When news of her arrival spread, she was forbidden to travel up the bay to Melbourne, and instead ordered to disgorge her wasted human cargo onto an isolated beach. The site became a makeshift quarantine station that then evolved into an institution lasting more than a century.
On this lonely shore, Dr Veitch shouldered a double burden since the ship’s senior surgeon, Dr Sanger, had himself succumbed to the disease. For more than six weeks, Dr Veitch continued to oversee those in quarantine, assisted now by a handful of the passengers, particularly a quiet, striking Highland woman to whom fatigue meant nothing, and who had been one of the first to respond, without question, to his urgent pleas for help. Even here, on the beach, many would continue to die.
After the last of the funerals, and the inquiry that sought to ensure nothing like this disaster would ever occur again, Veitch took his dark-eyed Annie far from the sea, settling with her in central Victoria, where he lived his years as a quiet country doctor and local councillor, never setting foot on a ship again.
Although I never gave my father any indication of just how strongly I was affected by the tale, the time has come for me to take up the mantle of my family’s saga, and recount the doomed journey of the Ticonderoga and the poor souls she carried. It is, of course, more than the story of just one man, or just one family. Hundreds survived the voyage and went on to establish themselves as the first in long lines of Australian families that prosper to this day. On this island continent, we are all of us, save for those who walked here millennia ago, boat people. This is the story of how some of us arrived, aboard the doomed Ticonderoga.
My father died more than a decade ago. Were he still alive, though, I would ask him—along with many other things—whether he felt his connection to the Ticonderoga saga was a privilege or a burden. I suspect he would answer, ‘Both’. I am yet to form my own conclusion.
1
A lonely beach
Brothers-in-law William Cannon and Patrick Sullivan squinted to the sun, not quite yet at its midday peak, resting for a moment on their shovels. Their trade of lime-burning was hot work, made more so by this warm November morning. In front of them, across a few hundred yards of coarse, white sand dunes, stretched a narrow ribbon of beach. Beyond that lay the sparkling expanse of Port Phillip Bay. If both men were to have strolled the short distance to the beach, then set off in opposite directions, one of them would have had only a short journey to the west before reaching the mouth of the bay at Point Nepean, where the narrow gap—known simply as the Heads—opens to the treacherous and unpredictable waters of Bass Strait. The other man, heading east and following the great sweep of the bay’s shoreline as it turned north, would have faced a trek of several arduous days through eucalypt and ti-tree scrub to the top of the bay before reaching the bustling settlement of Port Phillip and the town of Melbourne, now in the grip of gold fever. He could then, if he chose, have continued along the shoreline to the south-west, passing the smaller port settlement of William’s Town—as it was then known—before eventually arriving, not quite full circle, at Point Lonsdale, the opposite jaw of the mouth of this large and almost landlocked bay.
The lime-burning and fishing leases that Sullivan and Cannon, along with a number of other pioneering families, had acquired for their lonely stretch of beach made for a sparse, though not unprofitable, life. The expanding city hungrily devoured every ounce of the quicklime their kilns could produce from the piles of aeons-old sea creatures around them, providing the mortar for the bricks, streets and lanes of Melbourne. Sullivan had even put down some roots, constructing a tidy whitewashed three-bedroom cottage using local stone and wattle and daub walls. Outside, a small well had been sunk, providing passably fresh water struck just a few feet beneath the sandy surface. Large expanses of gnarled ancient ti-trees provided the dense, heavy fuel required to heat the lime kilns as well as the men’s winter hearths. In the several years these two men and others had worked their leases, not much had changed along their peaceful stretch of beach, and this November morning they had no reason to suspect that their idyllic little world would soon to be consumed by catastrophe.
In the middle of their regular mid-morning break, the men lit a pipe and spoke quietly about the afternoon’s work. Suddenly, Sullivan’s face darkened as something across the water drew his gaze. ‘Look there,’ he said, his voice low and ominous. His companion looked up, and both men fell into silence as they observed a magnificent black sailing ship apparently heading straight for them.
For Sullivan and Cannon, the sight of passing ships further out on the bay was nothing new. In July 1851, Victoria had finally been carved out of New South Wales and proclaimed a partially self-governing Crown colony, with a promise that it would become a full colony in its own right in five years’ time. Then, barely a month later, the electrifying announcement came: gold—apparently in unbelievable quantities—had been found at Clunes near the inland settlement of Ballarat. From that moment, it seemed to Sullivan and Cannon, the steady trickle of ships became a torrent.
In March 1851, for example, the records show just a handful of major ships dropping anchor in Melbourne: the Dockenhuden, Harriette Nathan, Ranchi and Favourite—schooners and barques bringing a few hundred passengers, mainly from other Australian ports. A year later, after the shockwave of gold had begun to reverberate, Port Phillip recorded no less than 43 arrivals, almost all of them emigrant vessels of all sizes and from all parts of the world. There was the 450-ton Celia from Gothenburg, the barque Wilhelmine from Batavia, the 851-ton Lady Elgin from Plymouth, and the 257-ton George from Singapore. Everyone, it seemed, suddenly wanted to come to Victoria.
The previous September, they had even watched the arrival of the gigantic clipper Marco Polo, which astonished the world by powering past the Heads a mere 68 days after departing Liverpool, with her master, the famous Captain James Nicol ‘Bully’ Forbes, proudly standing on the forecastle, brandishing a copy of an English newspaper kept in pristine condition from the morning of his departure, 4 July 1852. Across the route known as the ‘Great Circle’, through the fiercest of Southern Ocean storms, Forbes had ridden his ship like a wild beast, close to the edge of Antarctica as well as his terrified passengers’ wits. At the height of one such gale, his vessel tearing along at a demented speed, one passenger braved the pitching deck to approach Forbes as he stood beside the wheel, apparently mesmerised by the demonic elements swirling around him. For the sake of his own and the other passengers’ comfort, he begged the Captain to consider reefing some sail and slowing down a little. The captain’s reply, ‘Sir, I’m afraid it is a case of Hell or Melbourne’[1] passed quickly into maritime folklore. Averaging a daily total of 336 nautical miles, ‘Bully’ Forbes’ record would stand for years.
As impressive as the Marco Polo and many other vessels had been, though, neither Sullivan nor Cannon had seen anything quite like the great, black, deathly quiet ship that was now approaching from the far side of the bay and preparing to hove-to just a few hundred yards off their peaceful beach. She was, they could tell, an emigrant vessel—and a big one. Not quite as large as the Marco Polo, but with finer lines; her darkly painted hull still fresh despite a long sea voyage; four masts, and the distinctive steep-raked, slicing bow of the American-built clippers. A beautiful ship indeed, noted her two lonely observers, but something about her was not right. Where on earth were her passengers? Particularly on such a fine day as this, the exhaustion and anxiety of months spent crammed into a few square feet of dank space below deck alongside hundreds of others would normally finally give way to joyous relief and celebration. Only now, gliding up this calm and generous bay, having survived the endless uncertainties and warded off the haunting visions of rocks splitting open wooden walls with seas rushing in to rip loved ones from outstretched arms, could a future at last be contemplated. Those who had trunks had them brought up from the lower holds to the upper deck, where they would select their finest outfit for their arrival. The ladies in particular would look splendid, adorning the ship like exotic birds with their red and green satins to mark their arrival at the dawn of a new life. But this ship, as the men remarked, was ‘like a ghost ship’: silent.