‘Ay, Cap’n,’ came the response, and the magnificent clanking of the great anchor chain, finally released, reverberated throughout the ship. Finding a sound bottom, the Ticonderoga swayed for a moment, then rode at her anchor, still.
Henry Draper had been part of the Port Phillip pilot service for less than a year, but his time thus far had been anything but uneventful. As first mate of the barque Nelson, he had arrived in Melbourne from England in 1851, disembarked a load of privately paying passengers, and was preparing to load up for the return journey with a cargo of 2600 bales of wool and 9000 ounces of gold, which arrived under escort by steamer. After loading, his skipper, a Captain Wright, unwisely chose this moment to go ashore for a last carouse before their departure the next morning. Riding at anchor at Hobson’s Bay, Draper was awakened in his cabin during the night by sounds of scuffling on the deck. Emerging, he soon found himself surrounded by an armed gang who were preparing to liberate the ship’s store of gold. In the drama, a pistol was discharged at one of the mates, the ball missing him but grazing Draper’s hip. The bandits then locked the entire crew up and made off with the gold.
The ship’s cook, who had escaped attention by hiding under his bunk, released Draper, who then swiftly raised the alarm upon rowing ashore. The bandits were soon rounded up. Draper would have liked nothing better than to have simply left as planned the next morning, but as a witness to a robbery, he was now compelled to cool his heels for several weeks awaiting a trial. He was in the meantime feted as a minor hero, awarded a total of £170 for his troubles and visited by Port Phillip’s Chief Harbour Master, Charles Ferguson, who promptly offered him a job. ‘I received the request with astonishment,’ Draper later wrote, ‘as I considered my position far above that of a pilot’s.’ His pride quickly recovered, however, when told that his salary would be in the range of £100 per year.[1]
A year into the job, Draper was being kept busy at the pilot station at Shortland’s Bluff. The discovery of gold had seen a huge increase in shipping entering the bay, but his small group of pilots still had just two oared whale boats and a cutter at their disposal to guide as many as ten vessels a day both through the Rip and into the shipping lanes that cut their way through the shallow sandy banks up to the busy port of Melbourne. Early November was a particularly active time, and the records show that on the day the Ticonderoga came in, another nine ships also entered, many needing assistance. Few days of his career, however, would be as dramatic as this bright November morning when he answered the request of a large, dark emigrant ship lying at anchor off Shortland’s Bluff. She was, he could see, an unusually fine clipper, but as he approached her in his pilot’s cutter, he sensed all was not well. He could see people on deck, but they were few in number and appeared unsettled. Then, as he came within earshot, a series of desperate shouts could be heard, ‘Don’t come on board, pilot,’ he was told. ‘We are dying of fever!’
Standing off, Draper assessed the situation. The large ship could not remain where it was, but to come aboard to steer her into the lanes was apparently a risk. After examining her formidable sides, he directed his helmsman to come close. Making a perilous grab for one of the mizzen chains and shields on the side of the hull, built to take the great strain of the mizzen mast shrouds and stays, he hauled himself up. Avoiding setting foot on the deck, he continued scrambling up into the network of ropes, which took him eventually into the rigging from where he then looked down upon a scene of despair.
Under a tarpaulin lay a group of bodies. Passengers stood or lay around, their faces pale, red-eyed and exhausted beyond caring. The ship herself was unkempt, the deck a mess, the rigging around him untidy, the yards badly reefed, as if done by amateurs. Then there was the smelclass="underline" a terrible, decomposing stench that rose up sickeningly into his nostrils. What on earth, he asked, had these people been through?
Captain Boyle appeared below him, explaining the terrible sickness that had broken out on the voyage, which had already taken a hundred of his passengers. More were bound to die, he said, and even more remained ill. The senior ship’s surgeon, too, was incapacitated, his medicines exhausted. Supplies of fresh food and water, as well as proper care, were desperately needed. ‘I was informed they had 1000 passengers and that they had lost 102 on the passage,’ Draper later recalled in a brief memoir, although his memory may have exaggerated the numbers slightly.[2]
In an instant, Draper knew that the Ticonderoga would not, for the foreseeable future, be going anywhere near Melbourne, and that it was of the utmost urgency that news of her arrival be sent to those in authority as quickly as possible. He explained to Captain Boyle that, given the grave situation on board, he could not permit her to proceed to Melbourne and that, regretfully, she would have to remain here until further instructions were received. On hearing this, a further wave of despair washed over the small group of passengers. Not wanting to stay on board a moment longer than necessary, Draper climbed back down towards his waiting cutter. ‘And Captain, Sir,’ he added solemnly as he departed, ‘I would advise you to hoist the Yellow Jack.’ Boyle said he understood, and thanked the pilot.
Returning to his cutter, Draper proceeded as quickly as possible back to the shore station to seek the advice of his colleagues. The Ticonderoga, meanwhile, would continue to lie at anchor, the situation on board deteriorating by the hour. Boyle called over his first mate and a brief but solemn conversation took place. The mate nodded, and proceeded immediately below to a storage locker containing the ship’s signal flags, rolled up neatly in their respective wooden pigeon holes. At the very bottom, the mate drew out the one flag no ship’s master ever wanted to give the order to fly, the dreaded ‘Yellow Jack’, a simple square of yellow signalling catastrophe. Returning to the deck, he instructed one of the crew to climb the mainmast and hoist it at its highest point. Now every passing vessel, as well as everyone on shore, would see that the mighty clipper Ticonderoga was a ship of disease, a plague ship, which should under no circumstances be approached.
With Sanger in the grip of the fever, it was now Dr Veitch, the young physician on his first sea voyage and the only fit surgeon on board, who would take on the mantle of his superior. For the time being, it was he Captain Boyle would consult on the daily updates of the passengers’ state. Sadly, however, Veitch could offer his captain no good news.
Since the ship’s arrival the previous day, death had continued to ravage the Ticonderoga. Helen Bowie, the only child of a young couple from Edinburgh, George and Helen Bowie, died on the first day of the month, making their arrival into the bay a melancholy affair. Two-year-old Jemima Grant, whose family had travelled from Inverness, at the other end of Scotland, was next. Nor was the new month’s tally confined to the very young.
With the death of her husband, John, twenty, Jane Sievwright was suddenly a widow. Janet Stevenson, 35 from Stirling, left her husband, Alexander, and their two daughters, Christina, seven, and Jane, four, to face their new world without a wife or a mother. Three or four deaths were now taking place each day, and with burials at sea forbidden inside the bay, the bodies could only be laid out on the deck under canvas. However, even more horrifying to Henry Draper than this macabre tableaux he had spied from his perch in the rigging was the apparent disinterest shown by the other passengers. It seemed to Draper that they were people pushed to a point beyond caring.
1
H. Draper, ‘The Narrative of Captain H.J.M. Draper, One Time Port Phillip Sea Pilot’, reproduced in