Although largely poor, the Ticonderoga’s 800 or so Scots and English emigrant passengers had been selected by the Board for their general intelligence, hardiness and willingness to adapt to the travails and privations of a long voyage at sea. Embarking on their one-way journey in a spirit of gratitude and adventure, they endured conditions that would be completely and utterly abominable to any traveller today. Nevertheless, they accepted the horrendous cramping of their quarters, the seasickness, the stifling heat and drenching downpours of the tropics, the monotonous and largely inedible food, the storms, the leaking and the general terror of the voyage with good grace and few or no complaints. Even in their most challenging moments, most remained conscious of the fortune that had smiled on them in being handed this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape destitution of their homeland and begin a new and more prosperous life on the other side of the world.
In the first month of the Ticonderoga’s journey, deaths had indeed occurred—largely among infants—but this was an accepted part of the risks they had undertaken. The strange and challenging routines of ship life were largely adhered to, allotted tasks were performed with diligence, and consideration and respect for the needs of their fellow passengers were generally observed.
No one, however, could possibly have been expected to withstand the terrible confluence of circumstances that overtook the great clipper as the month of October arrived. It was at this stage—over the last third of her journey—that the routines of ship life would begin to break down, that order and morale would collapse and that, despite the best and most strenuous efforts of Captain Boyle and his two steadfast doctors, Sanger and Veitch, as well as the stewards, death and chaos would stalk the decks of the Ticonderoga. Now she would begin to earn the terrible epithet she would be ascribed when, disease-ridden and desperate, she finally limped to her destination: ‘Hell Ship’.
Captain Boyle faced a dilemma. The Ticonderoga was living up to her promise as a fast and well-built vessel, and for a while was even keeping pace with the Marco Polo’s record-breaking run to Melbourne of just 68 days. What, however, would be the cost in taking full advantage of these southerly gales? As more of his passengers and crew became sick, Dr Sanger reported that the terrible tossing of the ship in the rough weather was making the situation far worse, not only for the patients themselves but also for his and Dr Veitch’s ability to care for them.
The two men consulted at length about striking a balance between delivering their increasingly sickening passengers to Melbourne as soon as possible and not causing even more deaths in the process. Because now death was everywhere.
The married quarters—first on the lower deck, then the upper—were the hardest hit. Freezing families huddling together became breeding grounds for colonies of lice, which moved from one warm body to another. Always the same pattern emerged, presenting particularly quickly with the children and infants: the pink rash that grew to blister almost the entire body, the terrible fever, the skin of loved ones almost unbearable to touch. With adults, a ranting delirium set in; with children, it was a coma then death.
In these terrible days of October, the Ticonderoga’s exhausted doctors were given barely a moment’s rest. As Christopher McRae recalled in a letter to The Argus in January 1917, ‘I remember the Captain accompanying the Doctor, going through and seeing that things were in proper order, that is, as far as it was possible, under the circumstances.’ Cries for help rang throughout the ship, and Drs Sanger and Veitch answered all those they could, fighting the pitching of the vessel to make their way across the increasingly chaotic mess of the decks to another bunk, and another red and heaving patient staring with fixed, glassy eyes. Veitch carried the heavy medical chest, offered a sip of brandy or sweet wine to the deathly white lips of the patient, regardless of their age, while Sanger, in the half light and cloying atmosphere, set up his bottles and made up a tincture. Wet cloths were applied to cool the burning brow. Sometimes it seemed to work, with the patient’s overheated brain gaining some respite, even occasionally recovering. More often than not, though, it was all for nothing.
The Campbell family, listed as Presbyterians from Argyllshire, were all but wiped out in a month. John, 44, and his tiny daughter, two-year-old Jane, died within hours of each other on 5 October. Allan, an otherwise healthy lad of eighteen, would join his father and sister on 18 October, to be followed by another sibling, Peggy, a short time later.
The ship’s hospitals—both male and female—were soon overflowing into the narrow and inadequate corridors. Sanger and Veitch had to virtually force their way through to reach bodies prone on the floor, or in makeshift cots, to administer at least some semblance of treatment. Both knew that their medical supplies were running dangerously low. Soon, with the postponement of funerals due to the rough weather, the hospitals became morgues, filled to capacity, making them resemble an overflowing charnel house. The sick were ordered to stay in their bunks and wait to be treated there, only to be moved to the hospital once a patient had died. Those occupying neighbouring bunks watched with horror as the terrible symptoms took the patient closer and closer to death, and wondered when their turn would come.[1]
The pace of sea burials increased—now a far cry from the early dignified ceremonies presided over by the captain. They were now hasty affairs, conducted quickly between breaks in the weather, watched over by almost no one. Now it was one of the ship’s mates or even the redoubtable schoolmaster and impromptu minister of religion, Charles McKay, who was called upon to repeat the same few desultory words as yet another deadweight was tipped over the side, making a brief white splash into the slate-grey water as shocked and sobbing family looked on. The Ticonderoga’s sail-makers, in whose canvas the bodies were sewn, had permanent work as the ship’s undertakers. There was a pervasive and morbid fear of who would be next, with no one daring to contemplate how much worse the epidemic could become. Then another squall would roll in, and everyone but the crew would be ordered below.
A macabre backlog started to evolve, with more and more victims needing to be disposed of simultaneously. Years later, in January 1909, in one of just a handful of first-hand accounts given in a letter to The Argus, James Dundas recalled travelling as a nine-year-old with his family of five from Aberdeen:
I saw, more than once, ten buried in one day. They were tied up in bedding and mattresses, all together, and thrown overboard, to float away, as there was nothing to weight the corpses with. If we had not got to land when we did, I do not think there would have been many left to tell the tale.
On 11 October, Dundas watched his two-year-old sister, Elizabeth, burn up in a fever and expire in a matter of hours. The sounds of the sobbing of his father Lewis, 34, and mother Isabella, 36, would haunt him the rest of his life.
A graph prepared in 2002 by a diligent amateur historian of the Ticonderoga’s grisly journey plots the frequency of deaths over the course of her 90-day voyage.[2] Over the first few weeks of August and into September, the curve is mainly flat, with one or two rises and falls representing the ship’s handful of early fatalities. Then, as the 60th day of the voyage is reached, around the first day of October, the graph begins to rise. The curve is gentle at first, but it increases dramatically as the month proceeds, attesting that almost half of the Ticonderoga’s approximately 104 deaths at sea occurred within the last two weeks of October.
2
Victorian Public Records Office, 2002, ‘Register of Births and Deaths of Emigrants at Sea 1847-53’, CO 386/170, Folios 85–90