Emigrants and numbers
From a crisis to find enough able bodies to rescue the 1852 Australian wool clip, the British and colonial governments now found that there were not enough ships to carry the deluge of those who suddenly wanted to go. Everyone, it now seemed, was determined to participate in this ‘great race’ south to Victoria to make their fortune before—as they had seen happen in California—the gold started to peter out. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1850, just over 16,000 emigrants, both assisted and private, made their way to Australia from the United Kingdom. In 1851, that figure jumped to 21,532. However, 1852 saw an extraordinary increase to 87,881 people leaving for Australia, making it the highest in the 50-year period between 1830 and 1880.[1]
The Board, for years having done its best to spruik the benefits of Australia with limited success, now found that it was swamped with applicants, and the ships it had previously relied on to transport its assisted emigrants were no longer available. These had long departed, scattered across the world’s oceans, having filled their berths with the far more prosperous class of private passengers willing to pay their own way and delivering the shipowners a much larger profit per head.
The Board now scrambled to find new ships. In 1850, to increase passenger numbers, the relative luxury of a private cabin—for those few passengers able to afford it—was abolished, with everyone now corralled into the single class of steerage. They soon found, however, that few shipowners were interested in applying for the assisted emigrant trade when better-paying private passengers were willing to fill their berths. In Liverpool alone, shipping lines were struggling with a waiting list of over 7000 unassisted emigrants, having already shipped 6000 over the previous twelve months. Pressure came from the other side of the world too, as the Board’s agent in Melbourne now recommended that vessels of no less than 800 tons be hired to bring over much larger numbers of the kinds of people who were not likely to head straight to the goldfields as soon they set foot on the wharf. The Board therefore had little choice but to look to a class of ships previously uncontemplated: those big, fast, twin-deck ‘extreme clippers’ of America.
Poring over their dimensions and sailing records, the Board discovered, to its considerable relief, that not only did these big new ships conform to British statutory regulations regarding the movement of assisted passengers, but that the mortality rate on board was in fact slightly lower than on smaller vessels. In addition, the Americans themselves—having experienced the boom time of emigration with the California gold fever—were now keen to revisit their success in this new rush to Australia, and were preparing to expand their reach with several large and new clippers. The economics added up as well. Whereas a smaller vessel that could offer more comfortable accommodation needed a higher number of privately paying passengers to make a profit, the larger ships’ economies of scale could still make a tidy sum crowding a greater number into one large class.
When the Board’s assessors did the figures, it was realised that some of these ships were capable of carrying close to a thousand people at time. Here, however, they had reason to pause. They were experienced in transporting numbers in the hundreds, sometimes up to 500 in a single vessel, but given the ever-present hoodoo of disease at sea, how feasible would it be to transport up to double those numbers at once? Plying back and forth across the Atlantic on voyages of a couple of weeks’ duration was one thing; two or three months or more at sea travelling to the opposite side of the globe was a far more daunting prospect.
Whatever reservations the Board may have had about commissioning such large vessels, no fewer than four were nevertheless invited to tender, and all four were quickly accepted and the leases drawn up. They were the 1300-ton Wanata, virtually new from her builder’s yard in New Brunswick; the 1495-ton German-owned Borneuf; the enormous 1625-ton Marco Polo—in fact, a triple-decked ship—and, the smallest as well the last to tender, the Ticonderoga. In 1852, each of these ships would make their way, heavily laden with passengers, to Victoria.
Anticipating the rush in demand to emigrate, the imperial government passed An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Relating to the Carriage of Passengers by Sea 1852, known otherwise as simply the Passengers Act, setting out specific standards of accommodation, victualling and accountability with which British passenger ships were bound to comply. The new regulations stated, among other things, that every passenger be issued three quarts of water daily; sleeping berths should be not less than 6 feet in length and 18 inches in width, and that a complete and detailed list, the Master’s List, be made of each embarking passenger.
Once the owners of the Ticonderoga signed the contract, her master, Captain Boyle, informed the Board that she would indeed be capable of accepting the maximum number of 630 ‘statue adults’ legally permitted for her tonnage, at a cost to the Board of £17 each, undercutting the next nearest quote of £18, 17s and 6d. What constituted a ‘statue adult’, however, is—like tonnage—somewhat complicated. It was defined by the Passengers Act as being any passenger over fourteen years of age, or any two under fourteen. Infants less than one year old—and on the Ticonderoga there were many of those—did not count at all. This partially accounts for the uncertainty surrounding the exact number of individuals who boarded the Ticonderoga at Birkenhead. Official statistics differ. According to the Victorian Health Officer’s report written after the voyage, there were 811, whereas the British Parliamentary Papers state 797. The Ticonderoga’s own passenger records state a total of 814. Whatever the exact figure, it represented a sound profit for her owners who would receive half the per head fee on embarkation, the other half on arrival.
Deep within the bowels of the British Public Record Office in Kew, just outside London, a list of ships chartered by the Board still exists. Despite the passing of more than a century and a half, the Ticonderoga’s contract remains in excellent condition, its terms laid out in the superb steel-nib copperplate handwriting of the day:
‘Ticonderoga’: Tonnage 1280: Colony—Melbourne:
Contract Price—£17:0:0
Date to be ready—26 July (1852) Birkenhead
Date of Departure—4 August (1852), Birkenhead
Brokers—Lindsay
Surgeons—J.C. Sanger, J.W.H. Veitch[2]
It goes on to break down the embarking emigrants into categories: 160 married men and an equal number of married women; 106 single females but only 68 single males; 126 boys under fourteen; 147 girls under fourteen. The manifest also mentions nationality: 140 English, 643 Scots, but only a handful of Irish—just fourteen. The quoted tonnage (which as stated varies in other sources) of 1280 conforms roughly to the permitted amount of statue adults, entered in the contract as ‘630½’. Underneath this figure, however, is a small but neat pencil mark reading ‘598’, undated, and with no other reference or explanation. Perhaps an official in the Board sensed, presciently, that at 630—a figure that in fact translated to several hundred more actual living souls—the Ticonderoga would be seriously over-crowded.
9
Departure
By the third day at the Birkenhead emigration depot, the anticipation brewing among the hundreds of emigrants soon due to depart on the Ticonderoga was palpable. For people used to the quiet routine of rural village life, the past few days had been a whirlwind.
2
British Public Record Office, List of Ships Chartered by the Land and Emigration Commission, CO 386/179, Folio 7