A desperate Dr Veitch remonstrated with Captain Boyle. Surely, he pleaded, they were not expected to simply sit there as a floating morgue while the fever took even more victims? But Boyle’s hands were tied. For the time being, there was nowhere for them to go, and no one to take them.
Henry Draper had in fact been doing all in his power to help. Soon after returning to his shore station, he reported to his colleagues what he had seen on board the Ticonderoga. None of them had faced a situation like it, and felt further instructions from Melbourne were urgently required as taking a ship in her wretched condition into Hobson’s Bay was out of the question. All agreed that the passengers needed to come ashore, but to where? Port Phillip was a full day’s sailing away. Draper again regarded the eerily still ship, which seemed to have taken on a more menacing appearance. As the small group of men spoke in urgent circles about the ship and her plight, Draper went to the window and with a spyglass surveyed a long low stretch of beach and scrub that stretched away a mile or so from the bay’s eastern head, Point Nepean. ‘There,’ he announced. ‘There is where she will go.’
A short time later, by luck, the familiar sight of the 225-ton Champion, a coastal brig that regularly plied the southern coastal waters between the ports of Fremantle, Adelaide and Melbourne, came into view. Making one of her regular entrances into the bay, she was this day carrying six passengers and a load of general cargo.[3] Her skipper, the well-known Captain Wylie, needed the help of no pilot to slip into the fairways and up the lanes to Melbourne. Upon spotting the small two-masted brig, Draper hailed him with a signal that he should prepare to be approached. A short time later, the pilot cutter came alongside the surprised Captain Wylie.
Indicating the big dark clipper anchored of Shortland’s Bluff behind him, Draper told Wylie what he had seen on board, just as the older man caught sight of the Yellow Jack fluttering from her topmast. One hundred already dead, said Draper to an increasingly shocked Wylie, with many more sick and no medical supplies. The harbour authorities must be informed, he continued, and help must be sent—urgently. Wylie did not need to be told twice. Putting on more sail, he set off and made his way north to Melbourne as quickly as possible.
The next morning, 3 November, Draper again approached the Ticonderoga and, by the same means he had employed the previous day, came aboard. Another night spent out on the water had not improved her situation. After requesting that the captain weigh anchor and put on some sail, Draper directed the helmsman to the other side of the bay, and into the small cove that had come to be known as Abraham’s Bosom, from where the two lime-burners, William Cannon and Patrick Sullivan, watched her stately but eerie approach.
In a decision the Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, would later praise, Henry Draper took it upon himself to direct the Ticonderoga to an area of land that he understood to have only recently been set aside as a future quarantine station. There were as yet, he knew, few resources to be found there: only the two limestone cottages built by the lime-burners themselves, and one or two other small structures, but fresh water wells had been sunk, and a secure anchorage was to be had not far off the beach. From here, the sick could be evacuated and help could be delivered relatively easily. Getting those people off that ghastly ship, he had decided before approaching the Ticonderoga that morning, had to be the first priority. As he later recalled—indeed, with some pride—in his memoir:
I piloted her to the Quarantine Station at Point Nepean, let go the anchor, gave her 60 fathoms of chain, came down the rigging, and slipped back into my boat… by taking the precaution of going into the mizzen-top I could state to the Health Officer that I had not had any communication with the ill-fated people. Getting up into the mizzen-top was considered quite a masterpiece of ingenuity and forethought.[4]
Closer to the shore they may have been, but if the poor passengers on board the Ticonderoga had thought that their ordeal was nearing its end, they were sadly mistaken.
22
Protecting the colony
Despite the ever-increasing confidence of nineteenth-century medicine, despite the delivery of intelligent and highly trained graduates from ancient universities such as Oxford and St Bartholomew’s into British hospitals and surgeries, despite the volumes written about new advances in medical treatment of all kinds, most of the virulent and destructive diseases of the day remained essentially mysterious and completely incurable. With typhus, for example, despite the millions it killed there is no evidence to suggest that anyone, anywhere—prior to its pathogen being finally described by Henrique da Rocha Lima and Stanislaus von Prowazek in the early 1900s—had so much as suggested the possibility of its cause being linked to human body lice.
In the 1850s, therefore, doctors such as Sanger and Veitch, despite their best intentions and tireless concern for their patients, could barely even scratch at the symptoms with the knowledge and medicines at their disposal. Prior to the modern comprehension of infection, a disease having taken hold was simply left to run its terrible course. The only bulwark against its spreading was avoidance, in the form of isolation or quarantine.
With the advent of the gold rush, the colonial backwater of Melbourne, founded only seventeen years previously by John Batman (a syphilitic conman and slaughterer of Tasmanian Aboriginals, described by artist John Glover as ‘a rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known’,[1]) suddenly began to burst its established boundaries, even up to the threshold of its hitherto isolated quarantine station at Little Red Bluff. This had been established by the government in 1840, its hand forced by the arrival of one of the unluckiest vessels ever to set sail, the Glen Huntly. This purpose-built 450-ton barque departed Greenock on her maiden voyage from Scotland under the command of a Captain Buchanan in December 1839, laden with 157 mainly Scottish emigrant passengers bound for Victoria. On her very first night at sea, she collided with a coastal vessel, then in the English Channel as fog set in, she missed a marker and struck a submerged rock, which damaged her timbers even further. A few days later, despite being in the open waters of the North Atlantic, the hapless Buchanan managed to plough into yet another vessel, this time an American packet ship, which tore away the Glen Huntly’s masthead and lower spars. Then, while crossing the equator, typhus broke out, resulting in her arrival into Melbourne with 50 cases of ‘fever’ and ten passengers fewer than had embarked.
When the unfortunate ship limped into Hobson’s Bay with the yellow flag at her topmast, the people of Melbourne, already spooked by a recent outbreak of typhus that devastated Hobart and reports of the disease in Sydney, went into such a panic that the then Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, was later reported by The Age of 1931 as becoming ‘considerably perturbed and anxious to avoid the introduction of what might prove to be a serious menace to the well-being of the small but flourishing community’. He ordered the Glen Huntly to depart forthwith to a small sandstone promontory known as Little Red Bluff, 4 miles south-east of the city. It was a lonely, windy place, isolated in the bush but bordered by a swamp on one side, which had been a former meeting place for the now dispersed Bunurong Aboriginal people.
1
National Australian Museum, 2013,