How would you feel if you found out you had to go into quarantine? 

Would you feel angry, resigned, regretful, afraid? Would concern about your health override all other feelings? Or could there be a part of you that might enjoy the enforced rest and extra time off work? 

How would you pass the days? Would you value the chance of some time out, or would you be itching to get back to the world and resume your normal responsibilities and activities? 

As the residents of Wuhan in China enter their second week of coronavirus lockdown, and foreign nationals evacuated from China face periods of up to fourteen days in isolation facilities, I thought I’d take a look at a practice that has been part of the travel experience for nearly seven centuries: quarantine.

The word comes from the Italian quaranta– forty – because early disease-control practices in Europe mandated a forty-day period of isolation before ships coming from plague-affected areas were allowed to enter ports in ‘safe’ areas. It’s not clear exactly where the practice originated, but it was the Republic of Venice, a major trade hub during the medieval period, that in the fourteenth century created the first government-regulated quarantine. Many other Mediterranean ports copied the Venetian example, followed in time by countries all over the world.

Travellers these days do NOT expect to find themselves in quarantine, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a routine part of the tourist experience. It wasn’t just plague but also, increasingly, cholera that countries wanted to keep out, and in the effort to do so they often subjected foreign visitors to quite arduous quarantine conditions. 

The historian John Pemble, in his book The Mediterranean Passion, notes that for travellers in the nineteenth century the ‘cumulative delay’ caused by multiple quarantines could be considerable. ‘For example, tourists visiting Egypt, the Holy Land, Turkey, and Greece in that order had a minimum of three quarantines: one at Beirut for having been at Alexandria, one at Constantinople for having been in Beirut, and one in Greece for having been in Constantinople.’  Travellers who wanted to visit ‘the East’ or move around the Mediterranean were resigned to spending lengthy periods in detention along the way.

Quarantine was such an accepted part of tourism that guidebooks included information on the different quarantine stations or ‘lazzarettos’, as they were also called. Pemble quotes the 1884 edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece, which rated Corfu, Piraeus and Malta as having the best quarantine facilities, with Malta being ‘the least inconvenient and best regulated purgatory of them all’. 

Several famous British writers were ‘guests’ of this particular quarantine station during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Poet Lord Byron, theologian (and later saint) John Henry Newman, and novelists Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray were all detained there. For each of them, the great question was how to pass the time while waiting to be released. 

Let’s just say that Byron didn’t handle it very well when he was quarantined at Malta for 18 days in the spring of 1811. Having too much time and no pleasant distractions, his thoughts turned inwards, and not in a good way. He obsessed about all the things that were wrong with his life – health, finances, relationships – and wrote a list of negative thoughts in his diary. Like prisoners from time immemorial, he carved his name on one of the walls. He decided that his career as an author was just ‘vanity’ and not worth pursuing. He came to believe that his confinement was making him ill. Afterwards, he wrote the poem ‘Farewell to Malta’, which contained the lines: ‘Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine, / That gave me fever, and the spleen [bad temper].’ Not his finest poetic hour, but you get the picture.

In contrast, when John Henry Newman was confined at the quarantine station at Malta in 1833, he knew he had to be careful not to become depressed. As he wrote home, ‘to one who has been employing his mind actively for years, nothing is so wearisome as idleness’. So he and his travelling companions decided to keep busy and use the time of enforced leisure to their advantage. He wrote to his family:

I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and, bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.

With meals brought in from a local hotel and a boat for skimming about the harbour, no wonder Murray’s Handbook rated this the best quarantine station in Europe! But my point is, Newman turned his imprisonment to his advantage, and did everything he could to dispel tedium and keep his spirits up.

Talking of spirits – bad pun – Newman was convinced that the lazaretto was haunted by the souls of previous occupants. He wrote home about the ‘mysterious night visitants’ he heard prowling about his room and the stairs outside, and said that other travellers detained there corroborated his reports.

There seems to be a thing about quarantine and ghosts. Q Station Sydney, a unique accommodation and conference venue located on the site of the old quarantine station at North Head on the edge of Sydney Harbour, offers nightly ghost tours of ‘what is reputed to be one of Australia’s most haunted sites’. From the 1830s to the 1980s, migrants and overseas visitors suspected of carrying disease had to undergo quarantine here before they could enter the city or its hinterland. Some of those who succumbed to illness and were buried here still haunt the grounds and buildings, creating paranormal phenomena … or so the story goes.

But not all who were detained here were restless, unhappy or doomed. One passenger who sailed to Australia in 1935 on a ship carrying smallpox left a charming record of an unexpected summer holiday in one of Sydney’s most picturesque locations. Her poem is now displayed at the Q Station entrance and makes a good case for the upside of enforced medical isolation– as long as the location is right!

I wonder what the people going into quarantine this month on Christmas Island will make of their stay there. The political irony of Australians being placed in mandatory offshore detention is pretty striking, and perhaps foreshadows a future in which we’re all liable to become refugees of one sort or another. In the mean time, will the individuals sent to Christmas Island be Byrons, sinking into depression, or Newmans, keeping busy and finding interest in their situation? Time – and, presumably, those emerging from quarantine – will tell.