Now, in mid-October, the ship was heading on a course roughly 140 degrees east, making fast for the entrance to Bass Strait. As the Ticonderoga closed on her final destination, however, the rate of mortality from the disease increased. Death, it seemed, was making a final lunge as the finish line drew near. The end of October was particularly grim.
On 23 October, Margaret Stewart, 22 years of age and travelling alone in the single women’s quarters, died along with her dreams of meeting a husband with good prospects in Australia. The following days saw a gaggle of little children perish: Jane Smith, three; Mary Rutter, two; Elizabeth Drinnan, one. Nor were mature patients spared. James Dochard, 22, left his wife Mary, 23, and younger brother, William, eighteen, to finish the journey alone. A young mother, Mary Ann Henderson from Ross in the heart of the Highlands, joined her infant son, David, leaving behind her husband and a two-year-old, James. Another Scot, Jane Kay, died, leaving her husband and five children, all under the age of eight. A few weeks later, their youngest, William, would die in quarantine.
The Ticonderoga’s crew also became sick, but as they berthed separately, the rate of infection among them was not as severe as it might have been. Some estimates of ten seamen falling ill have been quoted, which represents slightly less than one-fifth of the 48-member crew. One of those was William Boyle, the ship’s third mate and younger brother of Captain Boyle. Deep in a coma, the captain knew his brother was in a parlous state, unlikely to recover.
The group that seems to have been least affected by the disease was older children and teenagers, only 5 per cent of whom died from the typhus, despite many more than that contracting the disease. Most of those who did fall sick usually recovered and survived. Apart from a naturally robust constitution, many may have been spared, ironically, by being compelled to man the ship, particularly in the trials of the Southern Ocean. Captain Boyle seems to have encouraged many of the young men in the single quarters to learn as much as they could about the art of sailing, and he drew upon their help when the ship needed all the manpower that could be mustered during the storms. It was dangerous work—although not nearly as dangerous, it would seem under the circumstances, as staying below deck.
Undaunted, the two doctors continued to make their presence felt in the dreadful lower decks of the ship alongside Captain Boyle, who in every recollection of this terrible part of the voyage to have survived, is remembered by all to have displayed the utmost consideration for his ailing passengers: ‘Captain Boyle was as careful as possible for the wellbeing of those committed to his charge,’ recalled Christopher McRae. ‘From a sense of duty and the possession of a human and kindly disposition, he used every means at his command to prevent such a condition of filth.’5 Simply observing the regular presence of the foremost authorities of the ship—the captain and his two surgeons—seems to have given many people the sense that, at the very least, they had not been completely abandoned. Boyle would do his best to assure people that the ship was making good time, and that any day now they would arrive at Port Phillip, where the best of care would be arranged for them—a promise he quietly prayed he could honour.
Drs Sanger and Veitch, now overwhelmed, sought more help among the passengers, as some of those recruited earlier had become sick and even died. Few came forward. An exception remained the Fannings—John, his wife Mary and now their son Patrick, sixteen—who throughout had served as nurses and attendants amid the chaos of both the male and female hospitals. This steadfast family all risked their health—indeed, their lives—to assist their fellow passengers in dire need, and remained until the end of the voyage, and even well after, battling at the forefront of the disease.
Two young women put forward their services. Mary Dochard, a young Scot from Stirling who had recently lost her husband, James, to the disease, was travelling with her extended family, including her late husband’s parents and several siblings and in-laws. Perhaps she felt obliged to assist the surgeons, if only to offer some protection for the rest of her family. The second young woman had lost no family, as she travelled alone in the single women’s section. She also appeared to be in good health and, being somewhat older than most of her companions, possessed a maturity that Sanger and particularly Veitch found compelling. Rather than sit out the weather and hope to remain free of illness, Annie Morrison, who had farewelled her father from the ferry at Tobermory, stepped forward to offer her limited experience of nursing.
In the putrid decks and in the ship’s hospitals, the small band of two doctors and a handful of volunteer nurses and other assistants worked tirelessly among the Ticonderoga’s sick, which in the latter stages of the voyage was estimated to be around 300 wrestling with various stages of the disease.
One morning, after another dismal night of broken sleep, Dr Veitch arose to once again proceed with Dr Sanger to the hell of the lower decks. Undoubtedly, there would be more grief and sickness than they had seen just the previous evening, and there would be little they could do to relieve the passengers’ suffering, but both felt it was their duty and purpose to make their presence felt, and to try. A knock on the door of Dr Sanger’s small cabin did not meet with its usual answer, however. Veitch called, but still no response came. Another entreaty was at last met with a hoarse response. Veitch quickly pushed open the small wooden door to find Sanger, still on his small bed, covered in sweat, his temperature sky high. His worst fears realised, Veitch began to administer what he could to his superior, even managing to retrieve some of the medicinal wine he had kept in reserve for just such an emergency. Sanger was presenting with the early stages of typhus and seemed utterly incapacitated. The mantle of care would now pass from one of the most experienced doctors in the emigration service to a virtual novice on his first appointment, facing one of the greatest disasters ever to have taken place in the history of peacetime emigration.
Veitch comforted Sanger as much as he could, but privately had little faith that he would recover. He seemed to be alarmingly advanced. No red rash had yet appeared, but Sanger was definitely febrile, nauseous and showing early signs of delirium. He managed, however, to impress on Veitch that he should carry on the work they had started, and that even with little medicine to administer, they were still of great value. Besides, they could not now be too far from Port Phillip and must surely soon be weighing anchor. Then, he said, help on a grand scale would be at hand.
Feeling a dread weight of responsibility, Veitch gathered his handful of nurses and assistants and got to work. After a short time, he asked the dependable Annie to inform the Captain—but no one else—of Sanger’s condition. She did not flinch.
Amazingly, amid the chaos, somewhere between twelve and nineteen (sources vary) babies were born during the voyage—mostly to Scottish women. It being impossible, particularly in the latter stages, to use the female hospital, most of these births took place in the mothers’ own bunks in the married quarters, where they were attended by Mary Fanning or others acting as midwives. Utterly against the odds, each of these newborns, though surrounded by death, survived not only the birth, but the remainder of the journey. Amid the terrible jangle of the dying, the grieving and the demented, the cries of just-delivered life could also be heard on board the Ticonderoga, contributing to an already surreal symphony. To the further encouragement of all, some of the patients—particularly the older children and youths—began to show signs of recovery, their fever dropping, and the rash and delirium abating. Those who had been lucky enough to be washed, largely removing the infestations of lice from their body and clothing, stood a better chance of recovery. These incidences were, however, some of the few moments of joy.
The tragedy that befell the Robertson family from Inverness unfolded on 26 October, when both Daniel, 40, and his wife Isabella, also 40, died within hours of each other. A few days later, their now orphaned baby daughter, Ann, would also pass away, leaving their eldest, eighteen-year-old Mary, to care for her three younger siblings, one of whom would also die a few weeks later in quarant
ine. Having left Birkenhead a family of seven, the Robertsons would finally disembark in Melbourne just three strong. In the last few days of October, the death toll on board rose to a terrible crescendo with around 25 passengers perishing within a few days. On 28 October, 32-year-old Sarah Bell from Somerset died, leaving a husband and three children, although she had begun the journey with four. The next day, James McKean, 24, also passed away, making a widow of his 22-year-old wife Margaret. On the last day of the month, Margaret Rutherford, 28, died. Exactly a month later, she would be followed by her husband. That night, as the ship pitched in a stiff breeze towards the north, yet another funeral for two of the infants who had died over the past two days took place. It was a pathetic affair, with barely a word spoken above a mumble of the few lines of the prescribed service and the endless wash of the sea. There were simply no words left to say.
Then a triumphant voice sang out somewhere high in the rigging: ‘Light! Port bow!’ Forgetting everything—even the melancholy reason they were on the deck—the funeral party rushed to the side of the ship and peered into the darkness. There, in the distance, a pale yellow beam stoked the blackened sky to the north.
Instantly, feet were heard from everywhere rushing onto the deck. Captain Boyle appeared, his first mate clutching a heavy ledger, hurriedly opening it to a particular page under the dim light of a hurricane lamp. ‘Yes, First Mate, yes?’ Boyle urged impatiently. ‘A moment please, Captain,’ said the excited young officer, running his eye over the myriad lines of information in front of him. Then, finding what he was so frantically seeking, ‘Three by three seconds, Captain!’ The two men peered again at the stabbing shaft of light, each counting quietly to themselves. To those watching the late evening scene, the suspense was almost unbearable. ‘I think we have it, First Mate, please note the time,’ said Boyle finally, with an excitement in his voice that even he could barely contain. ‘Please feel free to inform passengers and crew that we have just sighted the Cape Otway light, on the coast of Victoria.’ It was early on Monday morning, 1 November, 1852.
21
Arrival
Four days later, an alarming headline would greet readers of the late morning edition of The Argus newspaper: ‘Terrible State of Affairs on board an Emigrant Ship at the Port Phillip Heads!’
Their attention well and truly grabbed, groups of people going about their business stood still alone or in huddles along busy Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, holding open the large sheets of newspaper, close by the paper boys and newspaper stands where they had just been bought and, with growing alarm, read on:
Intelligence was brought to Williamstown, on Wednesday evening last, by Captain Wylie, of the brig Champion, from Adelaide, that a large ship named TICONDEROGA, ninety days out from Liverpool, with upwards of 900 Government emigrants on board, had anchored at the Heads. A great amount of sickness had occurred amongst the passengers, more than a hundred deaths having taken place, and almost a similar number of cases (Typhus fever) being still on board. Nor was this all. The doctor’s health was so precarious that he was not expected to survive, and the whole of the medicine, medical comforts, etc., had been consumed …
Passers-by, or those who could not afford the thruppence for their own copy, paused and shuffled close to hear the words spoken aloud by readers who found themselves with an instant and captivated audience. In colonial Victoria, where the single artery to the outside world was the arrival of ships, any new emigrant vessel was worthy of attention. Who was on board? What news, fashions and innovations would soon be arriving from the place that, although on the far side of the globe, was the colony’s cultural and economic epicentre: Britain? Ships also brought other, less welcome things, however, and as they listened, one word stuck like a thorn, compelling people shake their heads and raise a protective hand to the throat. Typhus. Muttering quietly, the shock felt by some quickly hardened to a sense of anger. This, they said, had long been predicted.
* * * *
Having sighted the Otway light, Captain Boyle could momentarily relax. He had, after all, managed to steer his large ship, undamaged across the ferocious seas of one of the longest and most dangerous shipping routes in the world. Moreover, despite neither he nor any of his crew having ever sailed these waters before, he had managed it in 90 days, which—while not a record—was an excellent time nonetheless. As navigators, Boyle and his first mate had proved themselves to be exemplary, missing not a mark, and successfully negotiating by far the most dangerous part of the voyage: the final days before reaching Port Phillip. It was at this point that the dreaded ‘threading the needle’ needed to be negotiated, with the approach to Bass Strait requiring seamen to slip through the narrow gap between the north-west–south-east running line of the Victorian coast and the rocky northern tip of King Island, Cape Wickham out in Bass Strait. After emerging from the whiplashing of the frigid Southern Ocean, this was no easy feat.
As Boyle, and every other seaman afloat, would have been all too aware, the coastlines of both places—Victoria and King Island—were strewn with the remains of both ships and lives. Seven years earlier (as he would have been reminded during many meetings held leaning over charts, protractor and compass in hand, with the representatives of the Board), the emigrant vessel Cataraqui, a large barque, had slammed into a rock shelf on King Island’s south-west shore, her skipper having erred tragically in estimating his position, convinced himself that he was actually much further to the north. Over three ghastly days, in a fierce storm, the ship was torn to pieces by the breakers, and though just metres from shore, no more than a pitiful four survivors remained alive from a passenger and crew list numbering 500 souls. The Cataraqui was, and remains still, Australia’s worst peacetime maritime disaster. Amazingly, a lighthouse at Cape Wickham was not built and activated until 1861.
Any glow of self-congratulation was short-lived, however, as Captain Boyle was brought back to reality by the sobs of the grieving and the wailings of the demented among his poor afflicted passengers and crew. As much as he would like to believe otherwise, his ordeal was far from over.
Staying on deck for the rest of the night to navigate the remaining 70 or so nautical miles to the entrance of Port Phillip Bay, Captain Boyle took the Ticonderoga north-east into a stiff spring breeze. After a few hours, almost in front of him, the first signs of his first day in Australia became visible on the eastern horizon.
Being completely unfamiliar with Australian landscapes, he took in the rich dark olive of the foliage, the undulating hills and the sweeping beaches of the Victorian coastline as it became slowly visible with the dawn—not unlike, he thought, some parts of America, with which he was far more familiar.
A new stirring began to be heard among the passengers. Finally, after weeks of the most terrible turmoil, of praying constantly for this nightmare voyage to be over, all sensed that they were finally nearing its end. Those in good health came onto the upper deck, braving the chilly wind to take in for themselves the first sights of their new country, no longer confined to the imagination but now real, there in front of them.
People who had lived and worked on farms all their lives came on deck and gripped the handrail. It was lush land, they thought to themselves, green and fertile. After what they had been through, this at least they needed to believe.
On a clear and bright early morning, after a journey of nearly 13,000 miles, the Ticonderoga arrived outside the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. Negotiating the formidable Heads was not a task to be taken lightly, particularly for those unaccustomed to its tricks and peculiarities. Beyond its entrance stretched a vast, almost entirely landlocked, inland bay measuring nearly 800 square miles. But first, the infamously treacherous passage between its two guarding promontories, known appropriately to sailors everywhere as ‘the Rip’, needed to be navigated. Although 2 miles of water separated the Heads—Point Lonsdale on the west and Point Nepean on the east—the intervening Rip was riven by a chaotic pattern of reefs reaching out from both points, reducin
g the true navigable distance to a gap little more than half a mile wide. A mistake made here would not be forgiven. So treacherous was the Rip, in fact, that even the government pilot vessels were reluctant to traverse it to bring vessels in. That risk, in most cases, would have to be undertaken by the captains themselves. According to his Notes to Mariners, Boyle was required to make his own way through the Rip to a small outcrop on the western arm near the fishing village of Queenscliff named Shortland’s Bluff. Once here, he was to signal for a pilot to guide him through the fairways to the shipping channel and eventually up to the port of Melbourne, Port Phillip itself. With the sandy floor of the bay at an average depth of only 26 feet, this was not a course Boyle wanted to tackle unaided.
He would have appreciated that same help with tackling the Rip itself, where unpredictable waves, eddies and currents abounded. Then there were the tidal streams that ran through it at up to 6 knots, and vastly differentiating depths—between 5 and 100 metres—making for surges that had already trapped scores of vessels, such as the 500-ton Isabella Watson. Eight months previously, this passenger barque had come to grief, taking nine lives with her, executing exactly the manoeuvre that Boyle, in a much larger ship, was now about to attempt. He could clearly see the Isabella Watson’s broken carcass washed up on a tiny cove just inside Point Nepean, as if placed there as a warning of the dangers that confronted him.
Boyle had studied his Notice to Mariners for the approaches to Port Phillip. Likewise he recalled the warnings to take particular care with the Rip. Slack water between the surge of the tides, he had been advised, would be the safest time to make his approach, but even then a sudden squall or current from below could drag a ship onto a reef or into the infamous natural feature of Corsair Rock, which lay guarding the Rip’s entrance like a sentinel.
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