Besides preventative measures and administering treatments for everyday conditions such as indigestion, constipation, sore throats and diarrhoea, a surgeon’s practical skills were paramount. They would set broken limbs and bandage sprained ankles, sew up wounds and perform minor surgery for hernias and other ‘internal obstructions’.[6] They would also become obstetricians for the many babies they would inevitably be called upon to deliver, treat and even bury at sea on a long sea voyage such as the Ticonderoga’s.
As well as a daily visit to as many parts of the ship as they could manage—much like a current-day hospital doctor making the rounds—they held clinics that were enthusiastically attended by the many passengers for whom medical attention had been a previously unaffordable luxury. Once a day, too, they would report to and confer with the captain, keeping each other abreast of all that was happening on board—particularly the mood and state of the passengers—always presenting a united front of authority. Of particular importance was their task of keeping the vessel clean.
At a time in which little could be done to cure everyday diseases, the surgeon’s primary focus was prevention. Routines of health and cleanliness, it was believed, could remove the conditions where such ailments could thrive, particularly with regard to those most vulnerable on a sea voyage: children. Although the feeding of infants and newborns was the responsibility of their mothers—sometimes with tragic consequences should they be unable to do so—it was up to the surgeons to ensure that older children received adequate rations, that their berths were adequately lit and ventilated, that they could exercise, and that their clothes and bodies were washed regularly. This, of course, often came up against the physical limitations of the ship itself, but in any case involved instigating unfamiliar hygiene routines for both children and parents, and directing the sanitation of the vessel itself.
Dr Joseph Charles Sanger was one of the most respected doctors at sea of his time, and a favourite of the Board, which had several times commissioned him to accompany migrants on the long journey to Australia: ‘Dr Sanger has already given great satisfaction in four previous voyages in our service’,[7] they stated in correspondence regarding his appointment to the Ticonderoga. With fifteen years at sea already under his belt, the most dramatic moment of Dr Sanger’s career thus far had occurred just the previous summer, in July 1851, when his ship, the 919-ton emigrant vessel Marion, struck a reef on the southern tip of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, barely hours from its destination of Adelaide following a gruelling 128 days at sea. Keeping the 350 terrified passengers on board as calm as he could, Sanger stayed on the deck as the ship’s longboats ferried the passengers back and forth to the shore a few miles away. Miraculously, not a soul was lost, and Sanger was commended for his cool-headedness. He would eventually complete twenty voyages in total, almost all for the Board, and was still sailing in 1866.
At twenty years his junior, his assistant, James William Henry Veitch, would be undertaking his first ever sea appointment with the Board—or, for that matter, anyone else. He was a young man whose star was on the rise. A descendant of two generations of naval doctors and a graduate of the London School of Apothecaries, he had already come to the attention of physicians of influence by demonstrating both high standards and calmness during a recent cholera outbreak in Portsea, near the naval base of Portsmouth. About to turn 27, with a coveted contract with the Board, he had good reason to anticipate a long career in the footsteps of not only Sanger, but his own father and grandfather—both respected and well-connected naval surgeons. However, it was not to be.
James Veitch’s voyage to Melbourne—like that of the Ticonderoga herself—would be his first as well as his last. There is no evidence to suggest that Veitch had any intention to settle in Australia when he departed Birkenhead in August 1852, yet within weeks of his arrival he had forfeited his passage money home, travelled far from the sea to inland Victoria, and for the remainder of his long life did not set foot on board a ship again. What his father made of his son’s decision can only be guessed at. James Veitch, however, no doubt had his reasons.
James William’s father, also named James, was born in 1783 in Selkirk, Scotland, and had retired by the time his son left for Australia on his first appointment with the Board, a position he unquestionably helped his son to secure. As a young assistant, he had served at sea with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars, taking part in various engagements such as the Battle of Cape Ortegal, the final chapter of the Trafalgar Campaign of 1805, then as surgeon on several ships, and finally running naval hospitals in the British territories of the Caribbean, such as at English Harbour in Antigua.
At sea, Veitch worked in the horror of the ships’ surgeries, small rooms painted red from floor to ceiling to hide the blood. And of blood there was a great deal indeed. In naval battles, cannon balls tore off heads and limbs, or sprayed shards of wooden splinters that cut through human flesh as if it were butter. Anaesthetic was a rope clenched between the teeth and, if the screaming patient was lucky, a swig of rum. The primary instrument of surgery was the hacksaw. At the height of a battle, buckets of blood and amputated limbs were emptied over the side, to be returned and filled again. More often than not, what was left of the mangled seaman was buried at sea a short time later, or after the infection had set in.
James Veitch descended from a long line of lowland Scots of Norman extraction, ‘Veitch’ supposedly being a corruption of ‘La Vache’, French for cow, derived from one William La Vache, a minor noble of the thirteenth century whose family proceeded to own cattle for the next few centuries. There is even a Veitch crest featuring a trio of long-horned Highland bulls above the Latin Famam Extendimus Factis, ‘we spread our fame through our deeds’. There is—or rather was—a castle at Dawyck on the Scottish borders which was demolished in 1830 and replaced by a somewhat gaudy house of the early Victorian style.
As his career went on, James observed enough of the horrors of primitive amputations and the horrendous associated loss of life to begin to experiment with replacing the coarse threads traditionally used to stitch wounds and arteries with fine gut sutures. As a result, he achieved both a higher survival rate and lower incidences of infection.[8] His findings were put into a book somewhat gruesomely titled, Observations on the Ligature of the Arteries, Secondary Haemorrhage, and Amputation at the Hipjoint, which was published in 1824 and changed naval surgery forever. He became surgeon to the Royal Naval Hospital at Plymouth, was admitted as a member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, then as Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in 1822, and eventually rose to ‘deputy inspector of hospitals and fleets’ before retiring to a fine house in Ovington Square, Brompton, in the heart of London’s very fashionable West End. His travels with the Royal Navy saw him publish extensively on a wide variety of medical subjects, such as his 1818 ‘Letter on the Non-contagious Nature of the Yellow Fever’, based on his observances of that disease in the West Indies, as well as some more nuanced papers like ‘Remarks on the Necessity of Attention to the Surface of the Body in the Treatment and Prevention of Several Complaints; With a Recommendation of the more General Employment of the Vapour-Bath’, in which he espouses such notions as ‘Temperature, acting on the surface of the body like opium, and wine acting on the stomach, is capable of imparting vigour to the human frame’.[9]