Meanwhile, some of the sailors were busy preparing their costumes for the time-honoured ceremony of the line crossing. In reality, these amounted to little more than bits of whatever scraps and flotsam that could be found around the ship, but the stage was soon set to welcome the King of the Deep, Neptune, his ‘wife’, Amphitrite, and several of their cohort, who would be ushered aboard and, with great flourish, interrogate the captain. ‘Where are you from?’ the sea god would ask rhetorically. ‘How long have you been out? For where are you bound?’ The captain would also be asked how many ‘children’ he had on board in need of a ‘baptising’ to mark the occasion of their first crossing. The assembled passengers, enjoying this moment of levity, ooh-ed and aah-ed at all the appropriate moments, as if watching a music hall show.
Then there was an announcement from the top of the wheelhouse through a loud hailer that those who had never before crossed the line would now be sought out and should prepare themselves for the ‘ceremony’. In the case of the Ticonderoga, this was almost everyone, so the practicalities of performing the often revolting ‘initiation’ of being shaved, covered in tar or other filth or, for the ladies, simply soaked to the skin were quietly abandoned in favour of a good deal of noise, cheering and parading around the upper deck as the equatorial sun blazed high overhead. For good theatrical measure, a few first-timers were rounded up and locked into the forecastle for a while.
Dr Sanger’s urgent words, delivered to Captain Boyle as he too was preparing to enjoy the colour of King Neptune’s antics, were met with a dread. ‘Typhus?’ he could only repeat. ‘Not scarlatina?’ But Dr Sanger was certain. The scourge of typhus had come to the Ticonderoga.
A day or so later, his grim prognosis was borne out when 28-year-old Jane Gardiner joined her daughter, Eliza, the Ticonderoga’s second victim, who had perished three weeks earlier at just four years of age. She left behind her husband, Alexander, and their sole remaining child, Robert, five. One of the Ticonderoga’s English families, the Gardiners had left their home in Northumberland full of hope for a better life. Now, barely a month later, only a shattered widower and his son remained.
There had already been a regular procession of death on board the Ticonderoga. Besides Anna Maria Hando, the infant son of Alexander and Ellen Mercer, Andrew, had been buried at sea, as had one-year-old Mary Ann Ross, Christina Jenkins, also one year of age, and tiny Margaret McJames. In at least two cases, the children’s grief-stricken mothers had thrown themselves overboard as well. As ghastly a toll as this appears to a modern reader, it was still not regarded as very much out of the ordinary in this age of prevalent disease and short life expectancies.
The three other double-decked ships hired by the Board in 1852 to make the run to Australia had also experienced a high loss of life. In the case of the large 1495-ton Borneuf, which was in fact still on its way to Geelong as the Ticonderoga set sail, 88 of the 754 passengers had not survived the voyage. All but four of these were children—mainly Scots—and all under the age of seven, with the average age being much younger. Most of these deaths were attributed to the typical wasting diseases of the poorer classes of the day: marasmus, scarlatina, measles, diarrhoea and chicken pox. Despite this, the Borneuf’s journey was regarded as a success.
The death of an adult, however, was another matter, and the passing of Jane Gardiner—an ostensibly healthy woman in her twenties—represented a grim turning point in the Ticonderoga’s voyage. Drs Sanger and Veitch had watched, helpless, as over a few days the terrible symptoms had worked their damage on the young mother: first the rash that spread from her chest then across her entire body, sparing only the palms of her hands; the temperature that raged through her constitution at up to 105ºF; the nausea, exhaustion and vomiting; the terrible aches in limbs and joints. Then, almost unbearable for her husband and child to watch, the delirium. As the fever set in, the woman’s mind became unhinged in a verbal rampage that terrified those around her in the lower deck’s claustrophobic quarters, then in the ship’s hospital. After this, she fell into a coma. Attempts to both cool her down or administer any kind of medicine were fruitless. The awful smell then led the Ticonderoga’s doctors to realise exactly what they were dealing with. It could only be typhus, and they were powerless to stop it.
For centuries typhus had been one of the great scourges of Europe. Entire armies had been laid waste by the disease. During the wars against the Moors in 1489, it is estimated to have wiped out 17,000 Spanish soldiers during the siege of Granada. In Napoleonic times, it accounted for more French troops than did the Russians during the retreat from Moscow in 1812. In the 1830s, 100,000 Irish died in a series of severe outbreaks and during the Crimean War of the 1850s, war wounds accounted for no more than one in six soldiers’ deaths, the rest being attributed to a variety of diseases, principally typhus.
Even as late as World War I, 3 million deaths were attributed to typhus, and despite the advances of medicine at the dawn of the twentieth century, no one had any idea how it was transmitted. It was, however, observed to act upon large amounts of people living in close, often unsanitary conditions, and hence became known by many descriptive names, including prison fever and camp fever.[1] It could tear through the populations of army barracks, slums, prisons, hospitals and particularly overcrowded ships such as the Ticonderoga.
The closest anyone could come to explaining the spread of typhus was via the generally accepted ‘miasmatic theory’, by which greatly feared diseases such as cholera, the Black Death and even chlamydia were spread not by infection and contact with germs, but rather by the foul air that seemed to accompany the rapidly expanding cities of the Industrial Revolution, and that appeared to emanate in rotting organic matter. Until the advent of powerful microscopes in the late nineteenth century, the contagion vs. miasma theories competed with one another for years, with even such luminaries as Florence Nightingale believing fervently that diseases she herself witnessed wreaking death and destruction on troops in the Crimea had nothing to do with proximity to others carrying the infection, but instead were carried on the breeze. It was an enduring theory, and it accounted for the notion that fresh, clean air was the key to health in crowded situations like hospitals and ships. In such a light, the Ticonderoga’s canvas air vents were seen as a most forward-thinking innovation. Towards the 1880s, the miasma theory would gradually be overtaken by weight of evidence of germs and bacteria, but the exact causes of some diseases, including typhus, remained a mystery.