In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. During a war, the rat populations of seaports and of ships always shoot up. House rats left their nests in basements and began to dig burrows in vacant lots and parks, particularly Central Park, earlier this spring than they have for many years. A steady increase in shipboard rats began to be noticed in New York Harbor in the summer of 1940, less than a year after the war started in Europe. Rats and rat fleas in many foreign ports are at times infected with the plague, an extraordinarily ugly disease that occurs in several forms, of which the bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, is the most common. Consequently, all ships that enter the harbor after touching at a foreign port are examined for rats or for signs of rat infestation by officials of the United States Public Health Service, who go out in cutters from a quarantine station on the Staten Island bank of The Narrows. If a ship appears to be excessively infested, it is anchored in the bay or in one of the rivers, its crew is taken off, and its holds and cabins are fumigated with gas so poisonous that a whiff or two will quickly kill a man, let alone a rat. In 1939 the average number of rats killed in a fumigation was 12.4. In 1940 the average rose abruptly to 21, and two years later it reached 32.1. In 1943, furthermore, rats infected with the plague bacteria, Pasteurella pestis, were discovered in the harbor for the first time since 1900. They were taken out of an old French tramp, the Wyoming, in from Casablanca, where the Black Death has been intermittent for centuries.
The biggest rat colonies in the city are found in rundown structures on or near the waterfront, especially in tenements, live-poultry markets, wholesale produce markets, slaughterhouses, warehouses, stables, and garages. They also turn up in more surprising places. Department of Health inspectors have found their claw and tail tracks in the basements of some of the best restaurants in the city. A few weeks ago, in the basement and sub-basement of a good old hotel in the East Forties, a crew of exterminators trapped two hundred and thirty-six in three nights. They nest in the roofs of some El stations and many live in crannies in the subways; in the early-morning hours, during the long lulls between trains, they climb to the platforms and forage among the candy-bar wrappers and peanut hulls. There are old rat paths beneath the benches in at least two ferry sheds. In the spring and summer, multitudes of one species, the brown rat, live in twisting, many-chambered burrows in vacant lots and parks. There are great colonies of this kind of rat in Central Park. The rat that Mrs. Zorah White Gristede, the critic of Park Commissioner Moses, pointed out for a newspaper photographer last week in the Eighty-fifth Street playground in Central Park was a brown rat. After the first cold snap they begin to migrate, hunting for warm basements. Herds have been seen on autumn nights scuttering across Fifth Avenue. All through October and November, exterminating firms get frantic calls from the superintendents of many of the older apartment houses on the avenues and streets adjacent to the Park; the majority of the newer houses were ratproofed when built. The rats come out by twos and threes in some side streets in the theatrical district practically every morning around four-thirty. The scow-shaped trucks that collect kitchen scraps from restaurants, night clubs, and saloons all over Manhattan for the pig farms of Secaucus, New Jersey, roll into these streets at that time. Shortly after the trucks have made their pick-ups, if no people are stirring, the rats appear and search for dropped scraps; they seem to pop out of the air.
Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.
The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms, and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits. Even so, they spend most of their lives in a state of extreme anxiety, the black rats dreading the brown and both species dreading human beings. Away from their nests, they are usually on the edge of hysteria. They will severely bite babies (there was an epidemic of this a year or so ago in a row of tenements in the Wallabout neighborhood in Brooklyn), and they will bite sleeping adults, but ordinarily they flee from people. If hemmed in, and sometimes if too suddenly come upon, they will attack. They fight savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs; they bare their teeth and leap about every which way, snarling and snapping and clawing the air. A full-grown black rat, when desperate, can jump three feet horizontally and make a vertical leap of two feet two inches, and a brown rat is nearly as spry. They are greatly feared by firemen. One of the hazards of fighting a fire in a junk shop or in an old warehouse is the crazed rats. It is dangerous to poke at them. They are able to run right up a cane or a broomstick and inflict deep, gashlike bites on their assailant’s hands. A month or so ago, in broad daylight, on the street in front of a riding academy on the West Side, a stableboy tried to kill a rat with a mop; it darted up the mop handle and tore the thumbnail off the boy’s left hand. This happening was unusual chiefly in that the rat was foraging in the open in the daytime. As a rule, New York rats are nocturnal. They rove in the streets in many neighborhoods, but only after the sun has set. They steal along as quietly as spooks in the shadows close to the building line, in the gutters, peering this way and that, sniffing, quivering, conscious every moment of all that is going on around them. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encountered most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one. When he does, it is a disquieting experience. Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away, its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon, of soullessness in general. Veteran exterminators say that even they are unable to be calm around rats. “I’ve been in this business thirty-one years and I must’ve seen fifty thousand rats, but I’ve never got accustomed to the look of them,” one elderly exterminator said recently. “Every time I see one my heart sinks and I get the belly flutters.” In alcoholic wards the rat is the animal that most frequently appears in the visual hallucinations of patients with delirium tremens. In Ireland, in fact, the D.T.’s are often referred to as “seeing the rat.”
There are three kinds of rats in the city—the black (Rattus rattus rattus), which is also known as the ship or the English rat; the Alexandrian (Rattus rattus alexandrinus), which is also known as the roof or the Egyptian rat; and the brown (Rattus norvegicus), which is also known as the house, gray, sewer, or Norway rat. In recent years they have been killed here in the approximate proportion of ninety brown to nine black and one Alexandrian. The brown is hostile to the other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight. It kills them by biting their throats or by clawing them to pieces, and, if hungry, it eats them. The behavior and some of the characteristics of the three kinds are dissimilar, but all are exceedingly destructive, all are hard to exterminate, all are monstrously procreative, all are badly flea-bitten, and all are able to carry a number of agonizing diseases. Among these diseases, in addition to the plague, are a form of typhus fever called Brill’s disease, which is quite common in several ratty ports in the South; spirochetal jaundice, rat-bite fever, trichinosis, and tularemia. The plague is the worst. Human beings develop it in from two to five days after they have been bitten by a flea that has fed on a plague-infected rat. The onset is sudden, and the classic symptoms are complete exhaustion, mental confusion, and black, intensely painful swellings (called buboes) of the lymph glands in the groin and under the arms. The mortality is high. The rats of New York are all ridden with a flea, the Xenopsylla cheopis, which is by far the most frequent transmitting agent of the plague. Several surveys of the prevalence in the city of the cheopis have been made by Benjamin E. Holsendorf, a consultant on the staff of the Department of Health. Mr. Holsendorf, a close-mouthed, elderly Virginian, is a retired Passed Assistant Pharmacist in the Public Health Service and an international authority on the ratproofing of ships and buildings. He recently supervised the trapping of many thousands of rats in the area between Thirty-third Street and the bottom of Manhattan, and found that these rats had an average of eight cheopis fleas on them. “Some of these rats had three fleas, some had fifteen, and some had forty,” Mr. Holsendorf says, “and one old rat had hundreds on him; his left hind leg was missing and he’d take a tumble every time he tried to scratch. However, the average was eight. None of these fleas were plague-infected, of course. I don’t care to generalize about this, but I will say that if just one plague-infected rat got ashore from a ship at a New York dock and roamed for only a few hours among our local, uninfected rats, the resulting situation might be, to say the least, quite sinister.”
Rats are almost as fecund as germs. In New York, under fair conditions, they bear from three to five times a year, in litters of from five to twenty-two. There is a record of seven litters in seven months from a single captured pair. The period of gestation is between twenty-one and twenty-five days. They grow rapidly and are able to breed when four months old. That is why they can take a mile when given an inch; a ship that leaves port with only a few rats in it is apt to come back with an army of them aboard. The span of life is between three and five years, although now and then one may live somewhat longer; a rat at four is older than a man at ninety. Exterminators refer to old rats as Moby Dicks. “Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,” one exterminator says. “A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skillfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read. If you get a few Moby Dicks in your house, there are just two things you can do: you can wait for them to die, or you can burn your house down and start all over again.” In fighting the rat, exterminating companies use a wide variety of traps, gases, and poisons. There are about three hundred of these companies in the city, ranging in size from hole-in-the-wall, boss-and-a-helper outfits to corporations with whole floors in midtown office buildings, large laboratories, and staffs of carefully trained employees, many of whom have scientific degrees. One of the largest is the Guarantee Exterminating Company (“America’s Pied Piper”), at 500 Fifth Avenue. Among its clients are hospitals, steamship lines, railroad terminals, department stores, office buildings, hotels, and apartment houses. Its head is E. R. Jennings, a second-generation exterminator; his father started the business in Chicago, in 1888. Mr. Jennings says that the most effective rat traps are the old-fashioned snap or break-back ones and a thing called the glueboard.
“We swear by the glueboard,” he says. “It’s simply a composition shingle smeared on one side with a thick, strong, black glue. We developed this glue twenty-five years ago and it’s probably the stickiest stuff known to man. It has been widely copied in the trade and is used all over. The shingle is pliable. It can be laid flat on the floor or bent around a pipe. We place them on rat runs—the paths rats customarily travel on—and that’s where skill comes in; you have to be an expert to locate the rat runs. We lay bait around the boards. If any part of the animal touches a board, he’s done for. When he tries to pull away, he gets himself firmly caught in the glue. The more he struggles, the more firmly he’s stuck. Next morning the rat, glueboard and all, is picked up with tongs and burned. We used to bait with ground beef, canned salmon, and cheese, but when rationing came in we did some experimenting with many other foods and discovered, to our great surprise, that peanut butter is an extremely effective rat bait. Rats have to be trapped, poisoned, or gassed. Cats are worthless. They can handle mice, and do, but an adult brown rat will rip the hide off any cat. Ferrets aren’t used against rats in New York any more, but exterminators in Philadelphia have to always keep a pair on hand. Some of the old families down there insist on that method. Personally, I like a ferret about as much as I like a rat.
“Insects, particularly the cockroach and the bedbug, are the No. 1 exterminating problem in New York. Rats come next. Then mice. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell this, but most good exterminators despise rat jobs because they know that exterminating by itself is ineffective. You can kill all the rats in a building on a Monday and come back on a Wednesday and find it crawling with them. The only way rats can be kept out is to ratproof the building from sub-basement to skylight. It’s an architectural problem; you have to build them out. Killing them off periodically is a waste of time; it’s like taking aspirin for a cancer. We refuse to take a rat job unless the owner or tenant promises to stop up every hole and crack through which rats can get entrance and seal up or eliminate any spaces inside the building in which they can nest. That may sound like cutting our own throats, but don’t worry: insects are here to stay and we’ll always have more work than we can do. Rats are on the increase right now, especially the black rat. The other day I saw some blacks in an El station in uptown Manhattan. Use to, you’d find them only on the waterfront. People don’t have time to attend to rats with a war on. After the war, we’ll pick up the slack. Twenty-five years ago there were easily two rats for every human in the city. They gradually decreased to half that, for many reasons. Better sanitary conditions in general is one reason. Fewer horses and fewer stables is another. The improved packaging of foods helped a lot. An increase in the power of the Department of Health is an important reason. Nowadays, if a health inspector finds rat tracks in a grocery or a restaurant, all he has to do is issue a warning; if things aren’t cleaned up in a hurry, he can slap on a violation and make it stick. The most important reason, however, is the modern construction of buildings and the widespread use of concrete. It’s almost impossible for a rat to get inside some of the newer apartment houses and office buildings in the city. If he gets in, there’s no place for him to hide and breed. Take the Empire State Building, which I know intimately. There’s never been a rat in it, not a single, solitary one.”
None of the rats in New York are indigenous to this country. The black rat has been here longest. Its homeland is India. It spread to Europe in the Middle Ages along trade routes, and historians are quite sure that it was brought to America by the first ships that moored here. It is found in every seaport in the United States, and inland chiefly in the Gulf States. It has bluish-black fur, a pointed nose, and big ears. It is cleaner and not as fierce as the brown rat but more suspicious and harder to trap. It is an acrobatic beast. It can rapidly climb a drapery, a perpendicular drain or steam-heat pipe, an elevator cable, or a telephone or electric wire. It can gnaw a hole in a ceiling while clinging to an electric wire. It can run fleetly on a taut wire, or on a rope whether slack or taut. It uses its tail, which is slightly longer than its body, to maintain balance. It nests in attics, ceilings, and hollow walls, and in the superstructures of piers, away from its enemy, the ground-loving brown rat. Not all piers are infested; a few of the newer ones, which are largely of concrete, have none at all. It keeps close to the waterfront, and until recently was rarely come across in the interior of the city. Whenever possible, it goes aboard ships to live. While docked here, all ships are required to keep three-foot metal discs, called rat guards, set on their hawsers and mooring cables. These guards sometimes get out of whack—a strong wind may tilt them, for example—and then a black or an Alexandrian can easily clamber over them. Occasionally a rat will walk right up or down a gangplank. It is almost impossible to keep a ship entirely free of them. Some famous ships are notoriously ratty. One beautiful liner—it was in the round-the-world cruise service before the war—once came in with two hundred and fifty aboard. Public Health Service officials look upon a medium-sized ship with twenty as excessively infested. The record for New York Harbor is held by a freighter that came in from an Oriental port with six hundred, all blacks and Alexandrians. The black and the Alexandrian belong to the same species, their appearance and habits are alike, and the untrained eye cannot tell them apart. The Alexandrian is frequently found on ships from Mediterranean ports. It is a native of Egypt, and no one seems to know, even approximately, when it first appeared in this country. It has never been able to get more than a toehold in New York, but it is abundant in some Southern and Gulf ports.
The brown rat, the R. norvegicus, originated somewhere in Central Asia, began to migrate westward early in the eighteenth century, and reached England around 1730. Most authorities believe that it got to this country during the Revolutionary War. From ports all along the coast it went inland, hot on the heels of the early settlers, and now it thrives in every community and on practically every farm in the United States. Its spread was slowest in the high and dry regions of the West; it didn’t reach Wyoming until 1919 and Montana until 1923. It has a blunt nose, small ears, and feverish, evil, acutely intelligent eyes. Its fur is most often a grimy brown, but it may vary from a pepper-and-salt gray to nearly black. Partial albinos occasionally show up; the tame white rat, which is used as a laboratory animal and sometimes kept as a pet, is a sport derived from the brown.
In addition to being the most numerous, the brown rat is the dirtiest, the fiercest, and the biggest. “The untrained observer,” a Public Health Service doctor remarked not long ago, “invariably spreads his hands wide apart when reporting the size of a rat he has seen, indicating that it was somewhat smaller than a stud horse but a whole lot bigger than a bulldog. They are big enough, God protect us, without exaggerating.” The average length of adult brown rats is a foot and five inches, including the tail, which is seven inches. The average weight is three-quarters of a pound. Once in a while a much heavier one is trapped. One that weighed a pound and a half and measured a foot and eight and a half inches overall was recently clubbed to death in a Manhattan brewery; brewery and distillery rats feed on mash and many become obese and clumsy. Some exterminators have maintained for years that the biggest rats in the country, perhaps in the world, are found in New York, Jersey City, Washington, and San Francisco, but biologists believe that this is just a notion, that they don’t get any bigger in one city than they do in another. The black and the Alexandrian are about two-thirds the size of the brown.
The brown rat is distributed all over the five boroughs. It customarily nests at or below street level—under floors, in rubbishy basements, and in burrows. There are many brownstones and redbricks, as well as many commercial structures, in the city that have basements or sub-basements with dirt floors; these places are rat heavens. The brown rat can burrow into the hardest soil, even tightly packed clay, and it can tunnel through the kind of cheap mortar that is made of sand and lime. To get from one basement to another, it tunnels under party walls; slum-clearance workers frequently uncover a network of rat tunnels that link all the tenements in a block. Like the magpie, it steals and hoards small gadgets and coins. In nest chambers in a system of tunnels under a Chelsea tenement, workers recently found an empty lipstick tube, a religious medal, a skate key, a celluloid teething ring, a belt buckle, a shoehorn, several books of matches in which all the match heads had been eaten off, a penny, a dime, and three quarters. Paper money is sometimes found. When the Civic Repertory Theatre was torn down, a nest constructed solely of dollar bills, seventeen in all, was discovered in a burrow. Exterminators believe that most fires of undetermined origin in the city are started by rats. “They are the worst firebugs in creation,” one says. “They set some fires by gnawing the insulation off electric wiring, but their passion for match eating is what causes the most damage. They often use highly inflammable material in building nests. For example, the majority of the nests in the neighborhood of a big garage will invariably be built of oily cotton rags. Let a rat bring some matches into such a nest, particularly one that’s right beneath a wooden floor, and let him ignite a match while gnawing on it, and a few minutes later here come the fire wagons.”
The brown rat is as supple as rubber and it can squeeze and contort itself through openings half its size. It has strong jaws and long, curved incisors with sharp cutting edges. It can gnaw a notch big enough to accommodate its body in an oak plank, a slate shingle, or a sun-dried brick. Attracted by the sound of running water, it will gnaw into lead pipe. It cannot climb as skillfully as the black and the Alexandrian, it cannot jump as far, and it is not as fleet, but it is, for its size, a remarkable swimmer. A Harbor Police launch once came upon three brown rats, undoubtedly from New Jersey, in the middle of the Hudson; in an hour and twenty-five minutes, swimming against the wind in tossing water, they reached the pilings of one of the Barclay Street ferry slips, where the policemen shot them. The brown rat is an omnivorous scavenger, and it doesn’t seem to care at all whether its food is fresh or spoiled. It will eat soap, oil paints, shoe leather, the bone of a bone-handled knife, the glue in a book binding, and the rubber in the insulation of telephone and electric wires. It can go for days without food, and it can obtain sufficient water by licking condensed moisture off metallic surfaces. All rats are vandals, but the brown is the most ruthless. It destroys far more than it actually consumes. Instead of completely eating a few potatoes, it takes a bite or two out of dozens. It will methodically ruin all the apples and pears in a grocery in a night, gnawing on a few and then cutting into the others for the seeds. To get a small quantity of nesting material, it will cut great quantities of garments, rugs, upholstery, and books to tatters. In a big warehouse, it goes berserk. In a few hours a herd will rip holes in hundreds of sacks of flour, grain, coffee, and other foodstuffs, spilling and fouling the contents and making a wholesale mess. It sometimes seems that only deep hatred of the human race could cause the rat to be so destructive. Every January, the biologists of the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior get together and make an estimate of the amount of damage done during the past year by rats. Their estimate for the country in 1943 was two hundred million dollars.
In live-poultry markets a lust for blood seems to take hold of the brown rat. One night, in the old Gansevoort wholesale-poultry market, alongside the Hudson in Greenwich Village, a burrow of them bit the throats of three hundred and twenty-five broilers and ate less than a dozen. Before the Gansevoort market was abandoned, in 1942, the rats practically had charge of it. In three sheds, four thousand were trapped. They nested in the drawers of desks and leaped out, snarling, when the drawers were pulled open. Exterminators have occasionally been perplexed at finding eggshells and even unbroken eggs in brown-rat burrows under poultry markets and butter-and-egg warehouses. Irving Billig, president of the Biocerta Corporation, which makes pest poisons, at 303 Fifth Avenue, claims that he found out not long ago how the rats transport these eggs. Now and then Mr. Billig takes on a big exterminating job. The city once hired him to quell the rats in Central Park and in the dumps on Riker’s Island. For a hobby, he hides in food establishments at night and studies the feeding habits of rats. “I’ll swear to this,” he says. “One night, in the warehouse of a grocery chain, I saw some egg-stealing rats at work. They worked in pairs. A small rat would straddle an egg and clutch it in his four paws. When he got a good grip on it, he’d roll over on his back. Then a bigger rat would grab him by the tail and drag him across the floor to a hole in the baseboard, a hole leading to a burrow. The big rat would slowly back into the hole, pulling the small one, the one with the egg, in after him.” In an East River slaughterhouse, Mr. Billig once witnessed another example of the ingenuity of the norvegicus. “I’ll swear to this, also,” he says. “This place had a bad problem and I was called in to study it. I hid in a room where there were some sides of beef hung on hooks, about three feet clear of the floor. Around eleven P.M. the rats started wriggling in. In fifteen minutes there were around two hundred in the room. They began jumping for the beeves, but they couldn’t reach them. Presently they congregated under one beef and formed a sort of pyramid with their bodies. The pyramid was high enough for one rat to jump up on the beef. He gnawed it loose from the hook, it tumbled to the floor, and the two hundred rats went to work on it.” After telling about this, Mr. Billig shudders and says, “A sight like that leaves a mark on a man. If the rats come out of their holes by the millions some night and take over City Hall and start running the city, I won’t be the least bit surprised. A few more world wars, a couple of epidemics of the bubonic plague, and the Machine Age’ll be done for; it’ll turn into the Rat Age.”
So far, in the United States, the plague has been only a menace. From 1898 to 1923, 10,822,331 deaths caused by the plague were recorded in India alone; in the United States, in this period, there were fewer than three hundred deaths. The plague first occurred in this country in 1900, in the Chinatown of San Francisco. It is generally believed that the bacteria were brought in by a herd of infected rats that climbed to the docks from an old ship in the Far Eastern trade. This epidemic killed a hundred and thirteen people and lasted until the end of 1903. The plague broke out again in 1907, a year after the earthquake. In the same year there was an epidemic in Seattle. There have been two epidemics in New Orleans—one in 1914 and one in 1919 and 1920—and there was one in Los Angeles in 1924 and 1925. Since then there have been only sporadic cases. However, there is a vast and ominous reservoir of plague infection in the wild rodents of the West. During the first epidemic in San Francisco, many rats fled the city and infected field rodents, chiefly ground squirrels, in the suburbs. In 1934, thirty years later, Public Health Service biologists turned up the fact that the plague had slowly spread among burrowing animals—ground squirrels, prairie dogs, chipmunks, and others—as far east as New Mexico and Wyoming. Late last year it appeared fifty miles inside the western border of North Dakota. Public Health Service officials say that there is no reason to assume that the infection will not infiltrate into rodents of the Great Plains, cross the Mississippi, and show up in the East. Most of the diseased rodents inhabit thinly settled sections and come in contact with human beings infrequently. Even so, every year several people, usually hunters, are bitten by infected rodent fleas and come down with the plague. Epidemiologists are greatly disturbed by the situation, particularly because there is an ever-present possibility that a few infected rodents may stray from rural areas and transfer the disease to town and city rats, settling an old score. If the disease gets loose among city rats, epidemics among human beings will probably follow.
There has never been an outbreak of the plague in New York. There have, however, been two narrow escapes. In 1900, plague-infected rats were found in ships in the harbor of New York, as well as in the harbors of San Francisco and Port Townsend, Washington. They got ashore only in San Francisco, causing the first Black Death epidemic in North America. Plague rats were found in New York Harbor for the second time early in January of last year. Among themselves, health officials have already got in the habit of referring to this discovery as “the Wyoming affair.” The history of the Wyoming affair was told to me the other day by Dr. Robert Olesen, medical director of the New York Quarantine Station of the Public Health Service, whose office is in an old, red-brick building overlooking The Narrows, in Rosebank, on Staten Island.
“I suppose there can be no harm in telling about it now,” Dr. Olesen said. “First, it’s necessary to explain how we inspect ships. Every ship in foreign trade that comes into the harbor is boarded by a party made up of a customs officer, an immigration officer, a plant-quarantine man from the Department of Agriculture, a Public Health doctor, and a sanitary inspector, whose main job is to determine the degree of rat infestation aboard. While the doctor is examining the crew and passengers for quarantinable diseases, the sanitary inspector goes through the ship looking for rat gnawings, tracks, droppings, nests, and for the presence of rat odor. An experienced inspector can smell rats. He pays particular attention to ships that have touched at plague ports. There are quite a few of these ports right now; Suez had an outbreak the other day and was put on the list. After he’s made his search, he reports to the doctor, who orders a fumigation if things look bad. If infestation is slight and if the ship comes from a clean port, the doctor probably won’t insist on a fumigation. I won’t give you any wartime figures, but in one peacetime month, for example, we inspected five hundred and sixty ships, found that a hundred and thirty-two were infested to some degree, and fumigated twenty-four, recovering eight hundred and ten rats. Ships make rapid turnarounds nowadays, and it often happens that the time required for a fumigation will cause a ship to miss a convoy.
“We are short-handed, and most of our fumigating is done by a group of twenty-two Coast Guardsmen. They were assigned to us early in the war and we trained them to make rat inspections and fumigations. We use hydrocyanic gas, which has a pleasant, peach-blossom smell and is one of the most lethal of poisons. An infested ship is anchored and a fumigation party of four or five Coast Guardsmen goes aboard. First, they send the entire crew ashore, carefully checking them off one by one. Then one of the Coast Guardsmen goes through the ship, shouting, banging on bulkheads with a wrench, and making as much racket as possible. He shouts, ‘Danger! Fumigation! Poison gas!’ Then the Coast Guardsmen put on gas masks and toss some tear-gas bombs into the holds. That’s to fetch out any stowaways who might be aboard. During the first months we used hydrocyanic, we killed a number of stowaways. A few weeks ago, in the hold of a South American freighter, the tear gas brought out eight weeping stowaways who had been hiding in an empty water tank. Two fellows in the crew had smuggled them aboard in Buenos Aires and had been feeding them. These fellows had kept their mouths shut and gone ashore, leaving the stowaways to be killed, for all they cared. When the Coast Guardsmen are satisfied a ship is empty of humans, they seal the holds and cabins and open cans of hydrocyanic, liberating the gas. They even fumigate the lifeboats; rats often hide in them. After a certain number of hours—ten for a medium-sized ship—the holds are opened and aired out, and the Coast Guardsmen go below and search for dead rats. The rats are dropped in oil-paper bags and brought to a laboratory in the basement here. They are combed for fleas. The fleas are pounded in a mortar, put in a solution, and injected into guinea pigs. Then each rat is autopsied and examined for signs of plague. Then bits of spleens and livers are snipped out, pooled, and pounded up. They are also put into a solution and injected into guinea pigs. If the fleas or the rats are infected, the pigs sicken and die. We began this work in 1921, and for twenty-two years we injected hundreds of generations of pigs with the fleas and spleens of rats from practically every port in the world without turning up a single Black Death germ. We didn’t want to find any, to be sure, but there were days when we couldn’t help but look upon our work as routine and futile.