physicians and Yale Skull and Bonesman, gifted in camaraderie and
reasoning. The bachelor Welch directly confronted Halsted about his drug
abuse, but didn’t stop at the chastisement; he proposed a solution: a
lengthy, rejuvenating sea voyage, with the combined benefits of fresh sea
air and eventual, forced drug weaning and disentanglement of cocaine’s
grip. Halsted consented, and by February 1886, Welch had chartered the
schooner Bristol, bound for the Windward Islands in the southern
Caribbean.
The arrangement between Welch and Halsted was for the elder
physician to obtain a very large quantity of cocaine and to serve as the
custodian and administrator of the medication. The treatment plan
stipulated that Welch would gradually decrease the daily dosage until
Halsted had become completely weaned off cocaine, and by the time the
four-thousand-mile round trip voyage was complete, Halsted would be
cured.
On the outward passage, the Bristol was a vessel of the gods, a veritable
Pegasus of the seas. Welch, the Greek literature expert (and once aspiring
college professor), must have been recollecting Odysseus and his evasion
of the Sirens. The goddess Circe had warned Odysseus that the Sirens
were, in reality, murderous monsters disguising themselves as enchanting
women with supernaturally enticing voices. Famously, Odysseus stopped
his men’s ears with wax to deafen and inoculate them from temptation; but
so that he “may have the pleasure of listening,” Odysseus kept his ears
unplugged. Lashed to the mast so that he could not escape, Odysseus was
tantalized beyond his power to resist, straining so vigorously that the
bonds cut deeply into his flesh.
The journey degenerated as they arrived in the Caribbean, with Halsted
bedeviled by the dwindling doses. The friendship between Welch and
Halsted came under extreme duress, and late one night, Halsted broke into
the captain’s medicine chest to procure the remaining cocaine doses. In
every sense, Halsted was adrift at sea, and by the time they had reached
the Florida coastline on the return trip, he was “plagued by nightmares,
exhaustion, irritability, [and] outright suspicion of his fellow travelers
...”^18 Truly a Greek tragedy, perhaps the only explanation for Halsted’s
survival is that the gods wanted Halsted to live, both to see the New York
harbor, but also to rule in Baltimore someday.