As Chairman of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, I deem it my duty to state that not one of the above vessels was sent out by private individuals, but all of them were taken up and sent out by the Commissioners of Emigration. Every emigration ship is inspected by the Government officer, and no more passengers are allowed than the act of Parliament authorizes. So that private ships are compelled to take no more passengers than they can carry in health and safety. But her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners have the power of experimentalizing as to how many out of eight hundred souls can be safely landed from one ship.
Our wonder is that they did not go the full length of the experiment, and stow away the whole of the live lumber in casks, with holes bored at the bottom. But happily, amidst this horrible slaughter, the weather was fine and the winds favourable, or few indeed would have reached their destination. In March last year, the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association urged on the Government the fact that no ship, whatever might be her size, could carry more than 600 persons in safety. The Great Britain, the largest ship afloat, took out this number, and lost one. In the very teeth of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, and in their own port, the emigration commissioners put on board 800, though the ships were not of the largest size! Had one of these ships only been thus fearfully visited, a pestilence, silent and uncontrollable, would have accounted for the slaughter. But here four ships sailing at different periods, though all under favourable circumstances on the voyage, similarly visited.
Till an investigation has taken place, let no man in his senses trust himself on board a Government emigrant ship. He may easily calculate his chance of getting to the end of the voyage. Here it is. The Ticonderoga had 800 souls on board at starting, and lost 104, including the doctor [sic]. The chance of being flung to the sharks is, therefore, just one in eight. People have usually been in the habit of considering themselves at least as well off in a Government emigrant ship as in a private one, but this is a delusion. We consider even Mr Rankin’s estimate of 600 persons in a ship as much too high. We should very much like some financial member of the House of Commons, to ask what sum was paid to the owners of this Ticonderoga. We are curious to know the particulars of this Government floating hospital, if only for the information of the colonists who send their money to be thus lamentably spent. If we recollect rightly, the Ticonderoga is not a British-built ship, but an old American liner; the receptacle of many a former cargo of Irish emigrants. We will not be positive on this point, but we do not expect to see the assertion contradicted. If the colonial legislatures, when they get the power of doing as they please with their own money, will aid societies like this, they will expend their money to some purpose, and we have no doubt that they will do so, as soon as the Emigration Commission has ceased to drain their exchequers.
Back at Point Nepean, Dr Taylor, as Ferguson had suspected, was not coping. Although an experienced surgeon superintendent, having only recently in fact completed a relatively trouble-free run from England on the Ottillia, nothing in his experience could have prepared him—or anyone else—for the deluge of woe that awaited him at Point Nepean.
Conditions continued to be primitive in the extreme. Some people were lucky enough to be housed in the requisitioned cottages and tents, but most were confined to the hastily constructed canvas lean-tos that had been put together by the Ticonderoga’s crew and able passengers. Some, remembered a Mrs Cain, daughter of the first permanent resident of Portsea, were confined to bark shelters, living like Aboriginal people, while their attendants and family ‘waved branches over them to keep off the flies’.[5] Donald McDonald, in a description for a newspaper written decades later, recalls that at night his mother would have to shake the frost from the blankets covering their small beach lean-to made from timbers and ti-tree branches.
With a huge workload, little help and not much he could practically do to help his patients in any case, Dr Taylor began to feel the stress of his position acutely. A few days into the posting, his wife and his two eldest sons arrived, his wife to assist him on board the Lysander, making up tinctures and prescriptions, and his sons to help with the distribution of the stores. It would all end badly for Dr Taylor. A year later, he recounted his take on the whole sorry experience at Point Nepean in a long and somewhat wounded letter to Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, in which he recounts a litany of injustices, particularly at the hands of Thomas Hunt, the man who had given him the job in the first place, but with whom he soon seriously fell out. Judging by the tone of his account, however, Taylor seems to have clashed with everybody—particularly the two men who were ostensibly there to assist him, Drs Sanger and Veitch:
The first surgeon of the ship, complained Taylor, was himself all of fever and altogether unable to render any assistance, while the junior surgeon, a young man without experience and of intractable temperament, was comparatively useless.[6]
Taylor’s is the splenetic rant of a man taxed beyond his capacities by a still desperate situation. In describing the entire set-up of the station as chaotic, he was undoubtedly correct. At one stage, he even had to shoot a stray bullock that had wandered into the station, then organise the cow-proof fence to prevent further bovine incursions. Overwhelmed, he could barely sleep, and was deprived of even some of the most basic necessities to make his tenure bearable:
Such excessive labour and mental anxiety, together with the want of sleep for many nights in succession, soon began to exhibit their depressing effects on the system. My legs swelled more and more, my appetite failed and at last when in the nighttime, after writing out my Report for the day, on the ground having neither chairs nor tables. I could find time for an hour’s rest that rest was denied me by the violent cramps which attacked my legs the moment I had fallen asleep.[7]
6
Letter from Dr Taylor to Governor La Trobe, 4 November 1853, Victorian Public Records, VPRS 1189/132 D 12053