt as though he knew that place by heart. The darkness, of course; and the rotting food and the filth sloshing underfoot. The fetid bedding alive with vermin and everywhere the sick.” The ship is devastated by typhoid fever, and only a handful of passengers or crew are untouched. The sick ones are relocated to hospitals or other care facilities—some places not even containing beds—while the dead are stacked on the beach to await burial. The ordeal gives Lauchlin a medical mystery—he wants to understand how sickness is spread, prevented, and how best to use isolation and quarantine practices to save the afflicted. Even the doctors and staff fall ill and start dying, including Lauchlin himself, who collapses during his duties and is nursed by a girl named Nora whom he had saved earlier. He dies of the fever, but Nora lives to deliver his things to his friends back home.