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Chapter 8 Oysters during his first five days at eagle point, Duncan ate oysters twice. After supper on the fifth day—the one on which he confronted the sergeant major—he felt the onset of their revenge. He went to bed that night with severe chills, headache, fever, and excruciating pain in his head, face, and jaws. He felt progressively worse over the next five days as soldiers dropped around him with identical symptoms. On the tenth day after arriving on Galveston Bay, Duncan attempted to work at Virginia Point headquarters but the pain and chills became so unbearable he had to lie down. He sent a courier back to Eagle Point to ask one of his men to come to headquarters to stay with him. He also sent word to Captain O’Brien asking for assistance. O’Brien knew Duncan well enough to realize if Duncan asked for help, he was in trouble. O’Brien arrived soon with several officers in tow. His fellow officers, including the battalion doctor, stayed with Duncan until midnight. While they sat by his bed, they must have worried that this would not be a good time for Union gunboats to reenter Galveston Bay. One of the battalion’s six companies was flat on its back, incapacitated by virulent food poisoning from infected oysters. Galveston Bay waters are warm enough for oysters to spawn year-round, but spawning is heaviest from late April to late September. Contemporary biologists have found a wide variety of less-than-delectable material in an oyster’s stomach: larvae of insects, mollusks and worms like leeches, parasitic fungi, algae, silt, and fragments of rocks. People who eat raw oysters are sometimes exposed to human pathogens like Cryptosporidium and Vibrio vulnificus that excrete toxins causing diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, headache, fever, and chills. If infected oysters were the culprit—and Company F’s universal simultaneous misery with similar symptoms suggests they were—William Duncan was probably near death from the infection. His immune system had A4950.indb 53 A4950.indb 53 10/17/08 8:54:21 AM 10/17/08 8:54:21 AM 54 Chapter 8 already been compromised by his serious bout with the mumps and his forty- five-year-old liver and kidneys were weak from regular drinking. Duncan was critically ill, making him wish Admiral Farragut had steamed into Galveston Bay with cannon blazing instead of hordes of vibrio assaulting his colon. At least he would have seen Farragut coming. Duncan took to bed at Virginia Point headquarters, too sick to return to his men who suffered their symptoms at Eagle Point. He slipped into critical condition with high fever, severe head and abdominal pain, and dehydration caused by diarrhea and nausea. A slave was assigned to act as his nurse in place of Captain O’Brien and the other men who attended him on the first night. It was accepted practice in the Confederacy for slave women to be loaned to Confederate hospitals and field units to provide nursing services. The loan arrangement was a form of indentured servitude where the slave nurse earned a daily stipend paid to her owner. Civil War nurses in both Union and Confederate armies had limited responsibilities. They were expected to keep their patients clean, wash and replace their clothes and bedding, prepare and serve food, administer medicine according to doctors’ orders, and, if literate, write letters for the patient. If the nurse worked in a battlefield unit rather than a hospital, she could also be ordered to drive an ambulance wagon, clean weapons, and care for livestock. Duncan must have been uncomfortable with the slave nurse because he soon sent a courier home to Liberty County with instructions to bring Sabine back to care for him. Stabbing pain intensified in his head, jaw, ear, and shoulders. Duncan was so desperate for relief from an earache that he poured hot oil into his ear. After not eating for almost two weeks, he finally sipped some soup. He tried to write a letter to Celima but could not finish it. Feeling somewhat better after several days, he paid Old Billy Smith one dollar for a chicken, heard that B. F. Spinks’s wife died, then looked out over Galveston Bay toward his customers and friends east of the Sabine River. “News reached here,” he writes, “that the Feds were giving our men fits in Louisiana.” Most Louisiana war news made its way...

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