Day 11. Mausoleum

Henry had been thinking about death for a long time. Not particularly his own death, but death in general. In Demerara every time he had wanted to travel up the river he was told that the Culpepper estate was up the river and no good would come of travel up the river. One day, before Henry was born, his aunt Peggy had taken his cousin to a party held at the estate, without the permission of her sister and brother in law - the Barrells . Walter Barrell was accidentally shot by the Culpepper’s son when they were playing unsupervised with some pistols. Theodore travelled immediately to the Culpepper estate and arranged for his son to be buried in the Culpepper’s family tomb which is then filled with sand to seal it up. His mother is not given any explanation as she is too distraught to listen and is weeping constantly for her son who she will never seen again. Peggy is wracked with guilt and is being blamed for the death by her neglect. She leaves for Barbados to live with her mother.

So there is a mystery about the final resting place of Walter that Henry never understands. And a foreboding about going up river; perhaps mistaking the river for the Styx alluded to by the preacher. Henry sees Walter’s mother constantly talking to shadows thinking they are her son. What is a young mind to make of all this? When Henry arrives in Barbados there is death everywhere. The bodies of the slaves blamed for the insurrection are still hanging from the trees for Henry to see. He had never seen a dead body before. Surrounding the churches there are burial grounds like he has never seen in Demerara; vaults underground approached by stone steps leading to the blocked entrances; mausoleums above ground, some with no apparent means of entry; altar tombs again above ground for one person and tombstones covering the whole grave of those below. There are legends in Barbados of the mysterious movements of coffins laid to rest in mausoleums. One often retold story involves the Chase family who are related to the Galls.

Henry’s father died in 1819 at sea off Nova Scotia. No bodies are recovered and so there is no place of burial to visit. Henry tries to find  the grave of his grandfather who had died in the debters’ jail in Bridgetown. People say he must have had a paupers’ burial being bankrupt; but there is no burial record that Henry can find.

You are never far from death in the West Indies of the 19^th century. 30% of deaths are due to zymotic diseases like cholera, typhoid fever and yellow fever. The “miasmas and vapours” hit the wealthy and poor alike as there is little medical understanding of their causes - only the symptoms and the pathological effects of the diseases. There was a major outbreak of Cholera in 1854. 20,727 people died out of a total population of 135,939.

So what triggered Henry to build a family vault in February 1853? There had been yellow fever epidemics in 1848, 1851 and 1852 - none of his immediate family had been affected. It was known that cholera was moving from island to island. By 1853 the epidemic had reached Nevis and the Governor dismissed the entire Barbadian health board and demanded new health regulations. It was too late. Perhaps, it was working out the actural figures for the Society, that put death at the forefront of his mind. And yet his wife was carrying another child Evelina Hitzler Gall their last child, born 7^th June 1853. Perhaps Henry was just fearful that if his family was struck down by an epidemic, their bodies would be disposed of in a communal grave. He marked the mausoleum with clear indications of its purpose “The Family Vault of HENRY BECKLES GALL built Feb^y 1853.”

The mausoleum is not in a prominant place in St.Michael’s graveyard, unlike the Gall mausoleum outside the Apse of St.John’s. Perhaps he thought that St.John’s was a backwater in the island and the family deserved a burial place in the capital. But he had buried his mother in St.John’s twenty years before. No the location is near the boundary under a large breadfruit tree which must have just been a sapling in 1853. It remained an empty ediface for over nine years.

Henry died unexpectedly at his home Dalkeith on the evening of 17^th August 1862 of “liver congestion”. The Barbados Globe in reporting his death described him as “a public officer of the highest talent and most punctilious integrity”: not the “little scorpion” as his uncle described him.