After hearing Captain Wylie’s account of the Ticonderoga, and relaying what the pilot, Henry Draper, had seen of her horrific state, Harbour Master Captain Charles Ferguson started a chain of events that would electrify the upper echelons of Victoria’s young colonial government. An urgent note was dispatched immediately to Governor La Trobe, but Ferguson had no intention of waiting for his answer before deciding to act.
A short distance from Ferguson’s office in the small port of Williamstown, just a few miles from Melbourne, HMS Empire sat tied up and ready. This fast little ship served as an emergency vessel of sorts, scooting around the coast of Victoria and beyond, pulling stranded ships off reefs, rescuing survivors from shipwrecks and intercepting incoming emigrant ships to ensure that their captains were in compliance with the Passengers Act (one such master would later be fined almost £500 for supplying inadequate provisions to his passengers).
Ferguson planned to sail the Empire as soon as possible to Point Nepean to deal with this new emergency and to take along with him one of the most important medical men in the colony, his colleague and Port Health Officer, Dr Thomas Hunt, whose new quarantine station, Ferguson had told him, might be happening considerably sooner than planned. In the meantime, he arranged for the ship to be packed with as many fresh stores as she could carry: eleven live sheep, 276 pounds of fresh beef, 53 loaves of freshly baked bread, 24 bags of fresh potatoes, four cases of porter, one case of wine, 9 pounds of arrowroot, and six iron pots. The list was a long one, but whatever had to be done to see it filled, Ferguson saw that it was done.
The rest of that day, orders and requisitions raced out of the Harbour Master’s office to suppliers across Williamstown and Melbourne. Their response came swiftly in the form of wagons arriving at the dock heavily laden with provisions. The most important acquisition of the day was the full medical chest to replenish the exhausted supplies of Drs Sanger and Veitch, but what Ferguson desperately needed was another doctor to travel with it. This same person would be then required to relieve the ailing and exhausted ship’s surgeons, distribute supplies, then stay on to organise the quarantine station, which at this moment existed only on paper. Such a person would not be easy to come by—particularly at short notice—but these were desperate times. Hurrying down the corridor to Thomas Hunt’s nearby office, the two men struggled to think of a suitable candidate.
Ferguson then fetched the list of ships currently in port and, running his finger down the column, stopped at the Ottillia, another large emigrant vessel that had recently arrived from Liverpool, currently undergoing repairs for lightning damage, and whose surgeon was listed as a Dr Joseph Taylor. The two men looked at each other. Perfect, they agreed, before hurrying out the door. A short time later, they stood beside the handsome Ottillia as she was tied up at the wharf, inquiring of her officers whether the surgeon superintendent might be available for a brief word. As it happened, Dr Taylor was in his cabin, and more than a little surprised to have his presence requested by no lesser figures than the Chief Harbour Master and Port Health Officer, who greeted him in the warmest of terms despite neither having met him before in their lives.
After extolling his well-known reputation as an exemplary practitioner of medicine, Ferguson and Hunt came quickly to the point. A brand new government quarantine station was being set up a little way from Melbourne and Dr Taylor was just the man to run it. A handsome salary of not less than £300 was on offer, as well as accommodation and excellent rations for himself and his family. Did he by chance, Dr Hunt inquired, happen to have any experience with fever? Absolutely, replied Dr Taylor, a veteran of several long voyages who in fact had treated many such cases. ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Ferguson. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, he added quietly, is most pleased that you might consider the position favourably. When Taylor’s head had stopped spinning, he wondered whether he might be allowed a little time to consider the Lieutenant-Governor’s most generous offer. Unfortunately, insisted the two gentlemen, time was such that the Lieutenant-Governor was most anxious to see the position filled without delay, and so an answer was required, well, immediately. As soon as a stunned Taylor nodded his assent, he felt his hand pumped vigorously and was told to pack his bags to be ready to sail to Point Nepean in precisely … at this point Ferguson checked his fob watch … two hours’ time. Oh, Dr Hunt added, you would be advised to bring with you all the medicine and drugs you might have in your possession, as well as all those you can get your hands on at short notice. Then, thanking him profusely and wishing him a good day, Ferguson and Hunt were gone.
* * * *
Sitting in the wooden cottage he had had dismantled in England and brought out in pieces to be re-erected on his estate in Melbourne, which—in a touch of nostalgia for his French heritage—he had named Jolimont, news of the Ticonderoga hit Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe like a lightning bolt. Immediately, he knew himself to be facing the most serious crisis in his role of running this new colony. Not only could such a disaster have serious ramifications for the flow of able-bodied people willing to come to Victoria, but if the disease itself was allowed to gain a foothold in Melbourne itself … it was a picture that did not bear thinking about.
The Empire, he knew, would soon be on its way to Point Nepean along with Hunt and Ferguson, but with nearly 700 desperately ill people stranded on a beach, whatever relief she could bring would, he knew, not last long. He urgently inquired about what other provisions were available to be sent to the Ticonderoga. He then learned that, by remarkable fortune, the old Lysander had once more become available, on account of the initial diagnosis of smallpox among the men of the 40th Regiment of Foot now being declared a false alarm. Advanced syphilis, it transpired, was the disease in question. While undoubtedly ghastly for the sufferer involved, this was nonetheless a far cry from smallpox. The relieved men of the 40th had been allowed to disembark the Lysander, and the ship was given pratique—permission to enter port—a day or so later. Even better, 50 new beds had just been installed in her holds, and her stores of fresh water and other provisions had yet to be returned to the warehouses. She would therefore immediately be dispatched to Point Nepean, where she would distribute her goods, offer what help she could and remain as a hospital ship until the quarantine station could erect more permanent facilities. This would have been welcome news indeed for the people on board the Ticonderoga, as down at the little cove, help could not come fast enough.
* * * *
Unlike just about everybody else on board the Ticonderoga, Dr Sanger was showing some signs of recovery. Having been acting as his plenipotentiary these past few days, Dr Veitch conveyed his superior’s instructions when he was well enough to actually issue them, doing his best to reassure the passengers that a period of quarantine was a blessing in disguise—it was not only essential to stop the spread of the disease, but the enforced rest it entailed, not to mention the fresh food and medicine that would soon arrive, would provide the greatest incentive to a cure that could be asked for. In truth though, Veitch had shared his passengers’ shock at realising that they were headed not for port, but rather for a lonely beach, and for an indefinite period of time.
The pilot, Henry Draper, had not said much beyond delivering them to the sanitary station, but when Boyle searched the shoreline for evidence of such a station, all he could see in front of him was sand and scrub. Draper may at this point have quietly qualified his earlier remark with the words ‘future sanitary station’. He assured Boyle that help would be arriving, and that they must wait here until it did.
Boyle informed Veitch of the situation, adding that as far as anchorages went, this secure and sheltered little cove was not too bad. Wherever they found themselves, however, both agreed that the passengers—starting with the very sick—must be evacuated off the ship as soon as possible. Without waiting for instructions, Boyle directed those able-bodied of his crew to go ashore and begin to construct whatever shelter they could from the ship’s spare spars and sailcloth, which were hauled out from deep in her holds. In the bright sunshine, the working parties rowed ashore and toiled in front of the lime-burners’ cottages and further back among the dunes, using the hardy ti-tree branches as supports for makeshift tents.
Patrick Sullivan, William Cannon and a small group of local lime-burners and fishermen were more than alarmed to see a group of seamen storming ashore towards their homes like a small invading army. Confronting them, they demanded to know what exactly was going on. The crew of the Ticonderoga had no time for niceties, however, and relating what they had been through these last weeks—for the first time to outsiders—while they worked on the shelters, the little crowd, as well as those family members whose curiosity had overcome their fear to emerge from their dwellings, gathered around their uninvited guests in deepening silence while the story of the ship of death unfolded.
As they listened, Sullivan and Cannon, who had watched the vessel’s ominous approach from the other side of the bay the day before, realised that their worst fears were unfolding. None of it came as a complete surprise. It had now been months since the small surveying party led by the important doctor from Melbourne, Thomas Hunt, first arrived to inspect their beach and its environs. From that moment, the brothers-in-law realised that the clock was ticking on the day the government would take it back from them. For Sullivan, whose parents had already suffered exile back in Ireland when people of power decided they would leave their land, it seemed that history was repeating itself.
With some rudimentary shelters established, Veitch made an assessment of the little hospital ward taking shape on the beach and was pleased by what he saw. Delivering his patients to shore, however, would be a far more difficult matter. Except for the very worst cases, though, the risk must be taken to remove them from the ship, where he knew only too well there was no hope for them whatever. Again, the crew of the Ticonderoga would carry out the task, being instructed to extract people as delicately as possible from their berths or from the ship’s hospital and carry them, literally on their backs, to the deck then down the long gangway to the waterline, where rowboats would take them to shore. Some of the sick could walk, but not many.
Reporting back to Sanger, Veitch was told to delay not a moment further. It was a long, miserable and enervating process for all concerned, but by the end of the first day at the cove, 40 of the Ticonderoga’s most feverish and delirious passengers had been taken off and laid down on dry land for the first time in three months. Some, however, were simply too sick to move and were compelled to remain on the ship. For those who came ashore, it was all they could do to crawl into the shady nooks and shelters that had been provided for them by the sailors. Passenger James Dundas recalled years later that ‘there was very little canvas for tents, so they had to make bush mia-mias for us to camp in them … like black fellows’.1 Here, at the very least, they could look up at a clear sky, released finally from the dreadful smell, the deathly, suffocating atmosphere and incessant rocking of the ship.
The ship’s doctors, by contrast, could indulge in no such relief, faced as they were with an entirely new set of problems. Veitch estimated to Sanger that upwards of 250 people still required treatment and that not enough of anything was available to help them. To start with, there was hardly any bedding left on board that was not putrid, that of the dead having been thrown overboard after them, and much of the spare sailcloth had gone as well. And how were they expected to feed this burgeoning beach hospital? Time would be needed to remove stoves and other facilities from the ship and relocate them on to land. Nor were there any medical comforts remaining, with both Veitch and Sanger having now exhausted their own stocks as well as the ship’s. Then there was the question of who was to bury the dead, mounting up perilously on the deck in the warm spring sun. For it was now, upon arriving at her destination, that the Ticonderoga’s death toll reached its terrible zenith.
In the first few days of November, within clear sight of land, no less than fourteen people died on board the Ticonderoga. Alexander Mercer, 32, from Edinburgh followed his infant son, who had been one of the ship’s earliest victims back in August, leaving only his wife and six-year-old boy. The infant Elizabeth Wilkie perished—mercifully the only member of her family of five to do so—but the very opposite was the case for the Appleby family, which saw the death on 2 November of John Appleby, three, following his younger sister Emma and his mother Sarah to the grave, leaving Silas Appleby, 28, alone in a new and unfamiliar world.
The list continued: Euphemia Reid, 36; John Spinwright, 30; Janet Stevenson; and Mary Bunton, 31. Little James Isbister would be the first—but not the last—to die from his very large family of twelve, who had possibly travelled the furthest of anyone on board the Ticonderoga, having left their home in the remote Orkney Islands off Scotland’s north-east coast.
The worst day of the voyage was 4 November, when seven people died. One of those was Elizabeth Harcus, twenty, who the very next day would be joined by her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary, as the disease tore through the single women’s quarters. By the end of the voyage, her father, George, would have lost all the women in his family as well as a son. There would be more deaths the next day, and the day after that until the warm spring sunshine and healing rest would gradually begin their work. Meanwhile, the ship continued to be awash with misery, but the focus of Drs Veitch and Sanger had to be on the living. Without the continued assistance of their volunteer nurses, Mr and Mrs Fanning and the steady Highland lass Annie Morrison, the doctors could not possibly have coped.
When dusk came, a good number of the sickest passengers had been placed ashore in their hastily constructed quarters. It being too risky to continue transferring patients after dark, Captain Boyle called a halt to the proceedings as the sun started to set. As he did, he was approached by one of the more senior passengers on board, 49-year-old Malcolm McRae, who had travelled with his wife, Helen, 39, and their seven children ranging from seventeen-year-old Christopher to Malcolm, two, who was currently sick. As McRae would later recall in his letter in The Argus, he politely explained to the captain in his soft Highland accent that his only daughter, Janet, ten, had died that afternoon and he would like permission to go ashore and bury her. To Boyle, he looked as utterly worn out as a man could be, but he was at pains to maintain his dignity as well as his manners. The captain had no doubt a refusal would be met simply with a nod, a ‘Thank-you, Captain’, and a quiet departure. Despite the last of the rowboats having returned for the night, some light still remained on the western horizon. Boyle looked around for one of his crew. ‘You would need to be quick, Sir,’ he said to McRae. ‘I cannot have you returning in the dark.’ McRae shook his hand. ‘I thank you, Captain,’ he said, with just a hint of a failing voice.
With the help of her eldest brother, Christopher, the girl was retrieved from below and her father carried her out, under a cloth, her small body appearing to weigh little more than the cold, damp clothes that clung to her. He was led down the side gangway and waited there while the sailor retrieved the small rowboat. Doyle watched them as they set off for the nearby shore, the rich red rays of a dazzling sunset lighting his expressionless face.
A short time later, at the very edge of the dusk, they returned to the ship, where yet more grief awaited Malcolm McRae. His son, Malcolm, had also now died. Once more, he politely requested permission to bury him, but this time Boyle had to refuse. ‘Thank you, Captain,’ was the man’s only reply, as he nodded and turned quietly away, having lost two children in a single day. His son would be buried beside his sister the next morning, in a dry plot behind the dunes that the first mate had pegged out that afternoon. The boy would not be the last member of his family that McRae would have to bury before the ordeal was finally over.