On Sunday, 6 November, Ferguson returned from Point Nepean to Melbourne on board the Empire, feeling that he had aged an entire year in the few days he had spent there. He reported to an anxious Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe that the final 150 sick and 250 fit passengers had all been removed from the Ticonderoga, with some being accommodated in the requisitioned lime-burners’ cottages, while others were living in primitive and makeshift conditions on the shore. The worst cases had been transferred to the hospital ship Lysander. The epidemic was far from over, though. People were still dying daily, although the numbers were gradually starting to decline. Dr Taylor was in charge, but Ferguson privately doubted whether he was up to the task. The Ticonderoga’s principal surgeon, Joseph Sanger, was recovering and now able to resume some work, and was once again being assisted on board the Lysander by Dr Veitch, although Ferguson described both of them as being ‘in an extremely debilitated state’.[12] He meanwhile approached another physician, a William Farman, surgeon superintendent of the Mobile, to quietly take over some of Taylor’s duties. Taylor, he decided, would now oversee the camp on shore, while Farman would undertake the cleaning of the Ticonderoga and work with Sanger and Veitch on board the Lysander. Supplies would still be needed—particularly tent material, blankets, bedding and mattresses, as well as the usual demands for wine and porter.
La Trobe and Ferguson realised, however, that the tragedy unfolding at Point Nepean could not be kept quiet for long, and both men readied themselves for the storm both had seen coming long before the arrival of the Ticonderoga.
25
Quarantine and outrage
To the people on the streets of Melbourne who gathered in huddles on that November Friday morning to hear the grizzly details of the Ticonderoga laid out by The Argus’s reporter under the memorable headline, ‘Terrible State of Affairs on board an Emigrant Ship at the Port Phillip Heads’, the notion of an overcrowded vessel struck down with disease was nothing new. During the latter half of 1852, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s four big double-deck ships had each arrived with varying amounts of sickness on board. The first of these had been the very large German ship, Borneuf, which had arrived in March with 83 of her passengers having died at sea, almost all of those being children and infants. This, though regrettable, was not seen as the catastrophe such an event would be deemed in later times. Children died frequently in the nineteenth century, particularly at sea, and in the case of the Borneuf, much of the blame was laid at the feet of the parents. In a report into the voyage, the Board concluded that ‘the high mortality rate was largely attributed to the insurmountable objection of Irish and Scots parents to seeking medical attention for their children’.[1] The drinking water also failed on board this ship, with the inadequate storage facilities turning it putrid, green and undrinkable. Even so, only a handful of adults perished on board the Borneuf—a figure quite within acceptable limits—and the voyage was regarded as a success.
The Wanata was next. She was a ship of just over 1100 tons, arriving soon after the Borneuf. A total of 39 of her passengers had not survived the journey, but once again all but ten of those were children. Scarlatina, measles and ‘fever’ were cited as the chief complaints, and the Wanata was sent to the Red Bluff sanitary station for a period of quarantine.
Then, on 20 September, it was the turn of the mighty Marco Polo to make its grand arrival into Port Phillip, under the command of a man who was already a global celebrity of the high seas, ‘Bully’ Forbes. At first the newspapers were so enraptured by the time he had set—a record 68 days from Liverpool to Melbourne—that their triumphant headlines ignored the fact that 51 children and two adults had died under his care.
Slowly, however, people both in England and in the Australian colonies began to question the wisdom of crowding so many people into these Goliaths of the sea, simply to alleviate the logistical problems in which the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission had found itself. Letters to the Editor of prominent newspapers in both England and Australia began to reflect public concern, one of the earliest being from an anonymous writer in The Argus on 24 September:
Attention should be urgently directed to the injudicious and cruel system of sending out overcrowded vessels which seems to be gaining ground just now. Within the month three striking cases have occurred. The Borneuf, Wanata and Marco Polo have arrived from Liverpool with about 800 passengers each. The consequences of such overcrowding are sure to be fatal, and accordingly, the deaths were 83, 39 and 53 respectively during the voyages. The vessels were of the largest size, it is true, but it is perfectly obvious that no vessel, whatever its size, can safely carry such large numbers of passengers on a three months’ voyage.
In England, too, many who had a chance to inspect these large ships before they set sail were likewise shocked at what they encountered, as this long but pointed piece to a London daily on 27 September 1852 indicates:
The overcrowding of emigrant ships
When a body of men take it in hand to do a thing, and do not do it so much from a conviction of its being the best thing in the world they can do, but rather as a compulsory matter, they do not do it well. The juste milieu is one of those rocks ahead against which they run doggedly, and so break their pates. Now they overdo the business, as if, in a splenetic fit, they said—‘There! Take your ship; cram her full, and be off.’ Mr Osborne, the indefatigable and the zealous, gives us instance of this. He went the other day on board an emigrant ship which was just setting sail, and found that, though she was a noble vessel of her class, and that two decks (blessed are the humble in the lower deck, certainly)—were set apart for the passengers, the berths being of the proper authorized dimensions, and, as excellent arrangements were made for ventilation and other indispensable necessities as possible—still this ship (considerably under a thousand tons burthen) carried not less than eight hundred emigrants and a crew of sixty men! In addition to this, there was the stately complement of two surgeons to do battle with seasickness, fever, human miasmatic exudations. This was not a trip to Gravesend or the Naze where the heroic endurance of a few half hours of agony would be compensated for by a participation ‘in old English sports’, a polka up on the ‘gothic hill’, and a promenade ‘a la Musard’ between avenues of shrubs and ham sandwiches. It was a certain life and death affair that was to last for months—from four to eight perhaps, more or less; and here are a greater part of a thousand souls under a care of two surgeons, and a medicine chest upon the same scale as we may infer sent by the Government on such a voyage. If this be not carelessness for human life, we do not know what else to call it. We do not always know in what condition the decimated scarecrows land, but those who have voyaged across the tropics, in a crowded ship have some appreciation of the unutterable horrors men, women and children go through, or rather don’t go through. Fever and dysentery play a leading part in the ghastly drama. Want of water in calm latitudes, or under the torrid zone may be ‘better imagined than described’. Has anyone ever imagined the awful Golgotha which a plague ship becomes! If our kinsmen and our friends leave us forever to seek in a foreign land what they have failed to obtain in this, they ought not to be sent forth like felons in the hold of a convict ship or packed like the cargo of a slave vessel.