Sitting in the wooden cottage he had had dismantled in England and brought out in pieces to be re-erected on his estate in Melbourne, which—in a touch of nostalgia for his French heritage—he had named Jolimont, news of the Ticonderoga hit Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe like a lightning bolt. Immediately, he knew himself to be facing the most serious crisis in his role of running this new colony. Not only could such a disaster have serious ramifications for the flow of able-bodied people willing to come to Victoria, but if the disease itself was allowed to gain a foothold in Melbourne itself… it was a picture that did not bear thinking about.
The Empire, he knew, would soon be on its way to Point Nepean along with Hunt and Ferguson, but with nearly 700 desperately ill people stranded on a beach, whatever relief she could bring would, he knew, not last long. He urgently inquired about what other provisions were available to be sent to the Ticonderoga. He then learned that, by remarkable fortune, the old Lysander had once more become available, on account of the initial diagnosis of smallpox among the men of the 40th Regiment of Foot now being declared a false alarm. Advanced syphilis, it transpired, was the disease in question. While undoubtedly ghastly for the sufferer involved, this was nonetheless a far cry from smallpox. The relieved men of the 40th had been allowed to disembark the Lysander, and the ship was given pratique—permission to enter port—a day or so later. Even better, 50 new beds had just been installed in her holds, and her stores of fresh water and other provisions had yet to be returned to the warehouses. She would therefore immediately be dispatched to Point Nepean, where she would distribute her goods, offer what help she could and remain as a hospital ship until the quarantine station could erect more permanent facilities. This would have been welcome news indeed for the people on board the Ticonderoga, as down at the little cove, help could not come fast enough.
Unlike just about everybody else on board the Ticonderoga, Dr Sanger was showing some signs of recovery. Having been acting as his plenipotentiary these past few days, Dr Veitch conveyed his superior’s instructions when he was well enough to actually issue them, doing his best to reassure the passengers that a period of quarantine was a blessing in disguise—it was not only essential to stop the spread of the disease, but the enforced rest it entailed, not to mention the fresh food and medicine that would soon arrive, would provide the greatest incentive to a cure that could be asked for. In truth though, Veitch had shared his passengers’ shock at realising that they were headed not for port, but rather for a lonely beach, and for an indefinite period of time.
The pilot, Henry Draper, had not said much beyond delivering them to the sanitary station, but when Boyle searched the shoreline for evidence of such a station, all he could see in front of him was sand and scrub. Draper may at this point have quietly qualified his earlier remark with the words ‘future sanitary station’. He assured Boyle that help would be arriving, and that they must wait here until it did.
Boyle informed Veitch of the situation, adding that as far as anchorages went, this secure and sheltered little cove was not too bad. Wherever they found themselves, however, both agreed that the passengers—starting with the very sick—must be evacuated off the ship as soon as possible. Without waiting for instructions, Boyle directed those able-bodied of his crew to go ashore and begin to construct whatever shelter they could from the ship’s spare spars and sailcloth, which were hauled out from deep in her holds. In the bright sunshine, the working parties rowed ashore and toiled in front of the lime-burners’ cottages and further back among the dunes, using the hardy ti-tree branches as supports for makeshift tents.
Patrick Sullivan, William Cannon and a small group of local lime-burners and fishermen were more than alarmed to see a group of seamen storming ashore towards their homes like a small invading army. Confronting them, they demanded to know what exactly was going on. The crew of the Ticonderoga had no time for niceties, however, and relating what they had been through these last weeks—for the first time to outsiders—while they worked on the shelters, the little crowd, as well as those family members whose curiosity had overcome their fear to emerge from their dwellings, gathered around their uninvited guests in deepening silence while the story of the ship of death unfolded.
As they listened, Sullivan and Cannon, who had watched the vessel’s ominous approach from the other side of the bay the day before, realised that their worst fears were unfolding. None of it came as a complete surprise. It had now been months since the small surveying party led by the important doctor from Melbourne, Thomas Hunt, first arrived to inspect their beach and its environs. From that moment, the brothers-in-law realised that the clock was ticking on the day the government would take it back from them. For Sullivan, whose parents had already suffered exile back in Ireland when people of power decided they would leave their land, it seemed that history was repeating itself.
With some rudimentary shelters established, Veitch made an assessment of the little hospital ward taking shape on the beach and was pleased by what he saw. Delivering his patients to shore, however, would be a far more difficult matter. Except for the very worst cases, though, the risk must be taken to remove them from the ship, where he knew only too well there was no hope for them whatever. Again, the crew of the Ticonderoga would carry out the task, being instructed to extract people as delicately as possible from their berths or from the ship’s hospital and carry them, literally on their backs, to the deck then down the long gangway to the waterline, where rowboats would take them to shore. Some of the sick could walk, but not many.
Reporting back to Sanger, Veitch was told to delay not a moment further. It was a long, miserable and enervating process for all concerned, but by the end of the first day at the cove, 40 of the Ticonderoga’s most feverish and delirious passengers had been taken off and laid down on dry land for the first time in three months. Some, however, were simply too sick to move and were compelled to remain on the ship. For those who came ashore, it was all they could do to crawl into the shady nooks and shelters that had been provided for them by the sailors. Passenger James Dundas recalled years later that ‘there was very little canvas for tents, so they had to make bush mia-mias for us to camp in them… like black fellows’.[1] Here, at the very least, they could look up at a clear sky, released finally from the dreadful smell, the deathly, suffocating atmosphere and incessant rocking of the ship.
The ship’s doctors, by contrast, could indulge in no such relief, faced as they were with an entirely new set of problems. Veitch estimated to Sanger that upwards of 250 people still required treatment and that not enough of anything was available to help them. To start with, there was hardly any bedding left on board that was not putrid, that of the dead having been thrown overboard after them, and much of the spare sailcloth had gone as well. And how were they expected to feed this burgeoning beach hospital? Time would be needed to remove stoves and other facilities from the ship and relocate them on to land. Nor were there any medical comforts remaining, with both Veitch and Sanger having now exhausted their own stocks as well as the ship’s. Then there was the question of who was to bury the dead, mounting up perilously on the deck in the warm spring sun. For it was now, upon arriving at her destination, that the Ticonderoga’s death toll reached its terrible zenith.