Hell Ship

by Michael Veitch

  Until deemed safe, it was customary for ships to pause outside the Rip, sailing back and forth under half-sail several miles out into Bass Strait, awaiting the most opportune moment to enter, then picking up the pilot to Melbourne. Captain Boyle, however, did not have time on his side. With his passengers dying like flies and 300 suffering various degrees of illness, his priority had to be delivering them to better care, and quickly.

  A mate then announced that one of the sailors had in fact sailed to Melbourne several times previously—albeit not recently. Conditions were not ideal, but the water looked calm, a breeze was blowing in his favour and so Boyle decided to make the attempt. Even approaching the entrance from the ocean side was dangerous, as jutting nearly a kilometre into Bass Strait was the Rip Bank, another obstacle that needed to be avoided. A brief conference took place on the upper deck, with charts and notes consulted once again. Standing by the captain and behind the helmsman stood the unnamed seaman who, several years before, had likewise attempted the passage, the weight on his shoulders now feeling much heavier than he would have liked. Boyle looked up and ordered more sail. When all was ready, he then gave the command to bring the Ticonderoga about, and with men placed fore and aft giving soundings, in the great ship went.

  Even in calm weather such as this, Boyle felt the surge of eddies tugging at the ship as it negotiated the bottleneck. Around him was a true patchwork of ocean temperaments: white water here, a smooth glassy upsurge from deep below there. Shadows flitted by as she glided over alternating patches of dark reef and pale sand. Boyle quickly appreciated the reputation of this torrid piece of water among sailors the world over. Running before the wind, the shore now began to move past. A line of little white stone cottages became visible, the first signs of habitation of this new land.

  Then the soundings indicated more water beneath them and the sea settled to its dark bluey grey. They were past the Heads and through the Rip of Port Phillip Bay. Rounds of ‘Well done! Well done!’ made their way along the upper deck from the captain and first mate. Boyle trimmed the yards as the Ticonderoga’s bow edged towards the low hump of Shortland’s Bluff. Then came the order that every soul on board had, for 90 agonising days, longed to hear, ‘Come to anchor!’

  ‘Ay, Cap’n,’ came the response, and the magnificent clanking of the great anchor chain, finally released, reverberated throughout the ship. Finding a sound bottom, the Ticonderoga swayed for a moment, then rode at her anchor, still.

  * * * *

  Henry Draper had been part of the Port Phillip pilot service for less than a year, but his time thus far had been anything but uneventful. As first mate of the barque Nelson, he had arrived in Melbourne from England in 1851, disembarked a load of privately paying passengers, and was preparing to load up for the return journey with a cargo of 2600 bales of wool and 9000 ounces of gold, which arrived under escort by steamer. After loading, his skipper, a Captain Wright, unwisely chose this moment to go ashore for a last carouse before their departure the next morning. Riding at anchor at Hobson’s Bay, Draper was awakened in his cabin during the night by sounds of scuffling on the deck. Emerging, he soon found himself surrounded by an armed gang who were preparing to liberate the ship’s store of gold. In the drama, a pistol was discharged at one of the mates, the ball missing him but grazing Draper’s hip. The bandits then locked the entire crew up and made off with the gold.

  The ship’s cook, who had escaped attention by hiding under his bunk, released Draper, who then swiftly raised the alarm upon rowing ashore. The bandits were soon rounded up. Draper would have liked nothing better than to have simply left as planned the next morning, but as a witness to a robbery, he was now compelled to cool his heels for several weeks awaiting a trial. He was in the meantime feted as a minor hero, awarded a total of £170 for his troubles and visited by Port Phillip’s Chief Harbour Master, Charles Ferguson, who promptly offered him a job. ‘I received the request with astonishment,’ Draper later wrote, ‘as I considered my position far above that of a pilot’s.’ His pride quickly recovered, however, when told that his salary would be in the range of £100 per year.1

  A year into the job, Draper was being kept busy at the pilot station at Shortland’s Bluff. The discovery of gold had seen a huge increase in shipping entering the bay, but his small group of pilots still had just two oared whale boats and a cutter at their disposal to guide as many as ten vessels a day both through the Rip and into the shipping lanes that cut their way through the shallow sandy banks up to the busy port of Melbourne. Early November was a particularly active time, and the records show that on the day the Ticonderoga came in, another nine ships also entered, many needing assistance. Few days of his career, however, would be as dramatic as this bright November morning when he answered the request of a large, dark emigrant ship lying at anchor off Shortland’s Bluff. She was, he could see, an unusually fine clipper, but as he approached her in his pilot’s cutter, he sensed all was not well. He could see people on deck, but they were few in number and appeared unsettled. Then, as he came within earshot, a series of desperate shouts could be heard, ‘Don’t come on board, pilot,’ he was told. ‘We are dying of fever!’

  Standing off, Draper assessed the situation. The large ship could not remain where it was, but to come aboard to steer her into the lanes was apparently a risk. After examining her formidable sides, he directed his helmsman to come close. Making a perilous grab for one of the mizzen chains and shields on the side of the hull, built to take the great strain of the mizzen mast shrouds and stays, he hauled himself up. Avoiding setting foot on the deck, he continued scrambling up into the network of ropes, which took him eventually into the rigging from where he then looked down upon a scene of despair.

  Under a tarpaulin lay a group of bodies. Passengers stood or lay around, their faces pale, red-eyed and exhausted beyond caring. The ship herself was unkempt, the deck a mess, the rigging around him untidy, the yards badly reefed, as if done by amateurs. Then there was the smell: a terrible, decomposing stench that rose up sickeningly into his nostrils. What on earth, he asked, had these people been through?

  Captain Boyle appeared below him, explaining the terrible sickness that had broken out on the voyage, which had already taken a hundred of his passengers. More were bound to die, he said, and even more remained ill. The senior ship’s surgeon, too, was incapacitated, his medicines exhausted. Supplies of fresh food and water, as well as proper care, were desperately needed. ‘I was informed they had 1000 passengers and that they had lost 102 on the passage,’ Draper later recalled in a brief memoir, although his memory may have exaggerated the numbers slightly.2

  In an instant, Draper knew that the Ticonderoga would not, for the foreseeable future, be going anywhere near Melbourne, and that it was of the utmost urgency that news of her arrival be sent to those in authority as quickly as possible. He explained to Captain Boyle that, given the grave situation on board, he could not permit her to proceed to Melbourne and that, regretfully, she would have to remain here until further instructions were received. On hearing this, a further wave of despair washed over the small group of passengers. Not wanting to stay on board a moment longer than necessary, Draper climbed back down towards his waiting cutter. ‘And Captain, Sir,’ he added solemnly as he departed, ‘I would advise you to hoist the Yellow Jack.’ Boyle said he understood, and thanked the pilot.

  Returning to his cutter, Draper proceeded as quickly as possible back to the shore station to seek the advice of his colleagues. The Ticonderoga, meanwhile, would continue to lie at anchor, the situation on board deteriorating by the hour. Boyle called over his first mate and a brief but solemn conversation took place. The mate nodded, and proceeded immediately below to a storage locker containing the ship’s signal flags, rolled up neatly in their respective wooden pigeon holes. At the very bottom, the mate drew out the one flag no ship’s master ever wanted to give the order to fly, the dreaded ‘Yellow Jack’, a simple square of yellow signalling catastrophe. Returning to t
he deck, he instructed one of the crew to climb the mainmast and hoist it at its highest point. Now every passing vessel, as well as everyone on shore, would see that the mighty clipper Ticonderoga was a ship of disease, a plague ship, which should under no circumstances be approached.

  With Sanger in the grip of the fever, it was now Dr Veitch, the young physician on his first sea voyage and the only fit surgeon on board, who would take on the mantle of his superior. For the time being, it was he Captain Boyle would consult on the daily updates of the passengers’ state. Sadly, however, Veitch could offer his captain no good news.

  Since the ship’s arrival the previous day, death had continued to ravage the Ticonderoga. Helen Bowie, the only child of a young couple from Edinburgh, George and Helen Bowie, died on the first day of the month, making their arrival into the bay a melancholy affair. Two-year-old Jemima Grant, whose family had travelled from Inverness, at the other end of Scotland, was next. Nor was the new month’s tally confined to the very young.

  With the death of her husband, John, twenty, Jane Sievwright was suddenly a widow. Janet Stevenson, 35 from Stirling, left her husband, Alexander, and their two daughters, Christina, seven, and Jane, four, to face their new world without a wife or a mother. Three or four deaths were now taking place each day, and with burials at sea forbidden inside the bay, the bodies could only be laid out on the deck under canvas. However, even more horrifying to Henry Draper than this macabre tableaux he had spied from his perch in the rigging was the apparent disinterest shown by the other passengers. It seemed to Draper that they were people pushed to a point beyond caring.

  A desperate Dr Veitch remonstrated with Captain Boyle. Surely, he pleaded, they were not expected to simply sit there as a floating morgue while the fever took even more victims? But Boyle’s hands were tied. For the time being, there was nowhere for them to go, and no one to take them.

  Henry Draper had in fact been doing all in his power to help. Soon after returning to his shore station, he reported to his colleagues what he had seen on board the Ticonderoga. None of them had faced a situation like it, and felt further instructions from Melbourne were urgently required as taking a ship in her wretched condition into Hobson’s Bay was out of the question. All agreed that the passengers needed to come ashore, but to where? Port Phillip was a full day’s sailing away. Draper again regarded the eerily still ship, which seemed to have taken on a more menacing appearance. As the small group of men spoke in urgent circles about the ship and her plight, Draper went to the window and with a spyglass surveyed a long low stretch of beach and scrub that stretched away a mile or so from the bay’s eastern head, Point Nepean. ‘There,’ he announced. ‘There is where she will go.’

  * * * *

  A short time later, by luck, the familiar sight of the 225-ton Champion, a coastal brig that regularly plied the southern coastal waters between the ports of Fremantle, Adelaide and Melbourne, came into view. Making one of her regular entrances into the bay, she was this day carrying six passengers and a load of general cargo.3 Her skipper, the well-known Captain Wylie, needed the help of no pilot to slip into the fairways and up the lanes to Melbourne. Upon spotting the small two-masted brig, Draper hailed him with a signal that he should prepare to be approached. A short time later, the pilot cutter came alongside the surprised Captain Wylie.

  Indicating the big dark clipper anchored of Shortland’s Bluff behind him, Draper told Wylie what he had seen on board, just as the older man caught sight of the Yellow Jack fluttering from her topmast. One hundred already dead, said Draper to an increasingly shocked Wylie, with many more sick and no medical supplies. The harbour authorities must be informed, he continued, and help must be sent—urgently. Wylie did not need to be told twice. Putting on more sail, he set off and made his way north to Melbourne as quickly as possible.

  The next morning, 3 November, Draper again approached the Ticonderoga and, by the same means he had employed the previous day, came aboard. Another night spent out on the water had not improved her situation. After requesting that the captain weigh anchor and put on some sail, Draper directed the helmsman to the other side of the bay, and into the small cove that had come to be known as Abraham’s Bosom, from where the two lime-burners, William Cannon and Patrick Sullivan, watched her stately but eerie approach.

  In a decision the Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, would later praise, Henry Draper took it upon himself to direct the Ticonderoga to an area of land that he understood to have only recently been set aside as a future quarantine station. There were as yet, he knew, few resources to be found there: only the two limestone cottages built by the lime-burners themselves, and one or two other small structures, but fresh water wells had been sunk, and a secure anchorage was to be had not far off the beach. From here, the sick could be evacuated and help could be delivered relatively easily. Getting those people off that ghastly ship, he had decided before approaching the Ticonderoga that morning, had to be the first priority. As he later recalled—indeed, with some pride—in his memoir:

  I piloted her to the Quarantine Station at Point Nepean, let go the anchor, gave her 60 fathoms of chain, came down the rigging, and slipped back into my boat … by taking the precaution of going into the mizzen-top I could state to the Health Officer that I had not had any communication with the ill-fated people. Getting up into the mizzen-top was considered quite a masterpiece of ingenuity and forethought.4

  Closer to the shore they may have been, but if the poor passengers on board the Ticonderoga had thought that their ordeal was nearing its end, they were sadly mistaken.

  22

  Protecting the colony

  Despite the ever-increasing confidence of nineteenth-century medicine, despite the delivery of intelligent and highly trained graduates from ancient universities such as Oxford and St Bartholomew’s into British hospitals and surgeries, despite the volumes written about new advances in medical treatment of all kinds, most of the virulent and destructive diseases of the day remained essentially mysterious and completely incurable. With typhus, for example, despite the millions it killed there is no evidence to suggest that anyone, anywhere—prior to its pathogen being finally described by Henrique da Rocha Lima and Stanislaus von Prowazek in the early 1900s—had so much as suggested the possibility of its cause being linked to human body lice.

  In the 1850s, therefore, doctors such as Sanger and Veitch, despite their best intentions and tireless concern for their patients, could barely even scratch at the symptoms with the knowledge and medicines at their disposal. Prior to the modern comprehension of infection, a disease having taken hold was simply left to run its terrible course. The only bulwark against its spreading was avoidance, in the form of isolation or quarantine.

  With the advent of the gold rush, the colonial backwater of Melbourne, founded only seventeen years previously by John Batman (a syphilitic conman and slaughterer of Tasmanian Aboriginals, described by artist John Glover as ‘a rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known’,1) suddenly began to burst its established boundaries, even up to the threshold of its hitherto isolated quarantine station at Little Red Bluff. This had been established by the government in 1840, its hand forced by the arrival of one of the unluckiest vessels ever to set sail, the Glen Huntly. This purpose-built 450-ton barque departed Greenock on her maiden voyage from Scotland under the command of a Captain Buchanan in December 1839, laden with 157 mainly Scottish emigrant passengers bound for Victoria. On her very first night at sea, she collided with a coastal vessel, then in the English Channel as fog set in, she missed a marker and struck a submerged rock, which damaged her timbers even further. A few days later, despite being in the open waters of the North Atlantic, the hapless Buchanan managed to plough into yet another vessel, this time an American packet ship, which tore away the Glen Huntly’s masthead and lower spars. Then, while crossing the equator, typhus broke out, resulting in her arrival into Melbourne with 50 cases of ‘fever’ and ten passenge
rs fewer than had embarked.

  When the unfortunate ship limped into Hobson’s Bay with the yellow flag at her topmast, the people of Melbourne, already spooked by a recent outbreak of typhus that devastated Hobart and reports of the disease in Sydney, went into such a panic that the then Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, was later reported by The Age of 1931 as becoming ‘considerably perturbed and anxious to avoid the introduction of what might prove to be a serious menace to the well-being of the small but flourishing community’. He ordered the Glen Huntly to depart forthwith to a small sandstone promontory known as Little Red Bluff, 4 miles south-east of the city. It was a lonely, windy place, isolated in the bush but bordered by a swamp on one side, which had been a former meeting place for the now dispersed Bunurong Aboriginal people.

  To accommodate both the Glen Huntly’s sick and healthy passengers, a hospital of sorts was set up in tents along the foreshore, which evolved by default into Melbourne’s first quarantine or ‘sanitary’ station, as it was dubbed initially to dampen public fears. In any case, it was a facility for which the burgeoning city was long overdue. Accepting its sudden establishment as a fait accompli, La Trobe appointed Dr Barry Cotter, Colonial Surgeon and the man described on a family biographical website as ‘Melbourne’s first doctor’, to oversee its proper development. Cotter decided that the sick would remain on board their anchored ships to either recover or die, while those still healthy would be housed in canvas tents along the shore and up on the bluff. These twin camps were named, appropriately enough, ‘Sick’ and ‘Healthy’, and the arrangement apparently worked, as only three more deaths eventuated from the Glen Huntly. To bolster the station’s position of isolation, La Trobe also provided a contingent of soldiers to prevent any contact between the patients and the outside world, as well as a water patrol in rowboats to deter any notions those confined to their ships may have had about swimming ashore. Cotter’s diary of April 1840 captured some of the scene: