Perhaps the most important decision made about the Ticonderoga’s nearly 800 passengers was their arrangement into the 125 or so ‘messes’ of around six people each, in whose company they would share the experiences and travails of the voyage. An initial division had taken place onshore while still at the depot, but the process was refined during the first few days at sea by the stewards in consultation with the surgeons and the captain. Where possible, the bunks of the respective members of each mess were situated close by one another, as was their allotted ‘desk’, a 5-feet-wide oak table with raised edges to prevent plates and other utensils falling to the floor with the roll of the ship.[8] Space being what it was, several messes would in fact share the one desk, but it was within one’s mess that the passengers tended to mix, ‘as though each mess formed its own little village on board’, according to historian Mary Kruithof.[9]
The object of the messing system was to encourage shipboard harmony; hence people of the same town, village or county were, where possible, placed together. Particular care was also taken to avoid potential flashpoints arising from those eternal sources of discord, religion and politics. The long voyage would provide more than enough idle hours for arguments to fester and ideologies to erupt, and religion—ever a sore point throughout Europe—was particularly inflammatory in the context of Scotland and its recent brutal history with England. With an emigrant’s region and religion both stated on their form, those from opposing faiths, or people who had been observed to clash or squabble at the depot, were berthed as far from each other as possible. However, some may have been closer to their fellow passengers than they thought, travelling alongside distant members of their own large, clan-based families. There were, for example, three families each carrying the names Campbell, Herd, McKay and McPherson, four Camerons and no less than five separate families named McDonald. The names Bruce, Fraser, Morrison and several others were also represented multiple times among the Ticonderoga’s passenger list.
Indeed, genuine bonds and friendships—even romances—did form on the journey, to eventually form part of the emigrants’ new life in Australia. There are at least two recorded cases of marriage between passengers, even though one of those—between a Cameron and a McRae—occurred much later in their lives, as the two were only young children at the time of the journey.
Much of the bonding between passengers inevitably occurred at mealtimes. Twice a day, in an exercise of mutual cooperation, the provisions for each meal were carefully doled out from the ship’s stores by the stewards and the ship’s third mate, who between them decided the daily menu, which in fact varied hardly at all. The ingredients were taken to the desk in a baking dish or lidded pot, where the ‘mess captain’—elected by the members of the mess but rotated somewhat—was responsible for bringing them to the galley to be prepared by the ship’s cooks as well as the passengers themselves. A chit would be received and, when ready, the cooks bawled out the number, and the meal was collected and then doled out to the mess on the tin plates and cups each person had been issued, and for which they were responsible.
The ‘menu’ varied only slightly from day to day and can hardly be described as exciting, or even particularly nutritious in the modern sense, but given the restrictions of the era prior to the advent of refrigeration, it was at least sustaining. Most main meals, taken in sittings from mid-afternoon, consisted of salted pork or beef (which would be all but inedible to a contemporary palate), supplemented by a pudding of suet (animal fat), flour and raisins. Other meat was dried and reconstituted into a sort of stew, as were some other starchy foods such as rice and potatoes.
Sailing to Melbourne from England at exactly the same time as the Ticonderoga in a smaller vessel, the Emily, Frenchman Antoine Fauchery, who would later set up a world-famous photographic studio in Melbourne, remembered the monotony of the shipboard meals somewhat sardonically:
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.
11
British Parliamentary Papers, Papers Relative to Emigration to the Australian Colonies, First Report from the Select Committee on Emigrant Ships with Minutes of Evidence, Explanation of deck plans by Kenneth N. Sutherland R.N., House of Commons, Sessional Papers 1852/53 vol. LXVIII