Shirley Heights Cemetery

The Shirley Heights Cemetery contains an obelisk in the style of a pyramid set up by the 54^th or 58^th Regiment in 1850 to commemorate the many men who succumbed to the withering effects of the tropics that year.   Thousands died of Yellow Fever, malaria, dysentery, typhoid and other infectious diseases.

Men ingested lead used in the distilling of the daily rum ration, and from ‘treatments’ such as mercury, leeching and blistering, from the heavy layers of clothing the men wore, and life in close quarters to each other, where personal hygiene was frequently neglected.

English Harbour was sometimes nicknamed ‘the graveyard of the Englishman’.

Amongst those buried here are  Harriet Hipkin, 33, wife of Sergeant-Major Hipkin.  She died of the ‘withering effects of this climate and dysentery’ on 23 January 1851, and Elizabeth Crofton, 28, wife of Philip Crofton, with their children, Ann and Thomas, all buried there in 1851.