Assuming the Ticonderoga followed roughly the same route as previous emigrant clippers such as the Marco Polo, which had left Liverpool exactly a month earlier, on 4 July 1852, Captain Boyle would have steered his ship as low as 55 degrees south—below the remote French territory of the Kerguelen Islands, below even the ice-covered sub-Antarctic rock of Herd Island, to well under a thousand nautical miles from the coldest place on Earth, the great icy mass of Antarctica.15 Then, finally, with the second half of the entire journey completed in just a few weeks, he would begin to climb back towards the north-east and Australia.
In the meantime, a full outbreak of typhus fever had erupted across the length of the ship.
20
Hell Ship
Although largely poor, the Ticonderoga’s 800 or so Scots and English emigrant passengers had been selected by the Board for their general intelligence, hardiness and willingness to adapt to the travails and privations of a long voyage at sea. Embarking on their one-way journey in a spirit of gratitude and adventure, they endured conditions that would be completely and utterly abominable to any traveller today. Nevertheless, they accepted the horrendous cramping of their quarters, the seasickness, the stifling heat and drenching downpours of the tropics, the monotonous and largely inedible food, the storms, the leaking and the general terror of the voyage with good grace and few or no complaints. Even in their most challenging moments, most remained conscious of the fortune that had smiled on them in being handed this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape destitution of their homeland and begin a new and more prosperous life on the other side of the world.
In the first month of the Ticonderoga’s journey, deaths had indeed occurred—largely among infants—but this was an accepted part of the risks they had undertaken. The strange and challenging routines of ship life were largely adhered to, allotted tasks were performed with diligence, and consideration and respect for the needs of their fellow passengers were generally observed.
No one, however, could possibly have been expected to withstand the terrible confluence of circumstances that overtook the great clipper as the month of October arrived. It was at this stage—over the last third of her journey—that the routines of ship life would begin to break down, that order and morale would collapse and that, despite the best and most strenuous efforts of Captain Boyle and his two steadfast doctors, Sanger and Veitch, as well as the stewards, death and chaos would stalk the decks of the Ticonderoga. Now she would begin to earn the terrible epithet she would be ascribed when, disease-ridden and desperate, she finally limped to her destination: ‘Hell Ship’.
Captain Boyle faced a dilemma. The Ticonderoga was living up to her promise as a fast and well-built vessel, and for a while was even keeping pace with the Marco Polo’s record-breaking run to Melbourne of just 68 days. What, however, would be the cost in taking full advantage of these southerly gales? As more of his passengers and crew became sick, Dr Sanger reported that the terrible tossing of the ship in the rough weather was making the situation far worse, not only for the patients themselves but also for his and Dr Veitch’s ability to care for them.
The two men consulted at length about striking a balance between delivering their increasingly sickening passengers to Melbourne as soon as possible and not causing even more deaths in the process. Because now death was everywhere.
The married quarters—first on the lower deck, then the upper—were the hardest hit. Freezing families huddling together became breeding grounds for colonies of lice, which moved from one warm body to another. Always the same pattern emerged, presenting particularly quickly with the children and infants: the pink rash that grew to blister almost the entire body, the terrible fever, the skin of loved ones almost unbearable to touch. With adults, a ranting delirium set in; with children, it was a coma then death.
In these terrible days of October, the Ticonderoga’s exhausted doctors were given barely a moment’s rest. As Christopher McRae recalled in a letter to The Argus in January 1917, ‘I remember the Captain accompanying the Doctor, going through and seeing that things were in proper order, that is, as far as it was possible, under the circumstances.’ Cries for help rang throughout the ship, and Drs Sanger and Veitch answered all those they could, fighting the pitching of the vessel to make their way across the increasingly chaotic mess of the decks to another bunk, and another red and heaving patient staring with fixed, glassy eyes. Veitch carried the heavy medical chest, offered a sip of brandy or sweet wine to the deathly white lips of the patient, regardless of their age, while Sanger, in the half light and cloying atmosphere, set up his bottles and made up a tincture. Wet cloths were applied to cool the burning brow. Sometimes it seemed to work, with the patient’s overheated brain gaining some respite, even occasionally recovering. More often than not, though, it was all for nothing.
The Campbell family, listed as Presbyterians from Argyllshire, were all but wiped out in a month. John, 44, and his tiny daughter, two-year-old Jane, died within hours of each other on 5 October. Allan, an otherwise healthy lad of eighteen, would join his father and sister on 18 October, to be followed by another sibling, Peggy, a short time later.
The ship’s hospitals—both male and female—were soon overflowing into the narrow and inadequate corridors. Sanger and Veitch had to virtually force their way through to reach bodies prone on the floor, or in makeshift cots, to administer at least some semblance of treatment. Both knew that their medical supplies were running dangerously low. Soon, with the postponement of funerals due to the rough weather, the hospitals became morgues, filled to capacity, making them resemble an overflowing charnel house. The sick were ordered to stay in their bunks and wait to be treated there, only to be moved to the hospital once a patient had died. Those occupying neighbouring bunks watched with horror as the terrible symptoms took the patient closer and closer to death, and wondered when their turn would come.1
The pace of sea burials increased—now a far cry from the early dignified ceremonies presided over by the captain. They were now hasty affairs, conducted quickly between breaks in the weather, watched over by almost no one. Now it was one of the ship’s mates or even the redoubtable schoolmaster and impromptu minister of religion, Charles McKay, who was called upon to repeat the same few desultory words as yet another deadweight was tipped over the side, making a brief white splash into the slate-grey water as shocked and sobbing family looked on. The Ticonderoga’s sail-makers, in whose canvas the bodies were sewn, had permanent work as the ship’s undertakers. There was a pervasive and morbid fear of who would be next, with no one daring to contemplate how much worse the epidemic could become. Then another squall would roll in, and everyone but the crew would be ordered below.
A macabre backlog started to evolve, with more and more victims needing to be disposed of simultaneously. Years later, in January 1909, in one of just a handful of first-hand accounts given in a letter to The Argus, James Dundas recalled travelling as a nine-year-old with his family of five from Aberdeen:
I saw, more than once, ten buried in one day. They were tied up in bedding and mattresses, all together, and thrown overboard, to float away, as there was nothing to weight the corpses with. If we had not got to land when we did, I do not think there would have been many left to tell the tale.
On 11 October, Dundas watched his two-year-old sister, Elizabeth, burn up in a fever and expire in a matter of hours. The sounds of the sobbing of his father Lewis, 34, and mother Isabella, 36, would haunt him the rest of his life.
A graph prepared in 2002 by a diligent amateur historian of the Ticonderoga’s grisly journey plots the frequency of deaths over the course of her 90-day voyage.2 Over the first few weeks of August and into September, the curve is mainly flat, with one or two rises and falls representing the ship’s handful of early fatalities. Then, as the 60th day of the voyage is reached, around the first day of October, the graph begins to rise. The curve is gentle at first, but it increases dramatically as the month proceeds, attesting that almos
t half of the Ticonderoga’s approximately 104 deaths at sea occurred within the last two weeks of October.
One of the reasons for this was discovered by Sanger and Veitch early one evening when called to attend a sick Englishwoman in her bunk on the lower deck. Even in daytime, the poor light made vision difficult, but at night the few swinging whale oil lamps offered only the most pitiful spluttering gloom. This perhaps afforded the patient at least a modicum of comfort, as one of the symptoms of the disease is an agonising sensitivity to light.
Having attended the woman in this cave-like atmosphere, the two doctors made their way back to the gangway when they noticed a family huddled over their child. Dr Sanger interjected to inspect the mite, finding her to be already in the advanced stages of a raging fever. Astonished, he looked at the parents and inquired angrily why he hadn’t been informed of her condition. They shrugged, but seemed reluctant to engage him any further. Dr Veitch was astonished that a parent would fail to report a sick child under such circumstances, and sought to remonstrate, but Sanger restrained him. Leading him away, he assured his less experienced assistant that it was an all too depressingly common occurrence.
The Scots Highlanders, warily looked upon as dangerous outsiders even by their fellow countrymen in the south, were unused to outside interference or assistance of any sort—particularly medical attention from those not connected with their small community. For centuries, the traditional home remedies of their village and extended family had, for better or worse, sufficed. Added to this were a language barrier and a deep suspicion of outsiders, including those from the southern parts of Scotland, and particularly the English, as 800 or so years of conflict between the two kingdoms, followed by the recent Clearances, attested.
As Dr Sanger had found on previous voyages, what he represented to many of these people was a gulf too vast to bridge, even in the face of dire sickness and ultimately death. Now, however, both he and Veitch began to peer more closely into the dark nooks of the lower decks where those quiet Gaelic families huddled in their berths. Soon, both found that the epidemic was more widespread than even they had thought. By the time Sanger and Veitch had attended to one of the sick children, the other members of the family were also usually harbouring the disease and would soon present with the symptoms of typhus. Charles McKay worked tirelessly beside Drs Sanger and Veitch as translator, doing his best to convey the gravity of the situation that many of the Highland families were facing. Reluctantly, some of them gave their sick members over to the doctors’ care, but little could be achieved in any case. The hospitals were already full and there were almost no medical stores left to treat the patients. As always, the disease remained particularly brutal on children.
On 18 October, Janet Gillard perished, just a single summer into her life, as did another infant of the same age, Agnes Welch, following her mother Mary, who had died two days earlier. Baby James Smith perished the next day, and on 21 October, yet another of the McRae family died: little Elizabeth, who was just two years old.
Soon the funerals themselves became almost redundant. Now, more often than not, a father, or even a sympathetic member of the crew, or even Dr Sanger himself, would spirit away the tiny bundle from the bedside of the grieving family and drop it quietly over the side to spare them further torment. Even with the adult funerals, hardly anyone now attended outside the immediate family. The sail-makers ran out of canvas in which to sew up the bodies. Weights of iron to pull the deceased quickly below the surface also became scarce. As young James Dundas recalled decades later, anything that could wrap a body to offer some dignity was now used: bread bags, tablecloths, even the bedding in which the patient had died. Previously, this was disposed of separately, but now it doubled as the funeral shroud.
As the Ticonderoga finally began to leave the ice to proceed towards the north-east, she encountered fierce headwinds, into which she was required to tack back and forth to make any headway at all. Then, climbing back through the Roaring Forties, a new horror arrived. Under a leaden sky one afternoon as the ship made its way across the Southern Ocean, another two passengers were hastily buried at sea. The tiny group of family members could barely look as their bodies were given to the waves, but then a gasp went up as all watched a series of grey fins attack the half-floating bundles slowly receding in the ship’s wake. Sharks, the ocean’s great scavengers that traditionally follow the refuse trail of ships, large and small, had found another reason to stay close to the Ticonderoga. Mourners and crew likewise looked away; attending children were quickly ushered below. To avoid this horrific spectacle, some burials—contrary to the custom—began to take place at night. The pall of grief sweeping the ship was immeasurable.
Meanwhile, the entire system of the ship, practised and refined successfully in the early weeks of the voyage, was breaking down. Although less infected than those in the married quarters, the single men in the ship’s bow also suffered, reducing the numbers of hands capable of keeping the ship relatively clean. Even those still fit enough to be rostered to such duties were soon overwhelmed by what they saw in the degenerating lower passenger decks and abandoned their tasks. Dr Sanger and Veitch, their wines, spirits and other medical comforts now virtually exhausted, were at their wits’ end. Now, often accompanied by Captain Boyle, all they could offer was sympathy, kind words and a little comfort. For those who had already given up hope and were resigned to the fate of either themselves or their loved ones, however, such displays of care and dedication counted for much.
The intricate meal system around which so much of the ship’s life had revolved was now in chaos. The galleys may well have coped with the battering dealt by the Southern Ocean—many of the stoves were gimballed and could cope with all but the fiercest tossing of the ship—but in the face of the disease, all semblance of order collapsed. While the Ticonderoga did not run out of food, the means to prepare it collapsed. Stoves went cold as more and more passengers became debilitated, first with fear of the storms, then with sickness. Those unaffected with either had to make do independently, conducting scavenger parties to the now often deserted galleys or gathering handfuls of soup tins and other sustenance from the stores. Biscuits and water became the staple for many.
By late October, even those who still had an appetite could not avoid one of the disease’s most confronting symptoms: the ranting shouts of delirium. The severely high fever associated with typhus scorched the minds of its helpless victims, sending even the most demure into bouts of screams, shouts and random abuse. For children witnessing their parents in such a situation, or vice versa, it was particularly harrowing. One woman was reported in the Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer later in April of 1853 as dementedly shrieking, ‘We are done for! We are done for!’, convincing those around her that, fever or no, she was forecasting a prophecy. This, amplified dozens then hundreds of times, made the ship resemble a floating prison for the insane, from which there was no escape.
Even worse, perhaps, was the terrible stench. Emanating from the breath and the myriad red and gangrenous sores that cover the body, it has been said that the stench of a single typhus patient is strong enough to be detected at the other end of a hospital ward, or even behind a closed door. Even today, typhus patients will be isolated for just this reason: the disease utterly lives up to one of its many names—‘putrid fever’.
Historical accounts of typhus’s awful stench are legion, but perhaps one of the most graphic was penned by a local priest recording an outbreak in eighteenth-century Guatemala:
The filthy smell and stench which came from those who lay sick of this disease was enough to infect the rest of the house, and all that came to see them. It rotted their very mouths and tongues and made them as black as coal before they died.3
Doctors who treated typhus patients also reported on their ‘cadaver-like breath’, and how the dreadful smell ‘provided a sensory aspect to the disease that was almost impossible to escape’. Descriptions of the smell of typhus vary from source to sou
rce, but most agree that it resembles advanced rotting flesh or vegetable matter, and can easily make a person not used to it retch violently. As we have seen, the interior atmosphere of the Ticonderoga, with her full load of passengers, was volatile even before the disease took hold. Even the crew, inured though they were to the challenging olfactory standards of a nineteenth-century sailing ship, reeled back in disgust upon removing the night covers at dawn. What she then began to smell like with dozens suffering various stages of typhus can scarcely be imagined. The smell reached into everything on board, pervading clothes, bedding, even the very timbers of the ship herself.4 Nor was the disease the only factor contributing to the ship’s rank atmosphere.
With passengers either ill or physically or emotionally weakened, and with morale and possibly even sanity collapsing, fewer and fewer had the strength or presence of mind to make the climb from the lower decks to use the ships’ water closets. Night utensils became filled to overflowing, and other receptacles began to be used for human waste, urine, vomit and ordure: soup tins, pots and other cooking utensils, drinking mugs—anything that could be found. With the rolling and pitching of the ship, the floors of the decks became awash in filth, further compounding the hellish atmosphere. The lower deck was in an even more indescribable state, as effluent began to seep down the walls and through the floorboards from the equally chaotic main deck above. Those who were still well enough to eat left food scraps, putrefying, where they lay.
At one stage, Captain Boyle ordered his second mate to venture below to the passenger decks and attempt to organise some kind of clean-up. He at first flatly refused but further pressure eventually compelled him to do so. His report to Boyle about conditions below deck so appalled him that he immediately appointed a number of the still fit men from the single men’s quarters to become cleaning constables. This supposedly, led to some improvement, but the descriptions of the ship when it was inspected after it arrived in Melbourne indicate that little was in fact achieved.
Hell Ship Page 15
