Hell Ship

by Michael Veitch

  * * * *

  In London in the summer of 1851, the Great Exhibition attracted an average daily audience of just over 42,000 people, all gasping in awe as they gazed up to the soaring glass roof of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Just over half a kilometre long, this engineering wonder was built entirely of glass and cast iron to nominally display the industrial products of 44 countries around the world, but was in fact primarily a propaganda exercise to show off the might of imperial Britain. Indeed, the past several decades of the nineteenth century had seen extraordinary developments in British society. Avoiding the expenditure in manpower and material of a major war, this small island was on its way to acquiring the largest and most wide-reaching political and economic empire in history.

  In recent years, the railway system and public omnibuses had opened up the country to people hitherto confined to the boundaries of their local parish, often presenting them with their first glimpse of the sea. The telegraph and the penny post allowed affordable communication from any part of the country to another, and cheap, mass-produced items adorned the mantelpieces of the affluent homes of the new merchant and industrial classes.4

  As hordes of ordinary Britons filed into the Crystal Palace—in all, a full third of the country’s entire population would visit the Great Exhibition over its six months’ duration—they could, for perhaps the only time in their lives, rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. Here, under the glass, all stood equally enthralled by the tens of thousands of items—large and small—heralding the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. People could inspect machines that made envelopes, and others that automatically compiled votes. They could observe a demonstration of cotton being produced from the bud to the final product, and gaze at the largest diamond of that, or any other, age: the legendary Koh-i-noor. They could marvel at the first forays of photography in Mathew Brady’s newly invented daguerreotypes and inspect exquisite gold, silver and enamel artefacts from the Empire’s undisputed jewel, India.

  The dazzling technologies of the Great Exhibition ushered in improvements barely dreamed of a decade earlier: for the first time, glass became available for household windows;5 soap—previously a hand-made luxury—was now turned out in factories, although it was heavily taxed. Washable cotton underwear became cheap and went some way towards lifting standards of hygiene, as did the instigation of flushing toilets—another wonder of the modern age debuted in the Great Exhibition. But change was slow, and long before such benefits of industrialisation could begin to filter down to the masses, life for Britain’s poor—particularly her agricultural poor—would become drastically worse.

  Swelled to beyond their capacity by agrarian workers whose traditional ways of life had been obliterated by the factory and the machine age, Britain’s cities were devolving into the nightmares of Charles Dickens’ descriptions: filthy, diseased, crime-ridden cesspits of despair, fuelled by an ever-increasing ocean of the unemployed.

  Despite the myriad innovations of the age, such basics as reliable clean water remained out of reach for millions. In London, the only source was the Thames, already used as an open sewer, but likewise in towns and villages across the country, the nation’s poor were compelled to queue at their local pump and haul water of uncertain quality over long distances and often up flights of rickety stairs.6 Although average life expectancy was slowly and gradually increasing, in mid-century it was still hovering somewhere around the mid-forties, a statistic swelled by high levels of infant mortality, which had actually increased in the 1850s to a staggering 41 per cent of children not surviving their first five years. Churchyards, the traditional place of burials, began to run out of space, forcing the government to pass the Burial Act in 1852 giving local authorities the power to establish and run public cemeteries for the first time.

  Should they survive infancy, life for children was particularly grim. If not carried off by one of the regular epidemics of cholera or diphtheria, the youngest poor could expect to meet their end in a variety of horrendous and exploitative industries. Children as young as eight were employed as ‘piecers’, standing next to the textile machines repairing breaks in the thread, or as ‘scavengers’, crawling underneath the moving mechanisms to clear obstructions. The cities employed thousands who had not yet reached their tenth birthday as chimney sweeps, but perhaps nothing was more unspeakable than what was found in the hundreds of coal pits mushrooming across the country. An inquiry into mining in Britain in the 1840s revealed that 1189 women and 1152 girls under the age of eighteen were toiling in wretched conditions in eastern Scottish mines alone. Accidents were commonplace, and caused barely a ripple outside the victims’ immediate families. In 1838, a sudden downpour flooded a coal mine in Barnsley, Yorkshire, killing 26 boy and girl child miners, only one of them over the age of thirteen.7

  In addition, crop failures, economic depressions, and rural enclosures—particularly in the Scottish Highlands, which endured its own unique human catastrophe—led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of those left to sink to the bottom of the Empire’s ocean of prosperity, or be swallowed up by the shadows of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’.

  Fifty years earlier, convict transportation was seen as effective social engineering—the means of surgically removing an entire underclass to the Australian colonies on the other side of the world, a place so removed from Britain that they would be of no bother to society ever again. By the 1850s, however, the penal transportation system was falling out of favour, not least among the colonials themselves, who had quite early come to the conclusion that their country had far greater potential than its role merely as a dumping ground for felons would allow. Now it was seen as necessary to induce—even assist—large numbers of selected persons to leave voluntarily. In any case, Australia needed them—and badly.

  4

  Australia 1851: Gold versus wool

  Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Australia’s growth in wool was hemmed in by an acute shortage of labour. Squatters and landholders became desperate. In 1840, a shepherd in Australia could earn up to £45 a year, three times what his counterpart back in England could bring home, with the deal usually sweetened further by free board and lodging and a generous weekly food allowance that included mutton, flour, sugar and tea.1

  The depression flattened off the demand in the mid-1840s, but with the discovery of gold and the rush of the early 1850s, thousands of men walked off jobs in towns and cities alike to flock to the goldfields in search of instant—and usually elusive—wealth. The rural labour problem suddenly became a crisis. The question of who exactly would service the wool industry became an obsession with Australian growers and politicians, particularly as the gigantic clip of 1852 loomed. Luckily, however, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his Colonial Reformers had a plan.

  While the Great Exhibition was holding Britain enthralled, 1851 was also a tumultuous year for Victoria. In July of that year, under a large eucalypt near the southern bank of Melbourne’s Yarra River in what is now that city’s Botanic Gardens, the long-cherished dream of the city’s patrons was realised when the Australian Colonies Government Act 1850 came into effect. The Act transformed Victoria from the Port Phillip District of New South Wales to a Crown colony in its own right, with full independence to arrive by 1855. The erudite French and Swiss-educated poet and painter Charles La Trobe was to be Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor. That year, Victorian sheep farmers produced 18 million pounds of wool from 6 million sheep; the whole clip was baled up and sent to fuel the voracious mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Nothing, however, was as dramatic as the announcement that gold had been discovered.

  In fact, gold had already been found at various places around Victoria and elsewhere, going back to 1839 when the explorer Paul de Strzelecki stumbled across it in the Victorian Alps. Various sheep farmers had uncovered it too, but rightly fearing a flood of crazed and undesirable diggers, they had kept it to themselves. Having listened in dread to the descriptions of chaos that had followed the Califo
rnian gold rush of a couple of years earlier, the authorities were likewise loath to let the secret out. Only when the goldfield discoveries in New South Wales threatened Victoria’s economy did La Trobe relent and attempt to face the matter front-on by offering a reward of £300 for anyone who could find gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. The announcement acted as the starting gun to a stampede that would last for years, transforming Victorian colonial society forever.

  A complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community, and as a natural consequence, there has been a universal rush to the diggings. Any attempt to describe the numberless scenes—grave, gay and ludicrous—would require the graphic power of a Dickens … People of all trades, callings and pursuits, were quickly transformed into miners, and many a hand which had been trained to kid gloves, or accustomed to wield nothing heavier than the grey goose quill became nervous to clutch the pick and crow-bar or ‘rock the cradle’ at our infant mines.

  So proclaimed the Bathurst Free Press in May 1851, which, like everyone else, was at a loss to process this sudden derangement that had turned society on its head overnight.

  With the discovery that the area around the sleepy inland settlements of Castlemaine and Bendigo in fact sat atop one of the world’s richest shallow alluvial goldfields, it seemed that the entire population of Melbourne, then Australia, immediately wanted to go there. In just two years, this antipodean El Dorado yielded around 4 million ounces, almost all of it found within 5 metres of the surface. In a few years, the largest nugget in the world was revealed: a 69-kilogram monster wryly dubbed the ‘Welcome Stranger’; it was so enormous that it had to be broken on an anvil into three pieces in order to weigh it.

  In the following ten years, Victoria produced more than one-third of the world’s entire gold output, bewitching the imaginations of the public and press alike, particularly in London, where newspaper articles declared that ‘their stores of gold surpassed the wealth which the stately galleons brought to Spain from South America in the days of Sir Francis Drake’. The arrival of a gold ship in the Port of London would often lead to scenes of mayhem on the Thames, as described by The Times in October 1852:

  The ship Medway has arrived in the Thames from Melbourne, Port Phillip, with no less than 67,000 oz. golddust, valued at 270,000 pounds. Immediately on the vessel arriving at Limehouse she was surrounded by a complete fleet of small boats filled with crimps, lodging-house keepers, and other of the longshore fraternity, who made numerous ineffectual efforts to get on board to remove the seamen’s effects under the impression, from the valuable nature of the ship’s cargo, that the men must be equally well stored … The Medway brings one of the most valuable cargoes ever imported by a private vessel into the port of London. It amounts in the aggregate, with cargo and golddust in the hands of passengers, to nearly 600,000 pounds.

  By early 1853, armed vessels were each week escorting into London ships from Melbourne carrying gold worth between £170,000 and £200,000.

  The rush was not simply one of gold, but of people. From an office in Regent Street, positioned strategically close by that of the Board, crowds assembled daily to undertake the great voyage and visit the diggings—if only in their imaginations. They gazed in wonder at moving panoramas extolling the beauty of the Antipodes, painted by popular artists of the time. There were also seascapes and pictures of exotic Australian animals, as well as handsome scenes of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, Goulbourn and Geelong, as well as the Parramatta River and Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The wonders of the voyage itself were extolled in colourful images of flying fish and porpoises, as well as the many stops along the way: Madeira, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. The fact that these had now largely been by-passed by the Great Circle route seemed of little consequence to those displaying their images to the captivated spectators.

  After starting its life as the ugly duckling of emigration, Victoria was suddenly the most popular destination on Earth. Numbers of new arrivals to Australia in general soon eclipsed the entire total of convicts who had been landed there during the previous 70 years. In the two years from 1851, Victoria’s population increased sixfold from 77,000 to 540,000. Over the next two decades, Australia’s population overall would treble from 430,000 to 1.7 million by 1871.2

  But the rush had a terrible downside. The indigenous people of the Kulin nation, the alliance of tribes which had lived and hunted in central Victoria for millenia, already under siege, were catastrophically displaced. Entire forests and tracts of scrub vanished seemingly overnight. Like the frenzy in California, the consequences of such a sudden and uncontrolled injection of wealth into the economy were dangerous and unpredictable. Newly cashed-up miners went on spending sprees, warping the prices of basic items, which soon skyrocketed. Ironically, Melbourne itself became a ghost town, seemingly inhabited by no one but the very old or very young, as men followed their lust for quick wealth to the goldfields. Eighty per cent of the local police force quit, leaving the city to thugs, criminals and packs of marauding dogs. Ships lay idle in the port of Melbourne, unable to sail for lack of crew who had jumped ship as soon as the anchor was dropped. Reports of sea captains vainly trying to restrain their absconding sailors at gunpoint became legion.

  It was even worse on the land. Shearers and farmhands, although traditionally well paid, simply walked off their stations to join the ant-like masses scratching over the clays of central Victoria with their new, over-priced picks and shovels.

  Meanwhile, the wool still needed to be gathered, and the contracts had to be honoured. News of the rush began to filter back to England and a looming dread settled on the wealthy brows of mill owners. The notion that the annual avalanche of Australian wool could be interrupted, let alone stopped, and the wheels of British industry silenced for no more pedestrian a reason than a paucity of labour was unthinkable.

  Anxious letters from Australia were received, then passed on—amplified with urgency—to the government in Westminster. The wool growers of Australia estimated themselves to be facing a 10,000-worker shortfall, and this number was growing. At this rate, the clip for 1852, which was due to be shorn and processed in the Australian spring and promised to be another big one, would remain on the sheep’s back, and the spinning textile mills of England’s industrial north would grind to a halt.

  From both England and Australia, fingers were pointed in the direction of the Board, which was seen to simply not be doing its job. What was the good of money from the sale of colonial land being handed over, it was argued, if the Board could not even provide sufficient numbers of people to stave off economic catastrophe? It was decided that the Board’s criteria for accepting emigrants would be overhauled significantly, particularly with regard to children.

  Prior to 1851, families with more than three children under ten years of age and two children under seven were excluded from the Board’s scheme.3 Such a burden of offspring, it was argued, would inhibit their parents’ capacity for productive work once they arrived in the colonies. The other factor was the vulnerability of small children to contract and spread disease in the confined incubator of a sailing ship. Small families, and single young men and women—particularly rural and agricultural workers—were the ideal emigrants, and it was to luring these that the Board had directed its attentions.

  But in Victoria it was precisely such unencumbered young men who were now deserting towns and cities in droves and heading for the goldfields. The policy would now be turned on its head. Sheep growers and farmers argued that the anchor of a family was in fact the main factor—indeed the only factor—preventing men from deserting, so the Board up-ended its rules to allow families to travel with up to four children under twelve years of age.

  Overnight, families who had previously failed to qualify for the golden ticket of assisted passage found themselves accepted, and the exodus was on. So hungry were some Victorian pastoralists for labour that many emigrants had been snapped up for employment even before they embarke
d. One of the McRae families, for example (there were several on board the Ticonderoga)—Thomas, 46, Margaret, 36, and their five children ranging from four to fourteen—had travelled from their remote village of Kintail deep in the Highlands to Glasgow. From here they caught the ferry to Liverpool and then Birkenhead, where they met hundreds of other families likewise making the journey, such as Alexander and Nora Cameron and their two young children from the Isle of Bute near Glasgow. Whatever trepidations these men may have had about their future, unemployment was not one of them, as the Board had already indentured both families to landowners prepared to pay well for experienced farm labourers. Thomas McRae was to work on a property at Buninyong near Ballarat, while Alexander Cameron, a forester by trade, would live and work at Werribee near Melbourne.

  To have such numbers of young families travelling was a new innovation, and emigration vessels that previously had experienced children and infants only in limited numbers would now appear to be overrun by them.

  * * * *

  This, however, was the last thing on the minds of the superintendents of the embarkation depot, William and Ann Smith, on this sunny August morning, as they prepared to greet this ferry-load of new arrivals—all Scots—stepping onto the little jetty, full of hope and anticipation. For the moment, their primary concern was to make a good impression on the imposing gentleman standing beside them dressed impeccably in a naval officer’s uniform, eyes fixed on the approaching ferry. No less a figure than Captain Charles George Edward Patey RN, an officer with an exemplary record, a veteran of the Mediterranean who had been made commander by age 27, captain by 33, and who would eventually retire a rear-admiral, had been the Board’s choice to be its representative here at the new Birkenhead depot. His brief was simple: to organise the passengers along naval lines, and to make sure the Board’s directives were being carried out to the letter. William and Ann Smith knew that every aspect of their performance would be observed closely.