‘Four days up from the Line,’ he read. ‘That puts us … where, First Mate?’
‘I’d say about eight points north, Captain.’
‘I concur,’ said Boyle.
‘She is doing well, Captain,’ said the Mate.
‘She is doing very well, first mate. Very well indeed!’
In a time-honoured tradition, the two ships had exchanged their names and estimated positions, still in this age determined by nothing but a doubtful ship’s clock, the position of the sun and mental arithmetic. The Lima, having gradually watched the sun’s zenith rise and fall, could report that it had crossed the important ‘line’ of the equator just a few days earlier. The news pleased Captain Boyle immensely. The Ticonderoga was racing down the world, making excellent time.
The passengers listened to the exchange as the Lima passed by then quickly vanished from view, swallowed up in the endless blue seascape. That same day, another child, four-year-old Robert Moorhead, travelling with his family of nine, died—again of scarlatina. His mother, Eliza, was beside herself at the death of her youngest, but her grief would be short-lived. Soon, she too would be joining him.
This fleeting glimpse of the Lima would be the Ticonderoga’s only contact with the rest of the world for her entire voyage. Following the Great Circle route to the bottom of the world, she would sight no other vessel until she reached Port Phillip.
On the deck, the passengers began to disperse quietly, but a number lingered, still trying to keep the Lima in sight even long after she had disappeared. The initial flurry of excitement was soon eclipsed by a sense of loneliness—even dread. Once more, the terrible heat of the day weighed in upon them, and people—even the women—loosened or even removed as much of their clothing as they dared. Some prayed for the relief of a cool breeze, wondering whether this heat would ever end. They need not have been concerned. Having sweltered through the tropics, the mercury would now plunge as the Ticonderoga continued south, and her passengers would once again be afflicted by conditions beyond their imagination—this time, in the frigid latitudes of the Roaring Forties.
14
The Great Circle
From the time of the passage of the First Fleet to the gold rush more than 60 years later, the route from England to Australia was prescribed by the Admiralty and not a subject anyone thought required much debate. And it was slow. In stately fashion, ships leaving British ports and travelling the 13,000 or so nautical miles to the Antipodes would call in at the island of Tenerife off the northwest coast of Africa, then drop in further south at the Cape Verde Islands, saunter across to Rio de Janeiro, restocking once more before heading east again to Cape Town on the southernmost tip of Africa. From here, after a stop enjoying the gentle climate of the famously beautiful town, ships’ masters would steer their vessels straight across the Indian Ocean at the Admiralty’s recommended course of 39 degrees latitude.1 Across this final leg of 7000 miles of empty Indian Ocean, sailing roughly equidistant between the Indian subcontinent to the north and the mass of Antarctica to the south, landfall would eventually be made somewhere close to the southern tip of Western Australia.
After 1817, Rio was finally given up, but the sojourn in Cape Town remained. As ships became faster, however, and the demand for speed greater, all this was to change. On each side of the Atlantic, two brilliant minds—one a watchmaker’s son from Plymouth, the other an American naval officer whose sailing days were over due to a badly broken leg—would usher in a revolution on the high seas.
Anyone observing an atlas could be forgiven for deducing that the shortest distance between two points should be a straight line. The Earth being spherical, however, makes this a delusion. It was the Englishman, John Thomas Towson, who first proposed using the Earth’s curvature to significantly shorten long shipping routes such as that from England to Australia, along roughly the same principle that determines that travelling from A to B around the base of a mountain can sometimes be shorter than going over the top.
Towson’s genius was indeed wide ranging: he had earlier discovered many of the principles of early photography, including the method by which an image can be preserved on a sheet of glass, the use of the reflective camera and the development of photographic paper. Having exhausted his interest in this field, in 1846 he turned his attention to the principles of navigation, presenting his ‘Great Circle’ theory in a compact but enormously important book, Tables to Facilitate the Practice of Great Circle Sailing, which he convinced the Admiralty to publish in 1847. For the first few years after its release, it remained little more than a tantalising theory, with no ship’s master actually daring to follow Towson’s radical path, as it required them sailing to parts of the world to which neither they nor anyone else had ever ventured—or particularly wanted to.
Instead of leisurely hugging the coast of Africa down the Atlantic, then turning left and following a line straight to Australia, Towson’s theory permitted a ship travelling to Australia from England to make no stops whatsoever, the route being sufficiently shortened for the ship’s provisions to last the distance. His Great Circle by-passed Teneriffe, ignored Cape Town completely, then continued way south before swinging to the north-east along a line that still left the south-west corner of Australia thousands of miles to the north. Although covering a much shorter distance, this Great Circle meant that ships needed to touch latitudes of 40 and even 50 degrees south, where the winds howl in an endless easterly gale around the bottom of the globe, unencumbered by any feature of land, propelling the ship like a slingshot across to Australia and beyond. If his theory was correct, the speeds that could be attained would allow a ship in the last third of the journey to cover the same distance in nautical miles as it had during the first two-thirds.
Towson’s Great Circle was not perfect in practice, however, as the theory in its purest form required following a single curve across Antarctica. Instead, he broke it down into a shorter series of smaller curves, or ‘rhumbs’. However, as a compass needle was not able to follow a curved course, great navigational skills were required by the master to determine the precise moment the ship needed to change direction. For this reason, Towson’s Great Circle remained unattempted for a full three years after he revealed it to the world. Finally, in 1850, a Captain Godfrey backed both his ship, the Constance, and his navigational acumen, and attempted the journey. He reached Adelaide in a new record of just 77 days.2 The Admiralty, though impressed, still demurred, unwilling to alter its official route. For this, it required more proof, which was duly provided by the great American navigator Matthew Fontaine Maury, the man dubbed the ‘Father of Modern Oceanography’, or even ‘Pathfinder of the Seas’. He wrote, as part of a ground-breaking study of oceanic wind and current patterns:
The Admiralty route to and from Australia is one of those tedious old routes, but very difficult to break up, because of the weight and authority which everything with the imprint of that ancient and renowned board upon it has with its navigators.3
This study provided him with a theory that would bolster that of Towson.
Maury had spent a good deal of time at sea, fascinated by the patterns of the winds and currents he observed. At 33 years of age, however, a stagecoach accident broke his right leg and condemned him to a shore job for the rest of his career. Not really knowing what to do with him, in 1842 the US Navy put him in charge of its Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, where he essentially became a librarian. The posting was a perfect fit.
In dusty vaults and forgotten trunks, Maury discovered thousands upon thousands of ships’ logs, dating back to the very beginning of the navy, compiled by long-dead captains who recorded winds and currents across all the world’s oceans during all times of the year, going back nearly a century. Maury categorised them and, most importantly, studied them, poring over countless notations on winds, sea drifts and currents. In the days before computers, Maury’s achievement of assembling the information into a coherent pattern was extraordinary. Slowl
y, he began to understand what was taking form in front of him, and in his ground-breaking 1847 study Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, put it all together. Later, he would even use information gathered from the diaries of whalers to determine that these creatures actually migrated from sea to sea—a previously unknown fact—and from that deduce the likelihood of a north-west passage across the top of the American continent.
Perhaps most significantly of all, Maury’s work confirmed that not only was Towson’s Great Circle the most efficient route to Australia in terms of distance, but that the winds south of 40 degrees were far more favourable to easterly bound ships than those further north.
In the end, shipowners and masters took matters into their own hands and began to follow Towson’s and Maury’s advice on their own. Only in 1854 did the Admiralty acknowledge the superiority of the Great Circle and adopt the route. The average trip from Britain to Australia was reduced from 120 days to around 80, and for his efforts, Towson was awarded £1000 and Maury became established as one of the greatest oceanographic scientists of all time.
For those on board ships heading to the Antipodes, however, the price paid for Towson and Maury’s Great Circle shortcut was high indeed. If the Ticonderoga had baked like an oven as it limped across the equator, now her passengers were to be subjected to another extremity: the wild and freezing latitudes of the Great Southern Ocean. It is here, at the end of the world, that sub-Antarctic gales howl endlessly across the dark and mountainous seas swirling around the coldest place on Earth. At this precise moment, a new and terrible epidemic—brewing now for weeks in the seams of the passengers’ clothing or even on their bodies—would burst upon the Ticonderoga’s human cargo with unspeakable consequences.
15
Surgeons at sea
The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (aka the Board) stipulated that all ships carrying over 50 of their assisted passengers must be accompanied by a surgeon. Laden with around 800 people, the Ticonderoga seems to have been significantly under-catered for, although this was not thought so at the time. The surgeons were well remunerated for their services, with the experienced Dr Sanger being paid £200 and his assistant, James Veitch, on his first voyage, receiving £80 pounds, though this would increase quickly with experience.
To a modern observer, the contents of the Ticonderoga’s medical kit appear somewhat curious. Listed under ‘medical comforts’, the inventory has survived courtesy of the Public Record Office in London. What, today, are we to make of ‘Box—125 packages, patent groats’, or the ‘100 gallons, vinegar’ it was felt necessary to bring along? The list is long and includes apparently large quantities of what was otherwise banned completely on the Ticonderoga: alcohol. For strictly medicinal use, no less than three dozen cases of Hollands gin were included, as were six dozen cases of sherry and double that of port wine. There were large supplies of brandy and porter (stout) as well as 80 gallons of oil, although the type is not specified. Other supplies included ‘62 jars, 5 gallons each, lime juice’, ‘160 lbs arrow-root’, boiled beef, boiled mutton, eight barrels of raw sugar and so on.1
In the sailing ship era, ship’s doctors, or ‘surgeon superintendents’ as they were also known, were regarded as being just as proficient, if not more so, than their counterparts on land, despite their popularity with the passengers varying from individual to individual. Occupying a unique position on board ship, they were expected to fulfil a wide variety of roles, some of which had little to do with the practice of medicine itself. As historian Robin Haines points out in her extensive study of medicine in the Age of Sail, surgeons were the chief contact between the passengers and those in charge of their destiny on the voyage—the captain and crew—performing the role of ‘agent of the state at sea’.2 They soothed quarrels, passed on passenger grievances to the captain, instigated and oversaw washing and cleaning routines, and were explicitly responsible for the general health of every passenger under their care.
However, most doctors with any experience of working at sea in emigration vessels were under no illusions about just how difficult the journey facing the men, women and families under their care would be. Dr Robert Scot Skirving, surgeon superintendent on the emigrant vessel Ellora, who would go on to become a prominent medical practitioner in Sydney, observed that:
It was horrid, even indecent for decent married people to be herded like beasts, with almost no privacy to dress or undress, and where, in the close and stuffy double beds they slept in, only a thin board separated each couple … The ventilation was very poor, and in the tropics, with a temperature of 90 degrees, the air was mephitic.3
Or, as author and historian Don Charlwood put it,
Surgeon-superintendents were just as responsible as ships’ masters for bringing emigrants safely to the new land … they needed as much skill in human relations as they did in medicine … most voyages would have been intolerable without their arbitration, and losses of life would have been very much higher without their devotion.4
It had not always been so. In the early days of convict transport, the rate of deaths on board convict vessels was high, but after the infamous 1814 arrival of the transports Surry, General Hewitt and Three Bees, in which together nearly a hundred convicts, crew and even some of the guards had died of ‘a malignant fever of a very infectious nature’,5 it was agreed that something needed to be done. Assistant Colonial Surgeon William Redfern, who himself had arrived as a convict sentenced for mutiny (though he soon earned a full pardon from Governor Macquarie, who desperately needed his skills), was asked to submit a report on the voyage. His ground-breaking recommendations made a major contribution to colonial public health. Competent and qualified surgeons, said Redfern, should be sourced and installed on all future convict transports, and be given powers to insist that ships be kept clean, fumigated and ventilated—even to the point of overruling incompetent or drunken ships’ masters. Being a navy man himself, Redfern suggested such surgeons be selected from the ranks of the Royal Navy. In a short time, convict mortality at sea plummeted from 11.3 to 2.4 per thousand per month.
Besides preventative measures and administering treatments for everyday conditions such as indigestion, constipation, sore throats and diarrhoea, a surgeon’s practical skills were paramount. They would set broken limbs and bandage sprained ankles, sew up wounds and perform minor surgery for hernias and other ‘internal obstructions’.6 They would also become obstetricians for the many babies they would inevitably be called upon to deliver, treat and even bury at sea on a long sea voyage such as the Ticonderoga’s.
As well as a daily visit to as many parts of the ship as they could manage—much like a current-day hospital doctor making the rounds—they held clinics that were enthusiastically attended by the many passengers for whom medical attention had been a previously unaffordable luxury. Once a day, too, they would report to and confer with the captain, keeping each other abreast of all that was happening on board—particularly the mood and state of the passengers—always presenting a united front of authority. Of particular importance was their task of keeping the vessel clean.
At a time in which little could be done to cure everyday diseases, the surgeon’s primary focus was prevention. Routines of health and cleanliness, it was believed, could remove the conditions where such ailments could thrive, particularly with regard to those most vulnerable on a sea voyage: children. Although the feeding of infants and newborns was the responsibility of their mothers—sometimes with tragic consequences should they be unable to do so—it was up to the surgeons to ensure that older children received adequate rations, that their berths were adequately lit and ventilated, that they could exercise, and that their clothes and bodies were washed regularly. This, of course, often came up against the physical limitations of the ship itself, but in any case involved instigating unfamiliar hygiene routines for both children and parents, and directing the sanitation of the vessel itself.
Dr Joseph Charles Sanger was one of the most respec
ted doctors at sea of his time, and a favourite of the Board, which had several times commissioned him to accompany migrants on the long journey to Australia: ‘Dr Sanger has already given great satisfaction in four previous voyages in our service’,7 they stated in correspondence regarding his appointment to the Ticonderoga. With fifteen years at sea already under his belt, the most dramatic moment of Dr Sanger’s career thus far had occurred just the previous summer, in July 1851, when his ship, the 919-ton emigrant vessel Marion, struck a reef on the southern tip of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, barely hours from its destination of Adelaide following a gruelling 128 days at sea. Keeping the 350 terrified passengers on board as calm as he could, Sanger stayed on the deck as the ship’s longboats ferried the passengers back and forth to the shore a few miles away. Miraculously, not a soul was lost, and Sanger was commended for his cool-headedness. He would eventually complete twenty voyages in total, almost all for the Board, and was still sailing in 1866.
At twenty years his junior, his assistant, James William Henry Veitch, would be undertaking his first ever sea appointment with the Board—or, for that matter, anyone else. He was a young man whose star was on the rise. A descendant of two generations of naval doctors and a graduate of the London School of Apothecaries, he had already come to the attention of physicians of influence by demonstrating both high standards and calmness during a recent cholera outbreak in Portsea, near the naval base of Portsmouth. About to turn 27, with a coveted contract with the Board, he had good reason to anticipate a long career in the footsteps of not only Sanger, but his own father and grandfather—both respected and well-connected naval surgeons. However, it was not to be.
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