St Kildan Pandemic

The Isle of Boreray some 6 kilometres from the main island of Hirta

In 1723 an old man from St Kilda went on a visit to Harris, caught smallpox and died there. The following year some of his relatives went over to the Long Island to bring back his belongings. Among them were the old man’s clothes, which, it seems, were still infectious. Certainly when the party of mourners returned to St Kilda with the clothes almost everyone on the islands came down with smallpox. Because of the islanders’ total lack of immunity the effects of the disease were devastating; most of them died. Some of the men, however, had gone on a fowling expedition to Boreray before the epidemic struck, and because there were not enough able bodied men on Hirta to fetch them back in the boat, they stayed there and escaped infection, somehow managing to survive until the next visit from the steward. When they returned to the main island they found only four adults and twenty-six children still alive, most of the houses deserted, the crops gone to seed and the cattle running wild. Death had followed upon death until the survivors were too few and too weak even to bury the corpses.

The community had to begin life again with less than forty people, many of them still too young to be of service; but there is evidence that help came in the form of immigration from other islands to repopulate the Island.