Each week our provisions allow us, and more than allow us, to have three or four meals a day if we see fit. In the morning, salted beef with dried potatoes; at noon, salt pork with rice; at two o’clock, dried potatoes with salted beef; at four, rice with salt pork. –Lord bless you, if we wanted it, we could at eight o’clock have both salted beef with potatoes and salt pork with rice!10
There were no fresh vegetables and, being a government-assisted ship, the luxury of live animals carried for fresh meat was not forthcoming. Even a henhouse for fresh eggs—a not uncommon practice for ships of the time—seems to have been absent from the Ticonderoga’s inventory of provisions. Unlike on private-paying vessels, alcohol—except for medicinal purposes—was prohibited, with any liquor in a passenger’s personal possession having to be surrendered upon coming aboard. The lack of fresh potatoes in particular was found by many of the Scots, as well as the handful of Irish, to be particularly irksome, forming as they did the starchy, bulky staple of their diet. In a later British parliamentary inquiry into many aspects of the ‘double deck’ voyages to Victoria, the difficulty of some passengers in coping with the lack of potatoes was specifically addressed:
The potato has a small quantity of nutritive matter in a large bulk, and consequently extends the stomach largely; and those who have been accustomed to it, when they are put on a more nutritive and concentrated food, felt a sensation of sinking and emptiness. They attempt to remedy that by taking a larger quantity of food, which they cannot digest, and that immediately produces disease (sickness and diarrhoea).11
The greatest fault in the Ticonderoga’s meal system, however, was the complete lack of provision of food for the many infants, who were expected to be sustained solely by their breastfeeding mothers. This would have dire consequences throughout the voyage, not only with some babies wasting away due to the effects of malnourishment—or marasmus, as it was called—but also later, when many of the adults could barely sustain themselves.
After the meals, the routines established in the depot were resumed, with the women clearing and cleaning the utensils and the men sweeping the decks and dry hollow-stoning the desks. No fresh water was permitted for washing of any kind, so plates and eating utensils were covered with a permanent film of salt. Clothes, too, could only be washed on specified days in seawater tubs on the upper deck, unless supplemented by rainwater occasionally captured in specially erected awnings. Marine soap, made from palm or coconut oil and soluble in seawater, was issued; although today it would be barely recognisable as soap of any description, it was for many of the Ticonderoga’s passengers their first experience of it, due to it being heavily taxed as a luxury item. The daily discomfort of living for weeks in such clothes—itchy and salt-encrusted—is another aspect of conditions of the voyage that modern sensibilities would struggle to comprehend.
The single men in particular were kept busy on the ship, being allotted an array of tasks such as pumping seawater up to the flushing tanks above the water closet, sweeping decks and ladders daily, and keeping the ship’s hospitals in good order. Several times a week, those rostered would venture through the lower decks, sprinkling and scraping away absorbent hot sand on the walkways and under the passengers’ bunks. The young women, however, were required to clean out their own quarters.
Some men were even permitted to assist the crew in the running of the ship. This was a task many came to relish, eager to be introduced to the complex world of sail, delighting in the learning of nautical terms and the names given to the myriad knots, spars and sails: topgallants, royals, spankers and so on. What the ship’s crew made of having to teach such a group of novices can only be guessed at and, inexperienced as they were, the danger of accidents was real. On the voyage of the Hornet from Southampton to Victoria in 1857, a male passenger had his hand crushed in a block while helping the crew to pull ropes. The ship’s surgeon, a Dr Brownfield, was required to amputate two fingers and sew the skin back over the stumps, his patient’s only relief from the pain being a large dose of brandy administered from the surgeon’s medicine chest.12
At least at the beginning of the voyage, and if not riddled with seasickness or weighed down with children, for some the romance of the journey was still novel, and provided the passengers with experiences utterly removed from their lives hitherto and that they would remember forever. Despite the lessons, routines and other activities, there were many hours of free time on board the ship, which were theirs to pass as they pleased: long conversations with people with whom they would never otherwise have crossed paths; watching the undreamed-of sights of dolphins, porpoises, flying fish and the myriad seabirds following the slow pace of the ship. Then there was the ever-changing texture of sea and sky. On some afternoons and evenings, the sounds of fiddles and pipes resonated throughout the ship as the Scots lasses instructed some of the other girls in the art of Highland dancing. At other times, the girls would sing the plangent tunes of their home, which would quickly be picked up by the rest of the passengers, transforming the ship into a floating and melancholy chorus.
Then, night by night, as the Ticonderoga edged slowly south, the passengers could come out onto the upper deck and find a quiet spot to observe the heavens, watching those northern constellations with which they had been familiar for their entire lives gradually dip ever lower on the horizon, before finally disappearing forever.
12
Death at sea
Due to the low rates of literacy on board the Ticonderoga, as well as the lack of light in the accommodation decks—not to mention the disaster which overtook her on the second half of the voyage—no passenger diaries from the trip have survived, if indeed they were ever written in the first place. More strangely, nor have any detailed first-hand accounts compiled in the aftermath come to light. There are, however, a number of fragments—usually written long afterwards—that paint a picture of the Ticonderoga’s journey south.
Several of these make mention of one macabre incident early in the voyage, as word went around the ship one evening that a female passenger had thrown herself overboard. No further details could be gleaned, but a pall of horror was felt by all those on board. It was not until 1932 in an article in Melbourne’s The Argus newspaper that some explanation of the incident was offered by one of the survivors of the voyage, Mrs Ellen Bentley. The woman in question had apparently recently eloped with her father’s footman, a decision she soon regretted. ‘Repentance came early,’ recounted Mrs Bentley. Observed to be in ‘deep distress’ early in the voyage, the woman became more and more consumed with remorse until ‘a leap overboard ended her suffering’.
Just eight days out of Liverpool, the first infant died—not of disease, but marasmus, a wasting condition brought on by lack of nutrients, especially protein. Little Samuel Ritchie was the youngest child of James and Mary Ritchie of Inverness. The news was not greeted as anything out of the ordinary: infants died routinely in the mid-nineteenth century of marasmus and many other ailments, and death rates at sea among the very young were particularly high. It was a requirement at sea that adults be buried during daylight hours to provide the proper decorum of prayers and service, but children could be given to the deep quickly, quietly and at night. The farewelling of the Ticonderoga’s first victim was nevertheless a solemn occasion, presided over by Captain Boyle reading the appropriate passages from the Bible and ship’s order of service, standing beside the grieving Ritchie family as the pathetic white package wrapped in a patch of sailcloth was sent to the deep, weighed down with a small ship’s iron from the carpenter’s shop. For the Ritchies, as for many other families, the funeral of little Samuel would be only the first.
The high toll of babies and infants on board the Ticonderoga is not difficult to account for. The effect of the harsh and unfamiliar ship’s diet on already weakened and under-nourished people began to take its toll, particularly in combination with the added debilitating effects of seasickness. Women, then as now, have a greater predisposition to motion sic
kness in general,1 and on board the Ticonderoga, breastfeeding mothers were most vulnerable. For days or even weeks, they could be laid up, exhausted and incapacitated, barely able to look after themselves, let alone their suckling infants. With no special provisions for infants, feeding them the ship’s diet could often make them sicker, so it was unsurprising that more babies and infants on board would waste away.
Just two days later, another child, Eliza Gardiner, four, likewise died of malnutrition, which again was regarded as standard. Then a bout of diarrhoea began to take hold, first in the single men’s quarters but spreading throughout the ship. Many people simply could not adjust to the diet, and suffered accordingly. Christopher McRae caught it early and, in his words, ‘suffered most of the time’.2
Then, around 20 August, Anna Maria Hando, sixteen years old and travelling with her parents, though residing in the single girls’ quarters due to her age, came down with a high temperature and severe rash that covered her entire body. The Handos were one of several English families travelling from Somerset, a rural part of England that produced exactly the sort of skilled agricultural worker so sorely needed in Australia. William Hando, 44, was listed as a Church of England farm labourer from the village of Hutton near the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare. Somewhat older than many of the passengers making the voyage, his skills were such that he and his family were accepted nonetheless, and both he and his wife Maria, 44, saw this as a God-given opportunity to begin a new life in the far-away, and quite unimaginable, colony of Victoria. Their family of seven was large, but by no means exceptionally so for the times. Their eldest son, Charles, also travelled apart from the rest of his family in the single male quarters in the bow, while William and Maria looked after Henry, ten, George, seven, and the youngest, Emma, aged four. The terrible condition being suffered by Anna Maria was recorded by Dr Sanger non-specifically as ‘fever’. This was not unusual. As Major J.H. Welch points out in his history of the quarantine station where the Ticonderoga would spend the final chapter of her journey to Victoria, ‘in 1852, there was no knowledge of the cause of any disease which was characterised by fever’.3 Indeed, the symbiotic nature of fevers and rashes had been long observed, but their relationship was barely understood. They were seen to act upon the body simultaneously, as were the radical physical changes they implemented in what was often an alarmingly short time.
Such conditions were known by many names: ship fever, prison fever, camp fever, spotted fever, Brill’s disease and others. Although the cause was a mystery, they were nevertheless observed to be in a terrible partnership with high fever, which itself changed and morphed in nature. It is likely that several different illnesses impacted the passengers on board the ship in the early stages—all of which Dr Sanger listed as fever, and the precise nature of which it is now impossible to determine. Later in the voyage, as a new and terrible strain took hold of more and more passengers, an equally terrible word would be settled on to describe it.
Over a few heart-wrenching days, young Anna Maria’s condition deteriorated, her rash deepened, her joints and internal organs ached in agony and, as her fever raged, delirium set in. Drs Sanger and Veitch looked on, did what they could to cool and calm the girl, supplied her with comforting sips of wine, arrowroot and other accepted tonics and remedies of the day, but could do nothing to save her. After three days, she lay still. The funeral of Anna Maria Hando, the Ticonderoga’s third and oldest victim so far, signalled a terrible turning point on board the ship. In Fever Beach Mary Kruithof describes the poignant scene as the members of the Hando family, heartbroken and in shock, watch their beloved girl, taken on the cusp of life, descending to the deep:
Passengers from the married quarters, single women and some crew gathered on the upper deck for the funeral. Anna Maria’s shrouded and weighted body was placed on a wooden board which was carried to the upper deck and placed with one end slightly tipped over the side of the ship. With the ship’s bell tolling during the service, the Captain and Mr McKay read the burial service together. On the words, ‘We therefore commit her body to the sea’, the board was tilted, tipping the body into the water. The ship sailed on. A terrible loneliness swept over the mourners and a sad company filed back down into their quarters below.4
For the Handos, like many other families, it would not be the last time they grieved.
13
A lonely encounter
As the Ticonderoga headed towards the equator, the weather and the ship began to heat up, which was another shock to those on board. Even the hottest day of the hottest British summer was nothing compared with this delirious, enervating onslaught that arrived with the dawn of each day, relieved only by the regular evening thunderstorm that caused the hatches to be battened down and water to once again leak profusely into the main and lower decks. The sea was at least mercifully calm, and as people gradually began to acclimatise to the motion, the incidence of seasickness dropped. But as the winds slackened around this part of the equator known to timeless seafarers as ‘the doldrums’, the ship’s progress slowed and the risk of being becalmed—sometimes for weeks—was real.
Captain Boyle seems to have avoided the worst of the doldrums, but nonetheless put up every possible piece of canvas he could manage to catch what breeze was offered. Poring over the charts, however, he began to have concerns about his ship’s progress. So far, there had been only a handful of deaths on board, and all the victims were young. In the Age of Sail, a fatality rate such as this was nothing out of the ordinary, and compared with some other voyages, it was even considered mild. Doctors Sanger and Veitch now began to elaborate somewhat on their earlier general diagnosis of ‘fever’ and reported that ‘scarlatina’—or scarlet fever, as it was later to be known—was presenting in some young patients. This was a bacterial infection particularly prevalent in children and infants, especially those of fair skin—which in the Scottish Highlands was virtually everyone.
Though it was not yet an epidemic, more cases of scarlatina began to take hold. Parents could only look on helplessly as their infected children were racked by the terrible symptoms: crushing headache, sore throat, vomiting. Then the spreading of the tell-tale bright pink rash, first on the tongue, then across their creamy white cheeks and finally covering their entire bodies as their temperature soared to over 100ºF. Associated infections of the middle ear and tonsils would break out, adding to the child’s terror and misery. The doctors did their best to cool the burning, and though some did survive the few days over which the disease ran its course, it was the soaring temperature that carried the children away in those days before antibiotics.
Boyle began to sense that his ship, carrying more people—many of them children—on a long voyage such as this, was in fact dangerously overcrowded. For this floating twin-deck experiment to arrive at its destination without disaster, a good deal of luck would be required.
On these hot nights, the regulations were sometimes relaxed and some passengers stayed up on the upper deck under the stars, relieved to be free of the stultifying chamber of the lower quarters. Sometimes the Highland country dancing of the girls would be allowed to relocate to the open deck, creating something of a carnival atmosphere. Paying passenger vessels were usually accompanied by small bands of musicians—hired German bands being particularly popular—but those in the Ticonderoga’s single steerage class would have to make do with their own. There seem to have been a good number of fiddle and pipe players present to provide the tunes so beloved of the passengers from the towns, glens and villages. Above them, the canvas sails wafted—at times unconvincingly—watched always by the anxious eyes of the captain and crew, who willed the stronger breezes to come on. Boyle continually put up new combinations of sail, ordering this or the other rope to be pulled and that sheet furled or reefed, and the Ticonderoga, built to capture even the most insipid of winds, sailed on.
* * * *
Late on the morning of 4 September, after exactly a month at sea and as the ship’s bow cut
her way south, a cry went up from one of the crew, ‘Sail!’ Nothing on a long ocean voyage created so much excitement as the sight of another ship on the high seas. Instantly the word went around like an electric charge. A stampede of feet rushed from everywhere to the bulwarks to catch a glimpse of this precious connection to the outside world. ‘There she is!’ pointed out someone as a small white cloud of full sail was spotted on the azure sea heading almost straight for them from the opposite direction off the port bow. ‘Raise the board!’ sounded a command, and two seamen held up a large sheet of blackened timber. On this, in chalk, had hastily been written, ‘Ticonderoga—August 4—Liverpool’. The other vessel was a far smaller ship than the Ticonderoga, but the sight of her warmed the hearts of everyone on board. The closing speeds of the two ships amazed those who longingly watched her pass, agonisingly close, imploring the first mate and even the captain to stop and hail her, but Boyle, himself already alert and watching with his eye glued to his long glass telescope from his position up on the forecastle, politely pointed out that sadly this would not be possible. Sometimes, the passengers had heard, passing ships did hove-to and ‘speak’ in an exchange of news and even mail, but whatever hopes the Ticonderoga’s passengers may have had for such an exchange were not to be realised this day somewhere way out in the middle of the Atlantic.
The Lima under Captain A. Yule was tracing the Ticonderoga’s passage almost in exactly the other direction,1 travelling to England with a cargo of wool and a single solitary passenger after an extended delay in Port Melbourne. Having shipped a cargo of coal from Sydney, the Lima was forced to join the growing number of ships in Port Phillip Bay lying idle at anchor, abandoned by their crews who had absconded to the goldfields. She managed to set sail in late April, but the reason for her taking four months or so to reach the Ticonderoga’s position is unclear. Still, peering intently through his glass, Boyle tried his best to steady himself on the binnacle and focus, cursing under his breath at the rocking of the ship. ‘Mark her as …,’ he called at last to his Mate, ‘Lima … 130 days out’. Across the narrow stretch of water, the crew of the Lima had likewise raised their board, but heading north, were able to impart to the Ticonderoga one vital piece of information Boyle did not want to miss.
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