One hundred seventy years ago, the seeds of what would become the most fatal plague in American history sprouted on a ship docked more than 1,000 miles from Norfolk.

The ship, the Benjamin Franklin, had been tied up in the Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands, harbor that spring. And for months, yellow fever had hopped from ship to ship. The virus had attacked eight or nine of the Benjamin Franklin’s crew.

On May 25, 1855, a young crew member came to the Benjamin Franklin’s chief engineer and reported he wasn’t feeling well.

“He complained of pain in the head and also a pain in the small of his back,” the engineer, Jonathan Bowen, would recall. “His tongue was coated with a dark brown crust.”

Bowen quietly summoned the Franklin’s captain. From this point forward, every decision that Captain Jo

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