Quarantine in colonial Durban
Our house sits upslope in Glenmore overlooking the Durban harbour, the Bluff and the Indian Ocean. During the Covid-19 hard lockdown last year, I would look out to the Bluff and think about my great-grandfather, Fred Harwin. In early 1874 he was quarantined for two weeks, along with his father Richard Harwin and his siblings, at the lazaretto (quarantine station) on the harbour side of the Bluff. The Covid lockdown presented the perfect opportunity to tell their story, especially as I had recently acquired a transcript of Richard Harwin’s diary that covers part of their journey by sea and most of their stay at the lazaretto. However, as life returned to a semblance of normality when the economy opened up, I never got around to it. Yet the story persists in my head, waiting to be written. So, with some encouragement from my Harwin relatives, here is the first of what I hope will be many ancestral stories. Our colonial quarantine story starts in 1873 in Feltw...