Hell Ship

by Michael Veitch

  There are at present at least 250 patients requiring treatment, and both my coadjutor, Mr Veitch, and myself are almost wearied out by the constant demand for our services, especially as it is impossible to get proper nurses for the sick in sufficient numbers.4

  Although no shadow of doubt had ever clouded my appreciation of the story, seeing my great-great-grandfather’s name, written in such dramatic fashion, as proof of the part he played in the drama of the Ticonderoga, nevertheless sent a surge of relief coursing through me, sitting that day in the little room in the great building on the other side of the world. Much of the excitement I felt was for my father.

  I thanked the librarian, before arranging for as many photocopies of the letters as the few pounds in my pocket would allow. On the train journey back to my digs in Islington, I pictured my father opening the big yellow envelope that I intended to mail him, and his eyes scanning the hand-written lines, revealing the story of the terrible second half of Ticonderoga’s journey to Australia.

  19

  The Southern Ocean

  To the best of their efforts, the authorities at Birkenhead organised the Ticonderoga’s passengers in berths as close as possible to others of similar national, ethnic or religious backgrounds. Beyond that, it was pure chance that determined exactly where, and with whom, they would spend the voyage. The luckiest passengers were the 103 families assigned positions on the ship’s main accommodation deck.1 As claustrophobic as their tiny berths may have seemed as they settled themselves into them at the Birkenhead depot back in August, it was with a shudder of horror—and no little relief—that they had watched those other families—56 in all—shuffle past to line up above the dark, yawning hatch that led down to their own berths in the Stygian bowels of Ticonderoga’s lower deck. It was here in these gloomy confines that the epidemic that seized the ship at the end of September would wreak its most terrible havoc.

  Meanwhile, the passengers were forced to deal with another tormenter, one that visited all decks and did not discriminate on the basis of class, sex or age: the weather. From five weeks into the voyage until almost the very end, it had begun to seem to all on board that it represented nothing but a long and continuous torture.

  A few days after dropping below the equator, excitement rippled through the ship as the voice of one of the crew, high in the rigging, announced ‘land to starboard!’, and all on the upper deck rushed to the rail. There, about 20 miles distant, rising from a blueish sea mist, stood a tall and majestic finger of rock pointed directly at the sky. Captain Boyle appeared on deck with his officer of the watch and the two consulted closely. Dr Sanger was beckoned over and handed the spyglass. The captain seemed pleased:

  Sir, you may inform the passengers that we are passing the island of Fernando de Noronha—a little over 200 miles from the coast of Brazil. The ship is making excellent time. Tell them also, if you will, that this is the last land we shall see for some time.2

  The last comment sent a slight shudder through those who heard it, and all eyes strained for a better view of the distant and mysterious island—in fact, a Portuguese prison colony—surprised at how hungry they had become to step foot upon something solid after so many weeks at sea.

  A day or so later, on 12 September, the mother of one of the English families, Mary Sharpin, 35, listed as ‘Wesleyan’ from Norfolk, succumbed to what Dr Sanger again noted simply as ‘fever’. She left behind her husband, Robert, and three daughters, aged four, seven and ten. Nor would this be the final tragedy to visit the family.

  An eighteen-year-old girl, Christine Rankin, plus two more infants, Lawrence Fulton and Helen Gartshore, were all buried at sea a few days later. In just over a week, from 10 September, Sanger and Veitch had lost fourteen passengers, in equal numbers of children and adults. Any notion that the epidemic now starting to rage on board the Ticonderoga could be confined to children was now confounded, and it was becoming clear that a catastrophe was looming.

  With no understanding of the true cause or origins of the disease, and with its relationship to the bacteria carried in the common body louse not to be revealed for another half-century, the common treatment for typhus in the mid-nineteenth century revolved around the supposed invigorating qualities of wine. In one of the most respected naval medical texts of the time, William Turnbull’s The Naval Surgeon Comprising the Entire Duties of Professional Men at Sea (a copy of which Dr Veitch’s father, James, would undoubtedly have pressed into his son’s hand, entrusting it to him like a precious tome), the primary method of treatment for typhus fever was described as ‘wine, in liberal quantity, suited to the circumstances of the case, but given in small doses at once and judiciously repeated’.3 This was preceded by a period of induced purging and vomiting brought on by the administration of a compound of antimony, a metallic element that had a particularly violent effect on a patient’s bowels and stomach. Though unpleasant, the treatment was not uncommon.

  Only after this ordeal could the already suffering patient be rested and kept warm, after which ‘a nourishing diet is to be administered in the most soluble form, and such as is most grateful to the patient’.4 By this general plan, assures Turnbull, ‘a cure will, for the most part be effected’.5 As the two struggling doctors were to witness on board the Ticonderoga, Turnbull’s breezy optimism was grotesquely misplaced.

  A few days later, as the south-east trade winds pushed the Ticonderoga far out into the South Atlantic, the first of the storms hit. None of the passengers had experienced anything like it. In just two weeks, they had travelled from the cloying sauna of the equatorial tropics to the storm-tossed fury of a southern hemisphere winter. They had, of course, been warned to expect the weather to turn, and many had taken the advice of packing warmer clothing for the second half of the journey, but the winds and the seas that picked up the great ship, and seemed bent on tearing her apart, were beyond imagining.

  As stated, no direct first-hand account of the journey survives from any of the Ticonderoga’s passengers, but writing at around the same time, another emigrant on a similarly assisted passage, Englishwoman Fanny Davis, described in vivid detail her experience on board the Conway, an emigrant vessel of just over 1100 tons but carrying only half the number of passengers as the Ticonderoga. Fanny likewise sailed from Birkenhead and experienced the hardships of the Great Circle, but her extensive and descriptive diaries give us an insight into what effect the experience of storms, hundreds of miles from any land, had on the passengers. Two months and ten days into the voyage, somewhere out in the Atlantic, Fanny Davis records:

  We had a most fearful night, it has blown a perfect hurricane … Nearly every minute a large wave broke on our deck and the wind sounded fearfully. All we could hear besides was the Captain and mate shouting to the men all night.6

  And the next day:

  Another very cold day, the wind cuts down our hatchway and nearly blows the hair off our heads and we are obliged to sit with a thick shawl on and even then we cannot keep a spark of warmth in us.7

  The following day’s entry was even more dramatic:

  It has been a most terrific night, such a one as makes young people old in one night for it was a regular night of horrors, the wind blew a perfect hurricane and every now and then the ship seemed perfectly under water and it poured down the hatchway in a perfect deluge. It is at such times as that we feel the comfort of having a top berth for the people in the bottom ones get washed out of their beds. The screams of the people as each wave comes down the hatchway was enough to make the stoutest heart to tremble.8

  According to Mary Kruithof, throughout the last month of the voyage, the Ticonderoga was ‘overtaken by storm after storm … each one lasting for days at a time’.9 Memories of warm equatorial evenings spent in calm and cordial conversation on the upper deck were now so distant that many of the passengers questioned whether they had taken place at all. Then, the heat had sometimes seemed unbearable, but what would they now give to have just one of those evenings back again?<
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  Shivering with cold as well as fright in their dank beds, the Ticonderoga’s passengers endured hour after hour, day after day huddled in the confines of their berths, feeling the ship tossed and pummelled by the screeching wind that drove the seas before it into a monstrous frenzy. The awful seasickness that they thought they had left behind now returned. It seemed the sea was determined to invade the confines of the ship, and even tightly closed scuttles shrieked and whistled as water pushed its way through every inadequate gap and seal.

  During the big storms, the galley system all but broke down. Coppers were upset and fires were extinguished as soon as they could be lit by the exasperated cooks. Besides, moving about the ship—for anyone—under such conditions was perilous. Those who did so frequently came to grief on ladders or simply slipped on the icy deck. Skulls were thrown against bulkheads, elbows and ankles cracked as the lurching ship threw everything inside against its wooden interior. Those who risked getting up from their cots to answer the call of nature had to grip hard with both hands to avoid being hurled as a wave struck. People tripped and skidded on the swirling mass of water and all the possessions tumbling around on the floors. Some intrepid souls who could no longer bear the confines of the lower decks occasionally ventured out onto the top open deck and described it as akin to trying to walk on a pitched roof.

  Even the single men, who had assumed their recent roles as sailors with such gusto—even to the point of starting to affect the talk and manners of the real old salts—were stunned into silent terror. From their quarters in the bow of the ship, the dreadful lurching of the vessel as it plunged down the troughs of 15- and 20-metre waves was at its most extreme. Like a train plummeting over a precipice, their hands—white knuckled—would grip the wooden rails of their cots as the ship lurched forward, throwing everything not bolted down into a cacophonous clatter of pans and cutlery. Foot-lockers burst open, spilling their contents. Then came the great crash as the ship’s bow hit the bottom of the trough, burying the upper deck under metres of sea water before the ship miraculously recovered once again. As terrifying an ordeal as this was, the men knew that above them, somewhere, the real seamen were at work, on the deck and in the rigging, climbing the mainyards and somehow managing to stay upright to grapple with the ship in the face of the storm. For them, the real terror came from the mighty swells that rose up from the Ticonderoga’s stern, stealing her wind before breaking over her in a deluge and turning her bursting sails into sagging sheets of sodden canvas.

  Captain Boyle was up there too, somewhere in his sou’wester high up on the forecastle. Between the bouts of wind, they could occasionally hear him barking out his orders, encouraging his helmsman, driving his army of men trained to fight this impossible struggle against the raging elements—one he could not afford to lose. The Ticonderoga was strong, and her raked bow could slice apart the fiercest of waves, but should she allow the wind to turn her side-on, to slip into the lee of one of those monstrous swells, Boyle knew that the sea could overcome her in seconds, her yardarms turned turtle into the water, her leaden sails dragging her over as another wave pounded across her decks. Then, in moments, she would be pulled to the bottom like a stone. It happened all the time, he knew, to finer ships manned by finer crews than his.

  While no list remains of the Ticonderoga’s crew, they were believed to have numbered 48 in total, and were all experienced sailors. But although the runs across the Atlantic could be fierce at times, none had seen seas comparable to the ferocity of these oceans swirling around the bottom of the globe. Boyle had done his best to make them aware back in Liverpool that conditions further south would be rough, but no one had envisaged this.

  George Pollock Russell, a Scotsman whose journal of his 1854 voyage has survived (due to the diligence of his granddaughter, Eunice), was likewise shocked by the severity of the weather:

  It is quite out of the question to walk on deck it is leaning at about an angle of 45 degrees … at half past seven in the evening a wave struck the ship with such force, we thought for certain the ship was going down. The storm is now raging fearfully; some are going to bed, others are stopping up … the sea is washing over the decks and into our beds … our table is broken in a heap in the middle of the floor … I turned into bed about 1 O’clock but did not sleep.10

  To compound the passengers’ misery, in such seas the innovative fresh air canvas ventilation system scooping fresh air from up top and distributing it below was disengaged, lest it become a conduit for seawater—which was everywhere in any case for those people cocooned in the lower decks. Hatches that were easily battened down and secured in calm seas burst and tore away, allowing cascading torrents to gush into the bowels of the ship. Waves crashing onto the deck forced water down through every deck board, gap and opening. Diarist William Johnstone, sailing the Great Circle route on the Arab a few years later, recalled that:

  The between decks where the Emigrants were all stowed away (sometimes a man and his wife and two children in the one bed) were in a most horrible condition. The seas washed down the hatchways and the floor was a complete pont, many of the beds drenched through and through. In addition to these delights, with four or five exceptions, they were all violently seasick—some of the women fainting, and two going into convulsions—all call out for Brandy, which they had been told by the Emigrant Agent had been put on board for their use—but which they now found ‘non est inventus’. The squall had come on so suddenly that their boxes were all adrift, flying about from one side to the other, with nearly 50 whining sick squalling children to complete their misery.11

  Patience and caution were attributes not highly sought after in sea captains of the emigrant clippers during the gold rush. Dash, nerve and the skill to drive their great vessels to a quick passage through the high seas and gales of the Great Circle and Southern Ocean were qualities far more sought after by shipowners and agents. Apart from the wonderful headlines generated by a quick passage to Melbourne, it delivered passengers to the goldfields faster, and could cut short the inevitable spread of disease. ‘Hell or Melbourne!’ had been Bully Forbes’ audacious response when asked to slow down the Marco Polo a little for the sake of his passengers.12 So driven was the famous mariner that it was rumoured he padlocked his sails in storms to prevent the more timid of his crew hauling in some of the dangerously strained canvas. Captain Boyle, though, as Christopher McRae remembered, was a different man entirely:

  To show how very solicitous the Captain had been for the comfort of the passengers and to prevent any panic amongst them, he had frequently been known, when coming on deck and finding the ship carrying full sail—which the second officer was given to do—gave order to shorten sail. Not so much because the ship could not carry it, as concern for those on board. There was no doubt of the ship being overcrowded.13

  The sole advantage of the Ticonderoga’s arrival in southern waters was that her speed picked up considerably. Dropping roughly two degrees in latitude every day, three weeks was all it had taken for her to exchange the balmy equator for the fury of the Roaring Forties and beyond. Now, large Southern Ocean whales, unlike any seen further north, began to surface beside the ship, eying her curiously. Unfamiliar southern latitude birds, such as cape petrels and shear-waters, made their appearance, and albatross stalked her for any scraps she might leave behind in her wake. The upper deck, recently the scene of languid evening promenades, now became the setting for children’s snowball fights in the day or two of respite between storms. Down in their beds, however, the passengers huddled for warmth, wearing every scrap of clothing they could find.

  On calmer days, the departure of the wind often gave way to the Southern Ocean’s famous fogs, which rolled across the seas like a wet and freezing blanket. At these times, visibility was cut to almost nothing, at least equalling the thickest ‘soups’ dished up by the English Channel. Through the cloying mist, sailors on watch strained their ears to pick up a new and unsettling sound: ice. The icebergs that drift up from
the Antarctic ice shelf in the southern autumn are far greater in size than those in the northern hemisphere and frequently measured in miles, with ice of significant size being not unheard of as far north as 40 degrees. The Ticonderoga’s route took her well inside Antarctica’s northern ice zone, making the danger of sudden and catastrophic collision real, with the iceberg’s unseen mass below the water being capable of splitting a ship’s timber hull like balsa wood, particularly travelling at strong speed before the southerly gales. Nor was it only the larger ice that presented danger.

  Smaller, melting ‘growlers’, clear and almost impossible to see, also lay in her path. Only the strange hollow wash of the sea breaking over them, or the popping and sizzling as ancient air bubbles were released as the ice melted gave their positions away, prompting the lookouts to shout frantic course corrections for the helmsman to steer around them. Such caution was only possible on calmer days. During the storms, when the ship was bolting through the water, there was almost no chance of receiving warning of them, and simple luck had to be relied upon.

  In the days of the clipper, the farther south a master steered into the Great Circle, the shorter was his route and the faster his time. Some captains, driving their ships as far south as 60 degrees, could cut as much as 1000 nautical miles off the route to Australia, but here the danger of ice increased exponentially. When ships began sailing the Great Circle, the Board had been advised by the Secretary of State to prohibit such vessels employed by them to drop below certain southern latitudes. This, however, prompted such a fierce outcry against perceived government interference in the sacred freedoms of navigation from shipowners and masters wanting to set ever-faster records to Australia that the provision was dropped. In any case, they realised, it was impossible to prescribe rules for each charter due to the different seasons and accidents of weather. The choice of route therefore continued to be left to the discretion of individual masters.14