To the people on the streets of Melbourne who gathered in huddles on that November Friday morning to hear the grizzly details of the Ticonderoga laid out by The Argus’s reporter under the memorable headline, ‘Terrible State of Affairs on board an Emigrant Ship at the Port Phillip Heads’, the notion of an overcrowded vessel struck down with disease was nothing new. During the latter half of 1852, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s four big double-deck ships had each arrived with varying amounts of sickness on board. The first of these had been the very large German ship, Borneuf, which had arrived in March with 83 of her passengers having died at sea, almost all of those being children and infants. This, though regrettable, was not seen as the catastrophe such an event would be deemed in later times. Children died frequently in the nineteenth century, particularly at sea, and in the case of the Borneuf, much of the blame was laid at the feet of the parents. In a report into the voyage, the Board concluded that ‘the high mortality rate was largely attributed to the insurmountable objection of Irish and Scots parents to seeking medical attention for their children’.1 The drinking water also failed on board this ship, with the inadequate storage facilities turning it putrid, green and undrinkable. Even so, only a handful of adults perished on board the Borneuf—a figure quite within acceptable limits—and the voyage was regarded as a success.
The Wanata was next. She was a ship of just over 1100 tons, arriving soon after the Borneuf. A total of 39 of her passengers had not survived the journey, but once again all but ten of those were children. Scarlatina, measles and ‘fever’ were cited as the chief complaints, and the Wanata was sent to the Red Bluff sanitary station for a period of quarantine.
Then, on 20 September, it was the turn of the mighty Marco Polo to make its grand arrival into Port Phillip, under the command of a man who was already a global celebrity of the high seas, ‘Bully’ Forbes. At first the newspapers were so enraptured by the time he had set—a record 68 days from Liverpool to Melbourne—that their triumphant headlines ignored the fact that 51 children and two adults had died under his care.
Slowly, however, people both in England and in the Australian colonies began to question the wisdom of crowding so many people into these Goliaths of the sea, simply to alleviate the logistical problems in which the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission had found itself. Letters to the Editor of prominent newspapers in both England and Australia began to reflect public concern, one of the earliest being from an anonymous writer in The Argus on 24 September:
Attention should be urgently directed to the injudicious and cruel system of sending out overcrowded vessels which seems to be gaining ground just now. Within the month three striking cases have occurred. The Borneuf, Wanata and Marco Polo have arrived from Liverpool with about 800 passengers each. The consequences of such overcrowding are sure to be fatal, and accordingly, the deaths were 83, 39 and 53 respectively during the voyages. The vessels were of the largest size, it is true, but it is perfectly obvious that no vessel, whatever its size, can safely carry such large numbers of passengers on a three months’ voyage.
In England, too, many who had a chance to inspect these large ships before they set sail were likewise shocked at what they encountered, as this long but pointed piece to a London daily on 27 September 1852 indicates:
The overcrowding of emigrant ships
When a body of men take it in hand to do a thing, and do not do it so much from a conviction of its being the best thing in the world they can do, but rather as a compulsory matter, they do not do it well. The juste milieu is one of those rocks ahead against which they run doggedly, and so break their pates. Now they overdo the business, as if, in a splenetic fit, they said—‘There! Take your ship; cram her full, and be off.’ Mr Osborne, the indefatigable and the zealous, gives us instance of this. He went the other day on board an emigrant ship which was just setting sail, and found that, though she was a noble vessel of her class, and that two decks (blessed are the humble in the lower deck, certainly)—were set apart for the passengers, the berths being of the proper authorized dimensions, and, as excellent arrangements were made for ventilation and other indispensable necessities as possible—still this ship (considerably under a thousand tons burthen) carried not less than eight hundred emigrants and a crew of sixty men! In addition to this, there was the stately complement of two surgeons to do battle with seasickness, fever, human miasmatic exudations. This was not a trip to Gravesend or the Naze where the heroic endurance of a few half hours of agony would be compensated for by a participation ‘in old English sports’, a polka up on the ‘gothic hill’, and a promenade ‘a la Musard’ between avenues of shrubs and ham sandwiches. It was a certain life and death affair that was to last for months—from four to eight perhaps, more or less; and here are a greater part of a thousand souls under a care of two surgeons, and a medicine chest upon the same scale as we may infer sent by the Government on such a voyage. If this be not carelessness for human life, we do not know what else to call it. We do not always know in what condition the decimated scarecrows land, but those who have voyaged across the tropics, in a crowded ship have some appreciation of the unutterable horrors men, women and children go through, or rather don’t go through. Fever and dysentery play a leading part in the ghastly drama. Want of water in calm latitudes, or under the torrid zone may be ‘better imagined than described’. Has anyone ever imagined the awful Golgotha which a plague ship becomes! If our kinsmen and our friends leave us forever to seek in a foreign land what they have failed to obtain in this, they ought not to be sent forth like felons in the hold of a convict ship or packed like the cargo of a slave vessel.
In Australia, meanwhile, one of those starting to add his doubt to the wisdom of commissioning very large vessels was Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe himself. Starting to sense the public mood, La Trobe, on 21 October when the Ticonderoga was still at sea, issued Dispatch Number 142 to his superior in London, Sir John Pakington, Secretary of State for the Colonies. In it he begged to direct ‘the serious attention of Her Majesty’s Government to the evils of disadvantages attendant upon the chartering of vessels of heavy burthen for the conveyance of large numbers of Emigrants to the colony’.2 The full text of that exchange has been lost, but if La Trobe’s fears were raised in this way in October, the November arrival of the Ticonderoga saw them horribly realised. In a dispatch of 9 November, he states:
I regret to be under the necessity of furnishing another example in proof of the propriety of the question being raised. On the 4th Inst. I received intimation through the Health Officer of the arrival of the Emigrant Ship ‘Ticonderoga’ from Liverpool, with 800 Government Immigrants, at the Port Phillip Heads, having lost 102 by death during her voyage from typhus and scarlet fever; and having an equal number of sick on board of the same disease; the Surgeon Superintendent also sick and the vessel in want of medicines and Medical comforts … I have appointed another Medical gentleman provided with every necessary in the way of medicines and medical comforts. Every effort will at once be made to cleanse the Ticonderoga.3
News of the plague ship spread fast. The same dramatic article announcing the Ticonderoga’s dreadful arrival in the Friday Argus was deemed important enough to be reprinted in the Geelong Advertiser the following day. With equal concern, the readers in the busy port town read of the drama unfolding even closer to their doorstep:
the authorities in Williamstown immediately furnished the government schooner Empire with the necessary supplies of live stock, beef, mutton, mild, vegetables, porter, wine spirits, and a medicine chest, and Dr Taylor, of the Ottillia, a gentleman of much practical experience, went down in her to the Ticonderoga, yesterday, to take charge, accompanied by Captain Ferguson, the Harbour Master. The Lysander ship, has also been taken up by the Government as a Quarantine Hulk, and proceeds to her destination at the Heads this day, having on board stores sufficient for all hands for three months, when further arrangements will be made which, we trust, will ameliorate the fearful state of things on board …
As dire as the situation was at Point Nepean, La Trobe was at least thankful that a full-blown crisis in busy Port Phillip had been averted due to the quick thinking of the pilot, Henry Draper, whose action to divert the Ticonderoga to the nascent sanitary station he later described as having been ‘judiciously made’.4 Captain Boyle too, fortunately, had had the wherewithal to begin offloading his passengers under his own volition without waiting for instruction. Had he made it to Melbourne, the outcry resulting from a full-blown typhus epidemic being unleashed on the under-policed and under-resourced colony in the grip of gold madness could scarcely be imagined. La Trobe could not, however, continue to count on the quick thinking of others, particularly as the newspapers were beginning to give full voice to the concerns of the public. Newspaper reporters now began to fall upon every scrap of news of the hapless vessel that they could find. On Tuesday, 9 November, The Argus published:
We have been kindly furnished with the following particulars relative to this unfortunate vessel by Charles Ferguson Esq., the Harbour Master at Williamstown, who has been down to the Heads in the Empire schooner, and returned on Sunday. It appears there were, on Friday about 714 emigrants on board; 100 deaths and nineteen births had occurred on the passage, seven of the former since the ship anchored at the Heads. There are at present 300 cases of sickness … tents have been erected with sails, spas, &c. of the ship on Point Nepean where a quarantine ground has been marked out … the Lysander ship, too, now at the Heads, will be fitted up as a hospital for the worst cases … both the surgeon and the assistant, belonging to the Ticonderoga, being in an extremely debilitated state. It is to be hoped the liberal measures being taken by the authorities in this case will counteract the further spread of the disease, which it is but natural to expect, when fresh air, exercise and liberal diet, are brought into operation.
Soon, however, the papers began to add their own thundering editorials to the narrative. On Monday, 15 November, The Argus editorial declared:
We must again advert to the evils arising from the sending out of large numbers of passengers in single ships. We lately alluded to several cases in which the mortality during the voyage had arrived at a very frightful extent. Since then, large English vessels have arrived also furnishing a sad list of deaths. Several vessels are now in quarantine, among them the Ticonderoga, which recently arrived with the terrible loss of 104 lives. When she anchored in our port, many scores of passengers were still ill, the doctor and his assistant were both laid up, and the medical stores were all consumed. From the result of such experience, it seems improper that any ship however large, however splendid her accommodation should endeavour to bring many hundred passengers for so long a voyage. Those vessels which have conveyed 200 or 300 passengers each have usually arrived without any serious loss of life; but those conveying 600 or 700 and upwards have frequently furnished such a list of casualties, as to lead us to strongly recommend to ship-owners to abstain from sending them, and passengers to avoid coming by them.
Word of the plague ship began to spread beyond the borders of the new colony, and soon a blistering article appeared in the combative but influential fortnightly Australian and New Zealand Gazette. In it, not only were the foretold consequences of employing large vessels laid bare, but the very practices of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, as well as assisted emigration in general, were brought into question:
In our last number we alluded to the fearful mortality which had taken place on board some ships from Liverpool to Australia, in consequence of over-crowding. Liverpool, or, rather, American ships, sailing from that port to the United States, have established an unenviable reputation for this system of packing live cargo, as Irish emigrants to America are evidently considered. Our impression was, that in Australian emigration a different course had been pursued by Liverpool shipowners with regard to Australian ships. And on inquiry we find that it is so; private ships sailing from Liverpool being in quite as good condition, both as regards comforts and provisions, as any out of London.
Our readers will be surprised that the floating pest-houses, in which two hundred and seventy-nine souls have been lost to their families and the colonies, are the property of, for the time being, and were shipped out under the eye of her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners, who have thus wasted the above enormous quantity of human life, and with it upwards of £5000 of the Victoria colonists’ money. In the name of humanity, we trust the colonists will, as they have intimated, stop the remission of any further land funds, if this is to be the use made of it. But let us recount the mortality on board these sea-shambles Borneuf, 83 dead; Wanata, 39 dead; Marco Polo, 53 dead; and Ticonderoga, a hundred and four dead! Total, 279 persons, starting from England less than six months ago, full of life and spirits at the cheering prospects before them. These have been hurried into eternity from having put confidence in her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners, whose latest discovery it appears to have been that the best way of promoting the health and safety of 800 souls on board each ship was to stow them away in the space which private shipowners would have allotted to 700. But on this point we will let Mr Rankin, the chairman of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, speak—The doctor is dead, and almost all the survivors are down with fever. The last case is the most striking, because the voyage, of 68 days only, must have been performed with winds invariably favourable. What, then, was the cause of this unusual and frightful mortality? The system of packing, which sends 800 in a space not more than enough for 700, and which stows passengers in lower deck berths without any better means of ventilation than a canvas windsail, which cannot be used in storms, when most needed.
As Chairman of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, I deem it my duty to state that not one of the above vessels was sent out by private individuals, but all of them were taken up and sent out by the Commissioners of Emigration. Every emigration ship is inspected by the Government officer, and no more passengers are allowed than the act of Parliament authorizes. So that private ships are compelled to take no more passengers than they can carry in health and safety. But her Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners have the power of experimentalizing as to how many out of eight hundred souls can be safely landed from one ship.
Our wonder is that they did not go the full length of the experiment, and stow away the whole of the live lumber in casks, with holes bored at the bottom. But happily, amidst this horrible slaughter, the weather was fine and the winds favourable, or few indeed would have reached their destination. In March last year, the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association urged on the Government the fact that no ship, whatever might be her size, could carry more than 600 persons in safety. The Great Britain, the largest ship afloat, took out this number, and lost one. In the very teeth of the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association, and in their own port, the emigration commissioners put on board 800, though the ships were not of the largest size! Had one of these ships only been thus fearfully visited, a pestilence, silent and uncontrollable, would have accounted for the slaughter. But here four ships sailing at different periods, though all under favourable circumstances on the voyage, similarly visited.
Till an investigation has taken place, let no man in his senses trust himself on board a Government emigrant ship. He may easily calculate his chance of getting to the end of the voyage. Here it is. The Ticonderoga had 800 souls on board at starting, and lost 104, including the doctor [sic]. The chance of being flung to the sharks is, therefore, just one in eight. People have usually been in the habit of considering themselves at least as well off in a Government emigrant ship as in a private one, but this is a delusion. We consider even Mr Rankin’s estimate of 600 persons in a ship as much too high. We should very much like some financial member of the House of Commons, to ask what sum was paid to the owners of this Ticonderoga. We are curious to know the particulars of this Government floating hospital, if only for the information of the colonists who send their money to be thus lamentably spent. If we recollect rightly, the Ticonderoga is not a British-built ship, but an old American liner; the receptacle of many a former cargo of Irish emigrants. We will not be positive on this point, but we do not expect to see the assertion contradicted. If the colonial legislatures, when they get the power of doing as they please with their own money, will aid societies like this, they will expend their money to some purpose, and we have no doubt that they will do so, as soon as the Emigration Commission has ceased to drain their exchequers.
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Back at Point Nepean, Dr Taylor, as Ferguson had suspected, was not coping. Although an experienced surgeon superintendent, having only recently in fact completed a relatively trouble-free run from England on the Ottillia, nothing in his experience could have prepared him—or anyone else—for the deluge of woe that awaited him at Point Nepean.
Conditions continued to be primitive in the extreme. Some people were lucky enough to be housed in the requisitioned cottages and tents, but most were confined to the hastily constructed canvas lean-tos that had been put together by the Ticonderoga’s crew and able passengers. Some, remembered a Mrs Cain, daughter of the first permanent resident of Portsea, were confined to bark shelters, living like Aboriginal people, while their attendants and family ‘waved branches over them to keep off the flies’.5 Donald McDonald, in a description for a newspaper written decades later, recalls that at night his mother would have to shake the frost from the blankets covering their small beach lean-to made from timbers and ti-tree branches.
With a huge workload, little help and not much he could practically do to help his patients in any case, Dr Taylor began to feel the stress of his position acutely. A few days into the posting, his wife and his two eldest sons arrived, his wife to assist him on board the Lysander, making up tinctures and prescriptions, and his sons to help with the distribution of the stores. It would all end badly for Dr Taylor. A year later, he recounted his take on the whole sorry experience at Point Nepean in a long and somewhat wounded letter to Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, in which he recounts a litany of injustices, particularly at the hands of Thomas Hunt, the man who had given him the job in the first place, but with whom he soon seriously fell out. Judging by the tone of his account, however, Taylor seems to have clashed with everybody—particularly the two men who were ostensibly there to assist him, Drs Sanger and Veitch:
The first surgeon of the ship, complained Taylor, was himself all of fever and altogether unable to render any assistance, while the junior surgeon, a young man without experience and of intractable temperament, was comparatively useless.6
Taylor’s is the splenetic rant of a man taxed beyond his capacities by a still desperate situation. In describing the entire set-up of the station as chaotic, he was undoubtedly correct. At one stage, he even had to shoot a stray bullock that had wandered into the station, then organise the cow-proof fence to prevent further bovine incursions. Overwhelmed, he could barely sleep, and was deprived of even some of the most basic necessities to make his tenure bearable:
Such excessive labour and mental anxiety, together with the want of sleep for many nights in succession, soon began to exhibit their depressing effects on the system. My legs swelled more and more, my appetite failed and at last when in the nighttime, after writing out my Report for the day, on the ground having neither chairs nor tables. I could find time for an hour’s rest that rest was denied me by the violent cramps which attacked my legs the moment I had fallen asleep.7
Aside from this, Taylor suffered acute diarrhoea, as well as the ignominy of the theft of his personal property, including his bed, forcing him to sleep on the ground, followed by his personal trunk being ransacked, with persons unknown making off with some of his clothes.
It appears that when Dr Hunt travelled down to Point Nepean on or about 9 November, he formed the opinion that Taylor was not the right person for the job and began moves to terminate his position once a replacement could be found. Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, however, seems to have been left out of this particular intrigue, and was apparently put in the embarrassing position of calling upon Taylor on his one visit to the station in December, dining with him and renewing his appointment, only to have him summarily dismissed by Dr Hunt a few days later. When informed of his sacking, in person by Dr Hunt, a flabbergasted Taylor challenged Hunt’s authority to dismiss him from an appointment ordained by the Lieutenant-Governor himself. According to Taylor, Hunt’s response was to threaten to pull the poor man’s tent down if he failed to vacate the area within two days.
In a letter informing La Trobe of his actions, Hunt stated: ‘I have this day dismissed Mr Joseph Taylor from the office of Resident Surgeon and Store keeper at the Sanitary Station Ticonderoga … I find him a very inefficient officer, much more given to talk than act.’8
Then, piling woe upon woe, Taylor contracted typhus, which had him in its grip until well into the new year, ‘from that time up until the middle of April, all is lost history to me, remembering nothing except some dreamy wanderings of my brain’.9
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Only very slowly did the death rate begin to decrease once the Ticonderoga’s passengers reached quarantine. On 20 November, The Argus, eager to keep its fixated readers up to date with the latest lurid details from Point Nepean, reported:
Frequent deaths are still taking place amongst the unfortunate emigrants of the Ticonderoga, five having occurred the other day; two more surgeons have been sent down and Dr Hunt, the Health Officer at Williams Town [sic] proceeded to Point Nepean yesterday to see if any further measures could be adopted for the improvement of the Quarantine Station at that place.
On 16 November, John Hando, 49, whose sixteen-year-old daughter Anna Maria had been one of the Ticonderoga’s first victims on 23 August, also died. A broken heart could well have hastened his demise. In October, he had also lost his wife, Maria, and just four days earlier, his remaining daughter, Emma, also perished. Only eighteen-year-old Charles and his two brothers, aged seven and ten, were left of the family of seven that had boarded the ship thirteen weeks earlier.
Another of the English passengers, Mary Ann Cheeney, 33, died on 16 October, leaving her husband alone to raise their children, William and Mary, both under ten; Elizabeth Taylor, one, became the sole victim of her family the following day, and Janet Mattheson, twenty, died just one day before her infant son, George.
Perhaps one of the most poignant stories was that of one of the few childless couples on board the Ticonderoga, Andrew and Margaret Rutherford, aged 27 and 28 respectively, and about whom little else is known. Margaret had died on one of the ship’s last days at sea, possibly even within sight of land, on 31 October, while her husband passed away in quarantine twenty days later, on 20 November. Unlike most of the ship’s other victims, whose families were able, despite the tragedy of losing loved ones, to go on to establish family roots in Australia, nothing whatever remained of Andrew and Margaret’s bold endeavour to come to Australia on the ship that would cost them their lives.