On 19 December, Dr Hunt, who had spent the last few days satisfying himself that the crisis was abating, gave the all-clear for the Ticonderoga to leave and complete the final stage of her long journey from Birkenhead to Port Phillip. Some passengers, though, now employed by the government in quarantine, were more than happy with their lot and elected to stay on at the cove, which would become known as Ticonderoga Bay as the station became established.
In her extensive research, Mary Kruithof has discovered the identities of those who remained behind as their fellow passengers departed.1 James Swan, having travelled from Ayrshire with his wife Margaret and four-year-old son, and who was employed as one of the first of the station cooks, felt he had landed himself an excellent position. Some of the stonemasons—Robert Taylor, Alexander Gardiner and Henry Goodrich—likewise thought the terms of 6 shillings a day offered by Captain Ferguson to start building the station’s first structures agreeable, and decided to remain there.
As more passengers recovered and more were released from the Lysander, the employed hospital attendants were also let go. This was not so for the Fanning family, who chose to stay on the Lysander, which for the time being would be a permanent part of the station, continuing to serve as a floating hospital. Having set the most sterling example in being among the first of the few at sea to answer the captain’s and the doctors’ calls for volunteer nurses, they continued to do so at the station, Mary as a nurse and John as a cook.
For the majority of those still on the beach, however, the time was approaching to leave it behind. Early on the morning of 22 December, Dr Hunt gave the final signal to depart and, once again, the Ticonderoga’s passengers began the difficult process of embarkation. Unlike at Birkenhead, however, there was no dock on which to line up, and certainly no brass band playing them off on their way. It was nevertheless another tediously slow process, with the ship’s rowboats being the only means of ferrying people and their luggage to the ship.
None had been in greater need of the weeks of enforced rest than Captain Boyle, who had not only exhausted himself in the course of the terrible voyage, but had lost his own brother on the day they landed. Some of the passengers had not even realised that Boyle was still among them on the beach camp, but now he was quite literally back at the helm, directing the little flotilla of boats and again issuing commands to the crew in preparation to sail.
It took many hours for the hundreds of passengers, as well as their luggage, to be reloaded onto the ship. Many had dreaded the idea of ever setting foot on her again, and would have preferred the trials of any kind of overland route to Melbourne if one could have been arranged. For the many passengers who had lost family members while at sea, it was a particularly unwelcome reunion with the vessel, associating it as they did with nothing but death, filth and suffering. A handful of patients, still gravely ill, remained on the Lysander with their supporting families—some to recover, others to be numbered among the Ticonderoga’s final dead. For those who had the capacity to comprehend it, however, the imminent departure of the Ticonderoga while they remained in hospital must have seemed a death sentence in itself.
As soon as people stepped foot on board the Ticonderoga, they immediately felt they could have been on a different vessel entirely. The ship they had remembered from the voyage was now almost unrecognisable.
The first thing they noticed was the smell—or rather, the lack of it. The revolting typhus stench of hundreds of dead and dying people, which had seemed to pervade the very beings of those subjected to its stink, was now gone, replaced by the strong, acrid waft of the limewater that the crew had applied to every surface. The deck was tidy, ropes were properly coiled and a sense of order prevailed. That section where, several weeks earlier, corpses awaiting burial had been piled horribly under a rough piece of canvas was now just another part of the foredeck.
Down below, the difference was even more stark. Several fresh coats of whitewash had transformed the filth and gloom of the voyage’s terrible denouement into a clean and orderly internal area that, on account of all the bunks having been disposed of, was also now remarkably more spacious. This, ironically, left precious few places to sit, and passengers now had to squeeze themselves and their trunks into any nook they could secure for the several hours’ journey up to Hobson’s Bay.
Before their departure, all those on deck, having once again picked out some of their better clothes for their belated arrival into Melbourne, stood transfixed as the last of the rowboats returned to the ship, laden not with people, but with some of the large pile of luggage that had, for all the weeks of quarantine, been kept out of the weather at a quiet corner of the beach. This colourful collection of trunks and boxes was the luggage of the dead, being brought solemnly back to the ship, the names of their deceased owners still clearly marked on the sides. The passengers watched the melancholy progress of the little boats quietly, as if observing a funeral procession. Then their eyes turned back to the shore, to the cemetery that had started as a patch of green but that now held nearly 70 of those who would never complete their journey. Even from the deck, some of the graves could be made out, marked by raw blocks of sandstone pulled up from the beach or some bits of timber purloined from the ship. Other graves were more pathetic, and perhaps even more poignant, indicated by nothing more than a couple of sticks nailed into a little cross. Many other passengers were simply buried in unmarked graves, decorated with little scatterings of seashells, pebbles and some of the more colourful wildflowers that abound on the peninsula in spring.
Weighing anchor at last, the Ticonderoga caught some of the warm wind blowing from the west and, again under the command of Thomas Boyle, turned away from the little beach forever.