Hell Ship

by Michael Veitch

  Friendships and acquaintances were forged, and those unused to the close proximity of strangers quickly learned to abandon such qualms. All the while, the talk of the voyage consumed every conversation. What would the ship be like? Who was the captain and what was his experience? What of the standard of food on board, and would there be sufficient quantities to last the journey? What would life be like in that far-off colony of Victoria? These and other questions filled the depot with a constant murmur of anticipation. As for exactly how long their journey would last, their inquiries were met with only vague answers as this could not be determined. They were told to expect up to four months at sea, as provisions would be carried for 120 days, plying a route that would take them to not a single stop along the way. Once they stepped on board, they would not be disembarking until they reached Victoria.

  In their hours of free time at the depot, some passengers could not resist boarding one of the regular shuttle ferries across the Mersey to catch a glimpse of the seemingly enormous metropolis of Liverpool, with all her inherent dangers and diseases. Others stood at the adjacent wharf where their ship was tied up, being busily prepared for sail by her small army of crew. Carpenters could be heard banging and sawing away in her interior, making final adjustments to the extensive refit she had recently undergone. While not permitted to come too close, many stood in awe, taking in the sight of this magnificent vessel, as sturdy and impregnable as a castle, and by far the largest object fashioned by the hand of man most of them had ever seen. Surely this leviathan would bear them in safety across the world’s oceans? On her stern, smartly painted in white lettering that stood out clearly against the black of her hull, was her curious name. They read it over to each other, then looked up once again at the words, ‘Ticonderoga—New York’.

  6

  The age of the clippers

  On a freezing December morning in 1850, 15,000 people gathered expectantly around the edge of Boston harbour, eyes fixed on the enormous yard of renowned ship designer, now shipbuilder, Donald McKay. Men stamped their feet and women, as much as they dared, lifted their skirts out of the frozen mud and slush. In front of them, the masts of the great ship pointed like gigantic fingers towards a low and ominous sky. Her sleek black hull—for the moment secure in its cradle—seemed to resemble a powerful animal about to be unleashed from its tether.

  In this seafaring age, interest in the launch of any new ship was always high, but with this, the first vessel both wholly designed and built by the enigmatic, Canadian-born McKay, the anticipation among the gathered Bostonians—as well as the wider maritime world—was intense. McKay’s vessels were a new breed of ship. In the past few years, he had designed the ‘extreme clippers’ Reindeer and Moses Wheeler, of 800 and 900 tons respectively; these ships contained nothing less than a revolution within their sleek, futuristic lines. Now, for the first time, McKay had both designed and built his own ship, and the public was desperate to see it.

  Those near the front, craning for a better view, could just make out the hollow curve of her graceful bow, designed to scythe through rather than straddle the water, and the almost feminine lines of her hull, widening gradually towards mid-ship, offering a concave shape to the waterline, all designed along complex principles of minimum weight and maximum strength.

  To add to the theatrical setting that chilly Boston morning, clouds of steam rose and swirled from the vats of boiling whale oil being applied to melt the frozen tallow that covered the slipway that ran down to the icy water’s edge. Suddenly, the excitement of the crowd rose as the sounds of mallets could be heard knocking away timber stays. ‘Your name is … Stag Hound!’ shouted a stentorian voice as a bottle of brandy was smashed against the ship’s side. Then, slowly at first, the Goliath began to move. A tremendous roar rose up all around. The sound of the great hull sliding, thundering and finally streaking down the slipway towards the water was drowned out only by the sudden eruption of every bell in the city pealing out in celebration of the birth of the mighty vessel. From somewhere, a cannon boomed then a band struck up and the cheering continued. The Stag Hound, perhaps the greatest extreme clipper ever to have set sail, was launched.

  The reign of the American ‘Yankee clipper’ ships was brief but spectacular, ushering in a revolution in speed and travel that broke open the world, transfixing populations across continents, who could now reach each other in times unimaginable a generation earlier. They would dominate the grand climax of the Age of Sail up until the beginning of the American Civil War, after which British shipbuilders would adopt and perfect the design, using harder, drier woods that lasted much longer than the American ships.

  The initial spur for the clippers was trade. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, after nearly two centuries, Britain at last began to dismantle her Navigation Acts, first installed by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth in 1651 as a protectionist bulwark against Dutch maritime traders. These laws stated that no trade in any English colony could be conducted by anyone other than English vessels manned by English sailors. As the British Empire grew, America in particular became increasingly infuriated at being thus shut out of the avenues of imperial commerce, such as the lucrative and expanding tea trade from places such as Hong Kong. The slight eventually became a contributing factor in the coming of the American Revolution.

  For Britain, however, the Navigation Acts were a two-edged sword, and eventually her mollycoddled shipping industry began to fall behind, particularly in such areas as shipbuilding. In slow, round-bowed tubs, the design of which had not changed in a century, British merchantmen would ply their trade leisurely along the Empire’s shipping lanes, stopping at several ports along the way and generally taking their time, showing little interest in those newer, faster American vessels they would sometimes encounter racing past them on the high seas, or in some foreign port a long way from home.

  In 1849, Prime Minister Lord John Russell decided to move with the times and, despite howling protests from virtually every member of the House of Lords—not to mention the entire British shipbuilding industry—he pledged to embrace the gods of free trade and release his seafarers from two centuries of protection, just as his predecessor Robert Peel had done with the Corn Laws in 1846. The shock, when it came, was palpable. Suddenly, in 1850, the first tea of the season was brought to London by the American clipper the Orient, which tied up to London’s East India Dock in 1850 to be greeted by a stunned crowd of locals who had never seen any vessel quite like it.

  For 30 years from the mid-1840s until the advent of steam, the clippers rode the oceans as the true thoroughbreds of the Age of Sail. They were long, sleek and streamlined, riding low in the water and with their extra masts throwing up acres of sail to harness the wind. Some of the larger ships carried more than 30 individual sails with exotic names like moonrakers, royals and skysails. In conditions where other ships would shorten sail, the clippers would put on more and still more, heeling over until their booms and lee rails skimmed the surface of the water as it raced by at 10, 15 and even 20 knots or more. Their forecastles and other deck structures were trimmed down and configured to the centre of the ship to achieve the utmost balance.

  Unlike their predecessors, which crashed their way doggedly through the waves like a battering ram, the clippers’ elongated bows sliced an effortless passage, leaving barely a wake behind them, the water seeming to part willingly before the progress of these graceful queens of the oceans.

  Their genesis was in the small, fast raiders of the primarily maritime War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Speedy little brigs, brigantines, fore-and-aft and topsail schooners, none bigger than 200 tons, would swarm out of Baltimore and other Atlantic harbours to harry the plodding vessels of the Royal Navy—which, in their exasperation, declared that the American sailors must have some ‘unlawful dealings with the great enemy of mankind for the malignant pleasure of annoying the English’.1 They were made for speed and, unlike the traditional European vessels with their ba
rge-like ‘upside-down bell-shaped’ bows and ‘cod head and mackerel-tail’ hull, they traded their space for the ability to transport a smaller cargo across the world in record times. Initially, that cargo was tea.

  In 1843, a brilliant naval architect and ship design theorist named John Willis Griffiths was given a chance to put his academic ideas into practice by a New York-to-China trading firm, Howland & Aspinwall, which took the gamble of commissioning his 750-ton Rainbow, a ship so revolutionary that the maritime establishment declared it unsafe to sail, that her construction was ‘contrary to the laws of nature’2 and that she would never return from her maiden voyage. Instead, the Rainbow achieved remarkable average speeds of 14 knots and set a new record for the return trip from New York to Canton of three months, bringing back the first of the new season’s tea chests for the highly competitive American market to the delight of the wealthy society ladies of New York and Washington.

  In 1846, Griffiths built the even more remarkable Sea Witch, which stunned the world when, under the command of another of the great characters of the Age of Sail, ‘Bully Bob’ Waterman, she arrived from Hong Kong after just 77 days at sea, her holds bursting with the new season’s tea. At this time, a conventional cargo vessel could be expected to complete the same trip in no less than 160 days.3 Two years later, in March 1849, ‘Bully Bob’, who had in fact worked with Griffiths on the sail design of the ship, achieved another feat by appearing unscheduled as a fast-moving speck on the horizon approaching New York harbour. When curious telescopes revealed that it was Sea Witch under full sail, just 74 days out of Hong Kong, the city went into raptures. Bully Bob had beaten his own record of two years earlier by three whole days. It is a feat that still stands today—unbeaten by any ship under sail more than a century and a half later.

  For three decades, the clippers ruled the world’s oceans, and as the demand for speed grew, shipyards up and down the east coast of America became alive to their construction—as described romantically in one of the classic accounts of the sailing age, Clipper Ships of America and Great Britain:

  The hammer notes of ten thousand men rang from the shipyards sprawled along New York’s East River, and up and down the north Atlantic coast town after town hummed and boomed with industry. Man seemed to rival Nature in a perfect orgy of inspired invention and turned out sleek thoroughbred after sleek thoroughbred, whose long white arms stretched outward to embrace the breeze and draw into themselves the very essence of moving, pulsing life. Captains, hanging up new records, were mobbed and feted and idolized.4

  The word ‘clipper’ derived from the antiquated ‘clip’, meaning to move quickly, the most salient response from those first bearing witness to the speed of these new ships. They were given suitably romantic names such as Flying Cloud, Ariel, Lightning, Sovereign of the Seas and, one of the greatest of all, the 1534-ton Donald McKay-designed Stag Hound, which on one voyage, despite being partly dis-masted in a storm, still managed to break the record for the run from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn, then one of the longest in the world. Initially tasked with whisking tea and other cargoes around the globe, it was the discovery of gold that ushered in the true heyday of the clippers, first in California then, in the early 1850s, Australia. Now the ships’ most lucrative cargo would be people, both well-heeled passengers paying their own way to seek fortune and adventure and those more desperate souls being assisted by their government to start a new life in a new land. One group of those less advantaged people would make the journey in the Ticonderoga.

  7

  The Ticonderoga

  She was built in New York in 1849 by Perrine, Patterson & Stack, at their yard at the bottom of North Second Street, Williamsburg, just across the East River from Manhattan.1 The company had been established a few years previously by a former sea captain, William Perrine, his partner Ariel Patterson and a Canadian from Quebec, Thomas Stack. Although the company would be broken up by 1853, it built six ships in total, the Ticonderoga being one of their larger vessels, although the John Stuart, built in 1851, hit the water at a whopping 1654 tons.2 Her initial owners were three New York brothers, Henry, William and John Harbeck, who began as a small company of merchants then store owners, stockbrokers and eventually successful shipowners. In all, they commissioned and owned three clippers, the Ticonderoga being named after the fort in Essex County, New York State, situated on a strategic spit of land between Lake George and Lake Champlain where a great battle had taken place in July 1758 during the Seven Years War between the British and French. According to sources, the word itself is Iroquois, meaning either the sound of flowing water, the meeting of two waters, or even the land between two waters. By whichever definition one chooses, the word, when spoken gently, seems to capture the gentle essence of a tumbling stream. There was nothing gentle, however, about the Battle of Ticonderoga, one of the darkest moments of the famous Scots regiment the Black Watch, which was almost wiped out attempting to take a fort from the resilient French.

  Strangely, no image exists of the Ticonderoga—not a painting, photograph or even a sketch has survived to give us a picture of how she would have appeared. This is unusual, as many paintings—even photographs—exist of earlier vessels, and particularly considering that the Ticonderoga was said to be a most beautiful ship, attracting much interest among ship-savvy populations wherever she went.

  Her fame spread even to London and, despite never once visiting the capitol, the popular Illustrated London News published an article on her, featuring a detailed cut-away diagram of her internal decks and layout but no actual image of the Ticonderoga herself. The story appeared shortly before she sailed and also described in great detail the work and function of the Birkenhead depot, providing several graphic illustrations of the buildings and the placement of the passengers therein. As for the ship herself, we are left only with educated assumptions as to her appearance. The British-built Alnwick Castle, at an almost identical tonnage and similar dimensions, is believed to have borne a striking similarity to the Ticonderoga.

  This is not the only area of mystery surrounding the Ticonderoga and her infamous Australian voyage. Her exact tonnage is vague, as is the number of masts she carried, with as many sources citing three masts as four. Exactly how many passengers she carried to Melbourne is also a matter of contention, as well as her precise arrival date in Victoria, and even the numbers who died on board the voyage and later in quarantine. This vagueness somehow contributes to the everlasting notion of the ‘ghost ship’, as witnessed by the two local lime-burners as she entered Port Phillip Bay at the end of her disastrous run in November 1852.

  Defining the Ticonderoga’s tonnage is in fact far from academic, as it was this that determined the number of passengers she was permitted to accommodate on her two very crowded decks on her trip south to Victoria. The number varies not only from source to source, but across the often bewildering definitions that varied between countries, particularly between the United States and Britain. The tonnage of the Ticonderoga would initially have been determined by the ancient Builder’s Old Measurement, expressed in ‘tons burden’, a calculation based on a ship’s length and maximum beam. This system was applied inconsistently, and was in any case considered unreliable, particularly as the ships of the mid-nineteenth century began to increase significantly in size. It was not until 1854 that Britain’s Board of Trade introduced a single method for the measuring of ship’s tonnage, the Moorsom System, based on dividing the ship’s internal volume by 100 cubic feet (2.8 cubic metres) then subtracting internal machinery and structure to arrive at a more workable figure. Even so, the tonnage of the Ticonderoga fluctuates across ‘registered’, ‘registered gross’, ‘net registered’ and so on to between 1089, 1280 and even up to 1514 tons.

  There are, however, many facts about the Ticonderoga that are not in dispute. At 169 feet long, she was by no means the biggest of the Yankee clippers, with some sources even referring to her as a ‘semi-clipper’. By way of comparison, the Marco P
olo, which made the same journey shortly before the Ticonderoga with Bully Forbes in command, was 14 feet longer at 183 feet and the great Stag Hound, at 226 feet, was larger again. But by all accounts, the Ticonderoga was a particularly fine-looking vessel with graceful, even delicate lines. She was built of copper-sheathed oak and her hull was painted jet black, with a fine white stripe running its length, framing the even row of wooden scuttles that ran from bow to stern. She was 37 feet wide, had a draught of 18 feet and her stowage capacity was enhanced by a feature not obvious upon initial observation: an extra deck. Many clippers were single-deck ships with an open, cavernous storage area, whereas the Ticonderoga’s extra lower level made her suitable for a variety of uses, such as the transport of emigrants. Word of her fine lines and construction went around the already ship-obsessed population of Liverpool, who are said to have come down in their droves to see for themselves the beautiful American clipper with the long and unusual name, and offer their opinion on her pedigree.

  Little is known about the Ticonderoga’s early life. It appears she went to work immediately upon her launch in 1849, running back and forth across the Atlantic, her holds bursting with bales of cotton from America’s southern states, destined for the mills of the English midlands. To enhance profit on their return journey westward to America, her crew would install bunks and mess tables (known as desks) and take on a load of privately paying passengers—many of them Irish—searching for a new life in a country that was not part of the loathed British Empire. In 1852, the year she sailed to Melbourne, she had already completed two Atlantic crossings, arriving in New York on 22 April with 300 passengers, then executing a quick turnaround with a load of cotton to arrive back in Liverpool by late May. A considerable quantity of stores were left over from one of these Atlantic runs, which were then utilised on the trip to Australia.