What We Are Reading:
Longyearbyen

By Roger Berkowitz

We are all learning about the year 1918 when the last influenza pandemic swept across the world leaving millions dead in its wake. Most of all we have learned the difference in the impact of the flu in Philadelphia, where rallies and crowds were allowed, and in St. Louis, where public health officials banned such gatherings. But there are other lessons to learn from the last great viral pandemic. The New Yorker has made available an account of the 1918 Flu written by Malcolm Gladwell in 1987. 

On September 24, 1918, three days after setting sail from Norway’s northern coast, the Forsete arrived in Longyearbyen, a tiny mining town on one of the Norwegian islands north of the Arctic Circle. It was the last ship of the year, before ice made the Arctic fjords impassable, and it carried among its passengers a number of fishermen and farmers going north for the winter to earn extra money in Longyearbyen’s coal mines. During the voyage, however, the ship had been hit with an outbreak of flu. Upon landing, many of the passengers had to be taken to the local hospital, and over the next two weeks seven of them died. They were buried side by side in the local cemetery, their graves marked by six white crosses and one headstone:

Ole Kristoffersen
February 1, 1896–October 1, 1918

Magnus Gabrielsen
May 10, 1890–October 2, 1918

Hans Hansen
September 14, 1891–October 3, 1918

Tormod Albrigtsen
February 2, 1899–October 3, 1918

Johan Bjerk
July 3, 1892–October 4, 1918

William Henry Richardsen
April 7, 1893–October 4, 1918

Kristian Hansen
March 10, 1890–October 7, 1918

The Longyearbyen cemetery is at the base of a steep hill, just beyond the town limits. If you look up from the cemetery, you can see the gray wooden skeleton of the coal mine that used to burrow into the side of the hill, and if you look to your left you can see the icy fringes of a glacier. Farther down the mountain are a shallow stream, a broad shale plain, and then, half a mile or so across the valley, Longyearbyen itself: a small cluster of red-roofed, brightly painted frame buildings. There are no trees, because Longyearbyen is many miles above the tree line, and from almost anywhere in the valley the cemetery is in plain view. Each grave site is slightly elevated and surrounded by rocks, and there are well-worn pathways among the rows of crosses. A chain-link fence rings the periphery. When I was there in late August, the ground had been warmed by the Arctic summer sun and was soft and spongy, carpeted with orange and red and white lichen. In the last row I found the miners’ graves—seven deaths separated by six days.

It is possible to go to almost any cemetery in the world and find a similar cluster of graves from the fall of 1918. Between September and November of that year, as the First World War came to an end, an extraordinarily lethal strain of influenza swept the globe, killing between twenty million and forty million people. More Americans died of the flu over the next few months than were killed during the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The Spanish flu, as it came to be known, reached every continent and virtually every country on the map, going wherever ships sailed or cars or trucks or trains travelled, killing so many so quickly that some cities were forced to convert streetcars into hearses, and others buried their dead in mass graves, because they ran out of coffins. Of all those millions of graves, though, the seven in Longyearbyen stand apart. There, less than eight hundred miles from the North Pole, the ground beneath the lichen is hard-frozen permafrost. The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them.