Hell Ship

by Michael Veitch

  Soon, however, the papers began to add their own thundering editorials to the narrative. On Monday, 15 November, The Argus editorial declared:

  We must again advert to the evils arising from the sending out of large numbers of passengers in single ships. We lately alluded to several cases in which the mortality during the voyage had arrived at a very frightful extent. Since then, large English vessels have arrived also furnishing a sad list of deaths. Several vessels are now in quarantine, among them the Ticonderoga, which recently arrived with the terrible loss of 104 lives. When she anchored in our port, many scores of passengers were still ill, the doctor and his assistant were both laid up, and the medical stores were all consumed. From the result of such experience, it seems improper that any ship however large, however splendid her accommodation should endeavour to bring many hundred passengers for so long a voyage. Those vessels which have conveyed 200 or 300 passengers each have usually arrived without any serious loss of life; but those conveying 600 or 700 and upwards have frequently furnished such a list of casualties, as to lead us to strongly recommend to ship-owners to abstain from sending them, and passengers to avoid coming by them.

  Word of the plague ship began to spread beyond the borders of the new colony, and soon a blistering article appeared in the combative but influential fortnightly Australian and New Zealand Gazette. In it, not only were the foretold consequences of employing large vessels laid bare, but the very practices of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, as well as assisted emigration in general, were brought into question:

  In our last number we alluded to the fearful mortality which had taken place on board some ships from Liverpool to Australia, in consequence of over-crowding. Liverpool, or, rather, American ships, sailing from that port to the United States, have established an unenviable reputation for this system of packing live cargo, as Irish emigrants to America are evidently considered. Our impression was, that in Australian emigration a different course had been pursued by Liverpool shipowners with regard to Australian ships. And on inquiry we find that it is so; private ships sailing from Liverpool being in quite as good condition, both as regards comforts and provisions, as any out of London.

  Our readers will be surprised that the floating pest-houses, in which two hundred and seventy-nine souls have been lost to their families and the colonies, are the property of, for the time being, and were shipped out under the eye of her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners, who have thus wasted the above enormous quantity of human life, and with it upwards of £5000 of the Victoria colonists’ money. In the name of humanity, we trust the colonists will, as they have intimated, stop the remission of any further land funds, if this is to be the use made of it. But let us recount the mortality on board these sea-shambles Borneuf, 83 dead; Wanata, 39 dead; Marco Polo, 53 dead; and Ticonderoga, a hundred and four dead! Total, 279 persons, starting from England less than six months ago, full of life and spirits at the cheering prospects before them. These have been hurried into eternity from having put confidence in her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners, whose latest discovery it appears to have been that the best way of promoting the health and safety of 800 souls on board each ship was to stow them away in the space which private shipowners would have allotted to 700. But on this point we will let Mr Rankin, the chairman of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, speak—The doctor is dead, and almost all the survivors are down with fever. The last case is the most striking, because the voyage, of 68 days only, must have been performed with winds invariably favourable. What, then, was the cause of this unusual and frightful mortality? The system of packing, which sends 800 in a space not more than enough for 700, and which stows passengers in lower deck berths without any better means of ventilation than a canvas windsail, which cannot be used in storms, when most needed.

  As Chairman of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, I deem it my duty to state that not one of the above vessels was sent out by private individuals, but all of them were taken up and sent out by the Commissioners of Emigration. Every emigration ship is inspected by the Government officer, and no more passengers are allowed than the act of Parliament authorizes. So that private ships are compelled to take no more passengers than they can carry in health and safety. But her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners have the power of experimentalizing as to how many out of eight hundred souls can be safely landed from one ship.

  Our wonder is that they did not go the full length of the experiment, and stow away the whole of the live lumber in casks, with holes bored at the bottom. But happily, amidst this horrible slaughter, the weather was fine and the winds favourable, or few indeed would have reached their destination. In March last year, the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association urged on the Government the fact that no ship, whatever might be her size, could carry more than 600 persons in safety. The Great Britain, the largest ship afloat, took out this number, and lost one. In the very teeth of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, and in their own port, the emigration commissioners put on board 800, though the ships were not of the largest size! Had one of these ships only been thus fearfully visited, a pestilence, silent and uncontrollable, would have accounted for the slaughter. But here four ships sailing at different periods, though all under favourable circumstances on the voyage, similarly visited.

  Till an investigation has taken place, let no man in his senses trust himself on board a Government emigrant ship. He may easily calculate his chance of getting to the end of the voyage. Here it is. The Ticonderoga had 800 souls on board at starting, and lost 104, including the doctor [sic]. The chance of being flung to the sharks is, therefore, just one in eight. People have usually been in the habit of considering themselves at least as well off in a Government emigrant ship as in a private one, but this is a delusion. We consider even Mr Rankin’s estimate of 600 persons in a ship as much too high. We should very much like some financial member of the House of Commons, to ask what sum was paid to the owners of this Ticonderoga. We are curious to know the particulars of this Government floating hospital, if only for the information of the colonists who send their money to be thus lamentably spent. If we recollect rightly, the Ticonderoga is not a British-built ship, but an old American liner; the receptacle of many a former cargo of Irish emigrants. We will not be positive on this point, but we do not expect to see the assertion contradicted. If the colonial legislatures, when they get the power of doing as they please with their own money, will aid societies like this, they will expend their money to some purpose, and we have no doubt that they will do so, as soon as the Emigration Commission has ceased to drain their exchequers.

  * * * *

  Back at Point Nepean, Dr Taylor, as Ferguson had suspected, was not coping. Although an experienced surgeon superintendent, having only recently in fact completed a relatively trouble-free run from England on the Ottillia, nothing in his experience could have prepared him—or anyone else—for the deluge of woe that awaited him at Point Nepean.

  Conditions continued to be primitive in the extreme. Some people were lucky enough to be housed in the requisitioned cottages and tents, but most were confined to the hastily constructed canvas lean-tos that had been put together by the Ticonderoga’s crew and able passengers. Some, remembered a Mrs Cain, daughter of the first permanent resident of Portsea, were confined to bark shelters, living like Aboriginal people, while their attendants and family ‘waved branches over them to keep off the flies’.5 Donald McDonald, in a description for a newspaper written decades later, recalls that at night his mother would have to shake the frost from the blankets covering their small beach lean-to made from timbers and ti-tree branches.

  With a huge workload, little help and not much he could practically do to help his patients in any case, Dr Taylor began to feel the stress of his position acutely. A few days into the posting, his wife and his two eldest sons arrived, his wife to assist him on board the Lysander, making up tinctures and prescriptions, and his sons to help with the distribution of the stores. It woul
d all end badly for Dr Taylor. A year later, he recounted his take on the whole sorry experience at Point Nepean in a long and somewhat wounded letter to Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, in which he recounts a litany of injustices, particularly at the hands of Thomas Hunt, the man who had given him the job in the first place, but with whom he soon seriously fell out. Judging by the tone of his account, however, Taylor seems to have clashed with everybody—particularly the two men who were ostensibly there to assist him, Drs Sanger and Veitch:

  The first surgeon of the ship, complained Taylor, was himself all of fever and altogether unable to render any assistance, while the junior surgeon, a young man without experience and of intractable temperament, was comparatively useless.6

  Taylor’s is the splenetic rant of a man taxed beyond his capacities by a still desperate situation. In describing the entire set-up of the station as chaotic, he was undoubtedly correct. At one stage, he even had to shoot a stray bullock that had wandered into the station, then organise the cow-proof fence to prevent further bovine incursions. Overwhelmed, he could barely sleep, and was deprived of even some of the most basic necessities to make his tenure bearable:

  Such excessive labour and mental anxiety, together with the want of sleep for many nights in succession, soon began to exhibit their depressing effects on the system. My legs swelled more and more, my appetite failed and at last when in the nighttime, after writing out my Report for the day, on the ground having neither chairs nor tables. I could find time for an hour’s rest that rest was denied me by the violent cramps which attacked my legs the moment I had fallen asleep.7

  Aside from this, Taylor suffered acute diarrhoea, as well as the ignominy of the theft of his personal property, including his bed, forcing him to sleep on the ground, followed by his personal trunk being ransacked, with persons unknown making off with some of his clothes.

  It appears that when Dr Hunt travelled down to Point Nepean on or about 9 November, he formed the opinion that Taylor was not the right person for the job and began moves to terminate his position once a replacement could be found. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, however, seems to have been left out of this particular intrigue, and was apparently put in the embarrassing position of calling upon Taylor on his one visit to the station in December, dining with him and renewing his appointment, only to have him summarily dismissed by Dr Hunt a few days later. When informed of his sacking, in person by Dr Hunt, a flabbergasted Taylor challenged Hunt’s authority to dismiss him from an appointment ordained by the Lieutenant-Governor himself. According to Taylor, Hunt’s response was to threaten to pull the poor man’s tent down if he failed to vacate the area within two days.

  In a letter informing La Trobe of his actions, Hunt stated: ‘I have this day dismissed Mr Joseph Taylor from the office of Resident Surgeon and Store keeper at the Sanitary Station Ticonderoga … I find him a very inefficient officer, much more given to talk than act.’8

  Then, piling woe upon woe, Taylor contracted typhus, which had him in its grip until well into the new year, ‘from that time up until the middle of April, all is lost history to me, remembering nothing except some dreamy wanderings of my brain’.9

  * * * *

  Only very slowly did the death rate begin to decrease once the Ticonderoga’s passengers reached quarantine. On 20 November, The Argus, eager to keep its fixated readers up to date with the latest lurid details from Point Nepean, reported:

  Frequent deaths are still taking place amongst the unfortunate emigrants of the Ticonderoga, five having occurred the other day; two more surgeons have been sent down and Dr Hunt, the Health Officer at Williams Town [sic] proceeded to Point Nepean yesterday to see if any further measures could be adopted for the improvement of the Quarantine Station at that place.

  On 16 November, John Hando, 49, whose sixteen-year-old daughter Anna Maria had been one of the Ticonderoga’s first victims on 23 August, also died. A broken heart could well have hastened his demise. In October, he had also lost his wife, Maria, and just four days earlier, his remaining daughter, Emma, also perished. Only eighteen-year-old Charles and his two brothers, aged seven and ten, were left of the family of seven that had boarded the ship thirteen weeks earlier.

  Another of the English passengers, Mary Ann Cheeney, 33, died on 16 October, leaving her husband alone to raise their children, William and Mary, both under ten; Elizabeth Taylor, one, became the sole victim of her family the following day, and Janet Mattheson, twenty, died just one day before her infant son, George.

  Perhaps one of the most poignant stories was that of one of the few childless couples on board the Ticonderoga, Andrew and Margaret Rutherford, aged 27 and 28 respectively, and about whom little else is known. Margaret had died on one of the ship’s last days at sea, possibly even within sight of land, on 31 October, while her husband passed away in quarantine twenty days later, on 20 November. Unlike most of the ship’s other victims, whose families were able, despite the tragedy of losing loved ones, to go on to establish family roots in Australia, nothing whatever remained of Andrew and Margaret’s bold endeavour to come to Australia on the ship that would cost them their lives.

  26

  A Christmas escape

  A few days before Christmas Day 1852, the Scots McIvor family were preparing for the Yuletide in their home in Coburg, a suburb to Melbourne’s north, just a little off the track that would, after an extremely arduous journey of several weeks, eventually lead to Sydney. Not that the McIvors had ever taken that journey themselves, and nor were they likely to. Having migrated from Scotland a decade earlier, they had done all the travelling they ever intended to do. Nevertheless, many of their traditions had been brought with them, and one of those was the celebration of a very Scottish Christmas. Being Presbyterians, there was little in the way of showiness, but one or two hymns, a shortbread and a haggis could always be counted upon. This year, however, a sense of unease was running through the family, as it was for many of the Scots of Melbourne. Certainly, every Christmas in this new country was somewhat odd, occurring as it did in the midst of a summer that, before leaving the frigid climate of Inverness, they scarcely believed was possible.

  The talk among the Melbourne Scots this Christmas was of the ship that had arrived at the Heads some weeks back, and was still confined to quarantine. A thousand Highlanders were said to be aboard her, and the loss of life had already been terrible. However, no passenger list was as yet available, so no one could have any idea who was on board. McIvor, in his sixties and very much the patriarch of the family, tried not to listen to the rumours, but as time went on, they became virtually unavoidable. The papers—his friends were telling him—were starting to talk about this ‘fever ship’, this ‘plague ship’ and her sorry passengers, stranded and sick, so close yet so far from their destination of Melbourne. ‘The unfortunate new arrivals,’ penned McIvor’s grandson John Andrew McIvor many years later, in an article that appeared in The Argus in August 1934, ‘were as remote as though on a distant island.’ Old McIvor had been lucky, he knew. The ship on which he and his family had made the voyage had been a small one, and illness had hardly gained a foothold, despite the journey having taken much longer than that of the Ticonderoga.

  A doctor, he had heard this very morning on one of his regular leisurely visits to Haymarket in Melbourne to meet friends and read the newspapers, had just returned from the quarantine station itself. Two or three people were still dying every day, he had said. Some said the disease was yellow fever, others that it was the dreaded scarlet fever. Others still said it was yellow jack, a terrifying sickness usually found in the American south, but since the ship had come from that part of the world in the first place and traded there regularly, that’s what some had convinced themselves it was. McIvor listened solemnly but said nothing.

  Then, late one evening on the day before Christmas Eve, while McIvor’s wife—known to all simply as Granny—was making the shortbread with the imprint of the Scots thistle, a knock was heard at the door. Visitor
s at this hour were not usual, and when McIvor answered the door, he nearly fell back in the stoop with shock. Standing before him was a young man, barely older than a boy. He was filthy, thin and exhausted, but in the unmistakable accent of his homeland, uttered the words he had for days repeated over in his head,

  Your cousin, the wife of Malcolm McRae, came in the ship Ticonderoga. I am her son, but my sister Janet and my two younger brothers died of the fever since we were landed at Point Nepean, and I have walked from that place with another young man and we followed the beach till we came to Melbourne.1

  With that, the young man, seventeen-year-old Christopher McRae, collapsed in the doorway.

  McIvor shouted to his wife, and as both of them brought the boy inside, she exclaimed loudly in Gaelic. Here was young Christopher, the son of her dear cousin Helen, having come all that way from Inverness—can you believe it?—and on that terrible ship everyone was talking about. They sat him down and he devoured the fresh scones that had been prepared, as well as the tea.

  * * * *

  A few weeks earlier, Christopher McRae had watched his father approach Captain Boyle on the deck of the Ticonderoga to seek permission to go ashore and bury his sister, ten-year-old Janet. The kind man had assented and Christopher helped to bring his sister’s body up from where she lay in the female hospital. Then, in a small rowboat, they had been taken to the shore of the little beach where, guided by one of the seamen, they had been shown the freshly marked-up burial ground and prepared the little girl’s grave. Upon returning to the ship, it transpired that his baby brother, Malcolm, his mother’s joy, had died too. Then, a short time later, it was the turn of another brother, Farquhar, just six. As he told the story to his ageing cousins, Granny McRae let out a terrible cry, and an ancient Gaelic lamentation filled the room. She clutched her husband’s hand; he could only shake his head and stare at the floor in silence.