Discovering the causes of infectious diseases had been a lifelong quest for Brazilian physician Henrique da Rocha Lima and his friend, Czech pathologist Stanislaus von Prowazek, with both men taking a particular interest in typhus. At great risk to themselves, they followed outbreaks and epidemics right across Europe, travelling to Serbia in 1913 to study one outbreak, and observing another in Constantinople the following year. In the winter of 1915, as war raged across Europe, they worked to contain a sudden and devastating outbreak among Russian prisoners of war in a camp near Berlin. Here, both men became infected, and von Prowazek quickly died. Da Rocha Lima recovered, however, and became more determined than ever to track down the cause.
In 1916, after a period of intense research, he announced the discovery of an entirely new group of bacteria that, once introduced into a person’s bloodstream, induced the familiar symptoms of high temperature, aches, rashes, delirium, sensitivity to light, often coma and, above all, the terrible stench—all the indications of typhus. In honour of his late colleague and another prominent victim of the disease, an American researcher named Ricketts, da Rocha Lima named his new strain of bacteria Rickettsia Prowazekii, and further announced to the world that the means by which it had, for thousands of years, been introduced into the human system was via one of mankind’s oldest companions, Pediculus humanus humanus, the common body louse. The discovery revolutionised the treatment of typhus. Lice were hunted down and destroyed with purpose and vigour like never before and by World War II, when DDT and later a vaccine had been developed, the incidence had been so reduced that the vaccine’s production was actually halted.
For the passengers and crew of the Ticonderoga, however, such developments were far in the distant future and in 1852, doctors Sanger and Veitch lacked the benefit of any such knowledge. Nor could they have had any idea as to the pathology of the disease: how it will eventually kill the louse itself; how the bacteria contained within its faecal matter will keep living on the surface of human skin for several days; how the unbearable itching of the louse’s bite will cause the patient to scratch, forcing the bacteria directly into the bloodstream; how the incubation period can last up to two weeks; how one single louse can lay up to 200 eggs; and that the ideal environment for the creatures to propagate was in humidity above 40 per cent and in temperatures between 29 and 32ºC—precisely the conditions the Ticonderoga had been experiencing as she sailed slowly south over the warm waters of the equator.
A lack of real knowledge of the disease notwithstanding, when Jane Gardiner died on board the ship in the early days of September, Sanger and Veitch had a terrible suspicion that there would soon be more to follow.
17
Typhus takes hold
The word ‘typhus’ derives from the Greek word typhos, meaning smoke or fog, and was originally used in the context of the disease by the great Hippocrates himself to describe the stupor and ‘confused state of the intellect’ he observed in its victims.1 What would not be observed—neither by Hippocrates nor anyone else—for another 2000 years was the relationship between the disease and the common body louse, Pediculus humanus humanus.
As research into the twentieth century revealed, typhus is spread when the louse feeds on the blood of a person already infected with the disease. After several days, the Rickettsiae bacteria thus introduced into the louse’s system will in fact kill it, but not before the louse crawls off to find a fresh victim whose body is neither too hot with infection nor cold from death. Prior to killing the louse, the bacteria multiplies exponentially inside it, to be excreted onto a person’s skin in the creature’s faecal matter, where it can remain viable and infectious for many days. The itching of the bite compels a sufferer to scratch, thus infecting themselves by forcing the bacteria into their own bloodstream via tiny cuts and abrasions. After an incubation period of about ten days, the first signs of the disease will start to appear, thus perpetuating the gruesome cycle.
A victim’s clothes would also become great spreaders of the disease, with garments not carefully removed from the victim releasing clouds of lice dust, eggs and faecal matter, which would reattach and infect again, partially vindicating the prevailing theory that the disease was wholly spread by stale and ‘infected’ air. The Ticonderoga’s innovative wind sails, which in fair weather distributed at least some air throughout the fetid lower decks, ironically helped to spread the disease.
How the typhus came on board the ship in the first place will never be known. Despite the best efforts of the staff at the Birkenhead depot, and the spick and span condition of the ship that Captain Boyle had gone to such lengths to present to Captain Patey and the inspectors of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission; despite the washing and re-washing of the passengers’ clothes before embarkation, someone—most likely in the seams of a jacket or shirt or bonnet or perhaps even in the smuggled blanket of young Janet Blair, had unknowingly brought on board the seeds of disaster in the form of a tiny colony of lice or their eggs. In her exhaustive research, Mary Kruithof believes that it was unlikely to have been Jane Gardiner, one of the first of Dr Sanger’s ‘fever victims’, who was incubating the disease when she came aboard, and that it was more probable that she caught it from another person in the married quarters—possibly someone she knew from her own part of Northumberland, quartered with her on the ship.2 Without knowing anything beyond an awful itch and a terrible headache, Jane Gardiner would first have become aware of the bites on her body a fortnight or so earlier. She may even have noticed them, in shock and grief at the recent loss of her daughter, Eliza, just ten days after setting sail from Birkenhead. The incubation period being at an end, the symptoms took hold of her quickly. Then, as her temperature rose, the lice themselves either died or vacated her overheated body for newer, cooler premises—and in the cloying proximity of the Ticonderoga’s passenger decks, such newer premises abounded.
The following day, another tragedy unfolded for the Appleby family from the Somerset village of Baltonsborough. Silas Appleby, 28, was listed as a literate, Church of England agricultural labourer, and was undoubtedly anticipating a better life for his family with significantly improved wages and conditions for his work in Australia. He had boarded the Ticonderoga with his wife, 23-year-old Sarah, their daughter, Emma, and son John, three. Little Emma had already passed away on 24 August, mere hours after contracting the raging fever that could not be contained. By 9 September, Sarah herself had contracted the disease and died. Mercifully, perhaps, she did not live to see the death of her remaining child, John, who would be buried at sea three weeks later on 2 November. Silas Appleby, having walked onto the Ticonderoga the head of a family of four, would depart it a grieving widower, entirely alone.
The next day, 10 September, 28-year-old Mary Ritchie from Inverness died after what seemed like a pathetically short battle with the disease. Her little Samuel had been the first infant to perish on board, and the very next day after her own death, the second of her children, two-year-old Alexander, also passed away. This left, once again, only the father, James Ritchie; having set out with his family of four, he was now also all on his own. He would soon be joined by others facing a similarly wretched situation.
The day Alexander Ritchie died, so did twenty-year-old Jane Dempster, a Scots girl housed in the single women’s quarters. By the middle of September, Sanger and Veitch realised that a full-blown epidemic was breaking out around them. Dreadful enough in itself, it was to be greatly exacerbated as the ship continued on to the Great Circle, ploughing into colder waters and freezing winds. The Ticonderoga’s passengers, already weakened by seasickness, a foreign diet and the claustrophobic ordeal of ship life, having been exhausted by weeks of sweltering heat and humidity utterly beyond their experience, would now be forced to endure the freezing latitudes of the sub-Antarctic. To keep warm in the icy gales and endless storms that would soon follow, families would huddle even closer together in the berths, sharing what warmth they could in their inadequate clothing. This sce
nario of prone bodies lying side by side would, over the next few weeks, present the most ideal conditions imaginable for the spread of typhus, and the Ticonderoga’s doctors would be tested beyond their limits. A particular burden, however, would fall on the shoulders of the young assistant surgeon on his first voyage, Dr James William Henry Veitch.
18
The box with the dull pink ribbon
Late one morning in 1983, aged twenty, I sat at a table in a modern, well-lit reading room as a librarian placed before me a shoebox-sized document container. I remember no more details of her, except that she wore a bottle-green cardigan and, save for the soft clink of her two very fine, very old-looking gold bangles, went about her work in complete silence. Mouthing a silent ‘Thank you’, I directed my attention to the box. It was secured by a dull pink ribbon, a little like a legal document. More than its appearance, however, I remember its smell: musty, with a hint of musk or cedar.
Earlier that day, I had taken the main line train from Waterloo station, preferring it to the underground as it allowed me to take in more of the London which, as a hopeless young anglophile, I’d pictured incessantly since childhood. Arriving at Kew Gardens station, I had been overawed by London’s gargantuan Public Record Office, a sprawling postmodern labyrinth of concrete and glass situated on the outskirts of the city.
As I entered the PRO’s looming grey facade, it occurred to me that somewhere amongst these miles of rooms and corridors, built to house the millions of documents recording the rise and decline of a nation and an empire—from luminous thousand-year-old parchments, to scribbled musings on Cabinet notepaper of long dead Prime Ministers—something pertaining to my own family lay hidden. My job was to find it.
As I began to tackle the complicated knot of ribbon, I pondered how many years had passed since some unknown hands had first tied it. Ten? A hundred? I felt myself to be at the end of a long, but private, quest. In fact, it was just the beginning.
* * * *
My father, who I resemble in myriad ways both good and bad, but particularly physically, enjoyed a successful career in newspapers, though I suspect he preferred to think of himself more as a writer rather than a journalist. His forte was human interest. Even in such roles as court reporter he had a knack of bringing the emotional drama of a trial to life, rather than simply offering the usual dry procession of witnesses and judgments. Inheriting that gene myself, at school I found writing was the only thing I was remotely good at, and my father agreed. My writing became to him something of a project. In high school, he would mark up my essays and stories with the mysterious signs and symbols of a newspaper subeditor. He was ruthless, but when praise came, I knew it was genuine and hard-earned. In the end, writing became a bond—perhaps the only bond—between us.
One night he told me a story of his own. It was a true story, that of the terrible journey of the ‘plague ship’ Ticonderoga, and the dramatic arrival of the first of our family, our clan, in this country—my great-great-grandfather, James William Henry Veitch. In solemn tones, he spoke of the awful disease which erupted on board the overcrowded vessel, how death stalked the passengers, carrying off entire families, and the miracles our revered ancestor performed among the sick and the dying, both at sea and later in quarantine. It sounded like a dark and heroic epic, which of course is how it had been told to him. ‘This is your story too, you know’, he said. ‘You should write about it’. I agreed with him wholeheartedly. But I never did.
It was only several years later I came to appreciate just what the Ticonderoga story must have meant to my father. In all, Dr James William Henry Veitch and Annie bore nine children, six of whom survived. Their last, Henry, lived to the venerable age of 92, dying only in the year I was born, 1962. For reasons long forgotten, however, a family feud had split him from my grandfather, Alfred, and the two were not reconciled until late in life.
It was only well into his adulthood therefore, that my own father encountered his grandfather, Henry. Although he had always been aware of the Ticonderoga story, it was for him inchoate, and in fragments. Only after meeting Henry did it become something of an obsession for him.
A gentle and, by all accounts, beautifully spoken man, Henry Veitch told my father of his life growing up in central Victoria in the late 1800s, of his father, then a respected councillor, of his mother’s lilting Highland brogue which never left her, and of the harrowing account of their journey to Australia on board the Ticonderoga. Why my father did not seek out Henry earlier—feud or no feud—remains a mystery to me, as is the reason why he never attempted to write the story himself.
Many years later, as I prepared to leave for Europe as a twenty-year-old backpacker, my father requested that I chase down some of the original documentation pertaining to the Ticonderoga and James William Henry Veitch, which he suspected to be held in London. I gave him a half-hearted assurance that I would try, though in fact barely intended to keep the promise. In the weeks leading up to my departure, however, it was virtually all he talked of. Over the previous weeks, he had corresponded furiously with the Kew Public Record Office via mail, tracking down files and catalogue numbers, distilling them all into a folder, which he pressed solemnly into my hand a few days before the flight. As I passed through the airport gate, the look of expectation in his eyes made me realise that, like it or not, I too had now been burdened with the saga of the Ticonderoga.
A few weeks later, I lifted the lid of the box marked ‘54829 Colonial Correspondence—Victoria—Colonial Land and Emigration Society, 1852–53’. Inside was a pile of official letters, folded longways into rectangles and all written with a steel-nibbed pen in the long-vanished hand of copperplate. Some were bound by more pink ribbon. I opened the first one, smoothing out the century-and-a-half-old crease, quietly amazed that I was not required to wear special white gloves, or at least be watched over by the librarian. My own enthusiasm for the quest now thoroughly awakened, the contents of the box seemed far too precious to be handled by someone such as myself.
Although exquisite, the handwriting was at first almost impossible to decipher. Only after a few minutes could one word be made out, then another. Then, gradually, like cracking a code, the sentences appeared to almost shift into place and come alive. The first few documents seemed of little relevance, being written by one or other unknown government official concerning such topics as schedules and ships’ insurance tables, but a third of the way through the pile, one word on one letter leaped off the page. ‘We have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 17th instant, enclosing a Despatch from Lieutenant Governor Latrobe relative to the mortality which occurred among the Emigrants by the “Ticonderoga” both during her voyage and in Quarantine.’1 It was written by Sir Thomas William Murdoch, the Board’s then chairman, to Herman Merivale, Permanent UnderSecretary for the Colonies, and dated June 29, 1853. It runs for fourteen pages, without a single mistake or correction, and represents the Board’s initial reaction to the report of the Ticonderoga disaster, which Murdoch had received only a few days earlier direct from Victoria and penned by Governor Charles La Trobe himself.
When La Trobe’s report had hit Merivale’s desk, it was like an explosion. The barely controlled panic in Murdoch’s words to his superior is palpable. In it, he quotes La Trobe’s report extensively, choosing those passages that could be turned to ameliorate any responsibility on the part of the Board. The impression was of a man trying to position himself in the best possible light before an impending disaster. The very next letter in the pile was Governor La Trobe’s report itself.
It is referenced with the number CO 309/13 and dated 26 January 1853. Addressed to the Right Honourable Sir John Pakington, 1st Baron Hampton, member of the Privy Council and Queen Victoria’s Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, who would later rise to First Lord of the Admiralty, it begins,
My despatch No 163 of November 9, 1852 apprized you of my having received intelligence of the arrival of the Government Emigrant Ship ‘Ticonderoga’
, the lamentable loss of life by disease which had been experienced during the passage and the great extent to which the sickness of a very serious character still prevails …2
Holding in my hand the personally written words of the first Governor of my home state of Victoria, after whom one of Melbourne’s main streets is named, was something of a thrill; that he was writing about the arrival of my ancestor’s vessel was doubly so. What I craved, however, was some direct reference to James William Henry himself, and this did not seem to be forthcoming. Several other letters again seemed to be of no relevance, then at the very bottom of the box, a two-page document written in the far less legible, almost hurried-looking hand of Dr Joseph Charles Sanger, offering the dramatic heading,
Ship Ticonderoga, Thursday, Midnight, November 4, 1852.
Sir, I have the honour to announce the arrival of the Ship ‘Ticonderoga’ from Liverpool with a large number of Government Emigrants on board under my superintendence—I deeply regret to have to inform you of the serious amount of formidable sickness prevalent during the whole voyage especially the latter part, and of the long list of fatal cases resulting therefrom.3
Sanger’s letter, written at midnight on one of the worst days of the saga, is a desperate cry for help, the first official description to the wider world of the still-unfolding tragedy. Then, about two-thirds down the first page,
Hell Ship Page 13