A reflection on the journals of ship’s surgeons on women’s convict ships bound for Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales.

[Please note this article deals with the historical medical details of the deaths of children.]

You could always hang surplus criminals, but there were murmurings that that was maybe a bit inhumane. Packing them into decaying naval hulks shored up in swampy riverbeds wasn’t really working, either. So Britain hit upon the marvellous solution of sending them off to Australia, which Britain had, ironically, stolen[1].

With transportation, you had what often amounted to a sentence of permanent exile levied mostly against the poor, as if poverty were so unseemly it was best moved offshore. Transportation was often considered a more merciful sentence than hanging, but equally often perhaps, with its danger and disease, was simply an extended execution, slower and more complicatedly cruel.

There is a tension implicit in the idea of a convict ship of women. The ships themselves were female, and they were prisons, of course, but liminal ones, bearing their cargo somewhere else. They were vessels, holding life against the dangers of the outside world, but they were also vulnerable to those dangers, and subject to profound superstition from the male sailors. And a woman on a ship was bad luck.

Convict women were overwhelmingly young, and they often brought children with them into the weird and perilous halfway space of the ships. What else could you do if you were sentenced to exile? If you had trusted family, I suppose you could leave the children with them. But it must have been a difficult thing to balance, impossible even: the harm of separation against the danger of the voyage. I can’t even complete this as a thought experiment, picturing my own children on some receding shore, or looking for the joy amongst the rats belowdecks. Sometimes, too, the women would get pregnant by sailors and give birth. Unsuccessful childbirth had brought many a woman to legal grief a couple of centuries previously in witch hunts, and birthing in the half-folkloric, half-scientific space of the prison ship, called she and usually named after a woman but hostile to womanhood, strikes me as horrific in every possible way.

How distinctly less free these women were than their male counterparts, tethered as they were to those who were most precious and most defenceless. How much more comfort they must have had, and more heartache.

. . .

If you read between the lines, you can divine something of how all this played out in a practical sense in the meticulous journals kept by the surgeons on board these ships. Rather than the bloody-sawed barber-surgeons of my nightmares, the ships’ surgeons were trained doctors, and often deeply invested in their work. You find real human emotion, from both the surgeons themselves and the women and children who were their patients. There is exasperation, judgement, pain and despair, but also an irritated kind of humour, empathy and – from time to time – love[2].

The journals are densely populated, suggesting busy days amongst unhappy flesh and minds. Women and children tumble over each other down the columns. There is diarrhoea, vomit, pus, mucus and pain. Things fester. Often you can find reference to the same person, over and over, symptoms lessening or worsening and new conditions presenting themselves, the spectrum of yellows, greens and browns of their bodily secretions faithfully recorded, their blood, their pallor, ending only with discharge, death or disembarkation.

There’s an “old woman” of 50 whose insanity “seems feigned”[3]. There are “indolent” mothers and “dirty” children[4] (literally me and mine). Treatments range from the horrific (bloodletting, blistering) to the pleasant (glass of beer). Surgeons were also partial to administering enemas, and I suppose it’s up to the individual where that practice falls on the scale of bad to good.

There are punishments, too: at one point, two women are handcuffed together and deposited into the “Coal Hole”[5] for bad behaviour. I’ve tried to imagine this, too: thinking of women I know, picturing myself shackled to one of them and pushed down into some dark hole. What would we talk about? Picking out narratives to follow is compulsive, scanning through the looping text for a particular name.

The narratives that come most clearly into focus for me were those of the children, with their mothers ever-present, faithful advocates. There are many instances of these surgeons demeaning, disbelieving or judging their patients, but there are perhaps just as many moments in which they rise above their prejudice and partiality and really fight for not only the lives but the ease and comfort of their charges. You find the mothers protecting their children from painful “cures”, and the surgeons acquiescing to these mothers, despite everything: despite the difference in class and power, and that the surgeons really fancied bloodletting and blistering for just about anything. In most such cases I was able to find, they still bowed to the mother caring for her child.

Robert Espie, surgeon aboard the Lord Sidmouth from mid-1822 until early 1823, reproduced his seven ship’s rules at the beginning of his journal. They are a mix of moral and practical strictures: no sex between the women and the sailors, no swearing or blaspheming, no sitting up late and disturbing others, no thieving; every woman was to keep herself and her environment clean, every woman was to receive her fair share of food, and all complaints were to be reported to Espie only (justified for reasons of efficiency, but I suspect megalomania).

The surgeon was patriarch. The surgeon was moral exemplar, doler out of favour and punishment to these grown women as to children. It sounds a bit like a school camp for dysfunctional teens (again, me) except that the penalty was solitary confinement. These rules seem to me to be strangely curtailed, at times too general and at others too specific, yet each presented as no more or less important than the next. Overwhelmingly, there is the strain between the dangers of trespass (sexual coercion, pregnancy, disease and starvation) and the dullness of a narrow routine in narrow confines.

A notable absence was no official rules around the treatment of the children.

On the 1822 voyage of the Mary Ann is the case of Mary Walton, who was 17 or 18 years old and “a girl of great wickedness”, according to ship’s surgeon James Hall. Hall was “[a] peculiar character…deeply religious, and [who] professed extreme concern over the moral condition of the female convicts on board. His punishment of the women always culminated in a paternal embrace as soon as the offender evinced penitence.”[6]

Yikes.

After the voyage was over, Hall ended up in trouble for getting embroiled in a spat with a fellow doctor he thought was taking advantage of a young convict girl, Ann Rumsby, who appears from time to time in his journal, including for complications from a bloodletting. I wonder how many paternal embraces she received.

. . .

Mary Walton’s situation is interesting for a few reasons, bleak though it is. She had already suffered a great deal, even before she boarded the Mary Ann. Months before, when she was still in gaol, she was hit so hard in the head she was still in pain onboard the ship and went to Hall for treatment. She was also suffering some extended and hidden ailment; her periods had stopped, and instead she bled from the stomach and nostrils. She suffered serious gastrointestinal pain, swelling, pain with urination, and constipation.

Hall tried to cure her with bloodletting and purging, and with making her swallow pine oil, twice, which each time she vomited back up. At first she refused an enema, but then he performed one, and examined her rectum, and gave her an ivory plug to wear. This is a girl in her late teens, remember, and alone: no parents.

At one point she vomited her tea, which Hall discovered had been laced with zinc sulphate. Mary Walton told him that the nurse gave her this laced brew. “[S]o much mystery hangs over this girl’s conduct that I shall stop noticing her statement of complaints,” wrote Hall. Despite her distress, despite her symptoms, he resolved to ignore what she said henceforth. He seemed to have grown to despise her. But, he noted, “the belly is much swoln”.

Next she was scalded on the “breast & belly”, and, after she healed, was scalded again in exactly the same way. This second set of burns did not heal, instead becoming “ulcerated”. Then, after a few weeks, Hall was alerted that she was very ill; although her pulse was normal and she was not feverish, her tongue was chalk-white.  He found discoloration on her fingers, which he identified as argentum nitricum (nowadays used as a homeopathic remedy for complaints ranging from anxiety to farting). Hall used “many enquiries & threats” to extract her confession that she put some on her tongue and then swallowed the rest. “She had,” he wrote, “no reason to justify her conduct.”

So here is a teenage girl suffering genuine medical distress and engaged in serious self-harm. Mary poisoned herself, she perhaps scalded herself – the fact that it happened twice in the same way at least makes this a possibility – and she took tea mixed with zinc from the nurse. She tried to resist an incredibly invasive rectal examination by Hall but then he either convinced her or did it anyway.

In this case, Hall presents himself as a man of little empathy and imagination. Why on earth was Mary’s situation a mystery to him? Couldn’t he think: why is she in such despair? Was she trying to kill herself? Or was she pregnant, and trying to get rid of it? This is the idea I keep coming back to. It seems hard to believe that Hall could have missed this, but there is the evidence: her periods had stopped, she kept ingesting various poisons and potions, and her belly was swelling[7].

The vulnerability of the women, and the desperately little power they held over their own bodies is here magnified. Even filtered through Hall’s distrustful and disdainful perspective, we can see the abject despair of a very young woman. Finding yourself pregnant could mean the end of your reputation, or your health, or your strength, or your spirit, or your life.

Mary Walton was barely out of childhood herself, but what about the very young? The experience of infants and children aboard these ships is hard to imagine. I think of the sunshine of my baby’s smile and his passion for pictures and splashing, and my daughter’s complicated thoughts, complicated artwork, her eczema and its constant treatment, and the need they both have for challenge, for kindness, for attention, for novelty, for comfort, for love. How to meet these needs onboard a ship such as these?

How, even, to meet the more basic needs, like the need to keep pus-yellow infection from sinking its yellow teeth into my daughter’s cracked skin? And what would I do if her skin did get infected and I knew the only doctor available might want to cut into these wounds and bleed her? Mortality was higher amongst the children than amongst the adults, and although the surgeons did work to save these young lives, time and again, they failed.

. . .

There was a collision of purpose between the surgeons and the mothers. The surgeons did not hesitate in using the full arsenal of their quasi-modern medical training, never mind the cruelty of the treatment. Meanwhile, the mothers’ focus was to prevent extended suffering for their children, even if it meant letting them go.

At the end of the voyage of the Midas, just before Christmas in 1825, surgeon Charles Cameron peevishly noted that “in each case [of the deaths of two children] I was thwarted completely in my wishes respecting their treatment by the over Tenderness and foolishness of their mothers”. These cases were six- or seven-year-old William McDonald, who died on September 9, and five-year-old Hannah Clarke, who died on October 22.

William McDonald, the son of a free woman, died of hydrocephalus. Cameron complained with great frustration that William’s mother did not alert him of the case until it was too far advanced. Of this case, Cameron wrote that “[i]t was decidedly, from the first moment I saw [William] a case of Inflammation of the Brain tending to Hydrocephalus, or rather when I first saw him, he was far advanced into that state which is commonly described as the second stage of Hydrocephalus. I have always considered it my duty to look after the health of the children but I have lately been so much engaged with the Patients ill of Fever, that I have not been able to attend to this part of my Duty; and his mother, first allowed the disease to proceed to the state I mentioned, by perhaps not observing it, and afterwards, even when I saw him, and pointed out to Her the dangerous nature of the disease she was so tender of the Boy that she would not allow me to give him the medicines which I wished, and He himself was so cross that He would hardly take anything whatever.”

This is heavy with inconsistencies. He blamed the mother but admitted he had not been able to do his duty himself for reasons beyond his control, or so he claimed; he said he knew right away it was hydrocephalus, yet nowhere noted this diagnosis in his journal except right at the end, in hindsight. He sounds defensive to me, like he feels guilty.

Five-year-old Hannah Clarke, who suffered from an inflammation of the small intestine, also suffered Cameron’s treatments, including bloodletting. The behaviour that so annoyed Cameron in her mother, Elizabeth Clarke, was that Elizabeth twice removed the “Blisters” he applied to her child’s abdomen. These were hot dressings that raised blisters and were as painful as you might imagine.

Espie, the Lord Sidmouth’s surgeon, described the deaths of twin 18-month-old infants as sacrificed not “to disease, but to inanity”. These baby girls weighed less than seven kilograms each, which is around the average weight of a five-month-old girl in Australia today. They had been born in the workhouse, and Espie wrote that they were so “starved and small that their dimensions … might be said to be invisible”.

Despite this, the twins could speak and showed “a quiet curiosity”. They were still breastfed, which, to my mind, might be the reason why they had survived as long as they did. However, Espie attributed their extreme ill health to this very breastfeeding and wrote of how he entreated the mother to wean them, and how she refused[8]. Breastfeeding is draining in both senses of the word, and nowadays it is recommended that someone breastfeeding twins take in an extra 4,000 to 5,000 kilojoules per day.

The mother, a woman only identified as “Edwards” was not a convict but a free passenger. Coming from time in a workhouse, travelling alone with her twin daughters, she was surely seeking a better life. The twins eventually atrophied to death. “The mother,” Espie writes, “required much care and nursing to restore her health”.

Aboard the Mary, with surgeon Harman Cochrane, can be found the case of William Wood and his family. It was 1823, the ship had been underway for about two months, and two-and-a-half-year-old William’s health was in danger. He was suffering diarrhoea and a cough so bad it made him vomit thick mucus and blood. William had already survived a litany of ailments, which his mother, convict Elizabeth Wood, faithfully reported on. There had been pustules and a chest infection, for which he had been repeatedly given those painful, hot blisters. He had had hooping cough. Apart from medicine, all he had eaten onboard the ship was salted meat, but over the next few days he stopped accepting food.

Cochrane applied a blister to William’s chest, which healed, but Elizabeth Wood refused to allow Cochrane to apply another. Here is another instance of that unlikely respect. Cochrane writes of trying to convince her, and of her simply refusing. On this, he obeys her.

William was feverish and declining rapidly. His situation began to seem like torture, both in his symptoms and the treatments Cochrane administered. He began having seizures, small ones at first, but rapidly growing so serious that his whole body locked up, his muscles became rigid, and his breathing momentarily stopped. Like tetanus, but not tetanus. Of treatments, Cochrane wrote that a “ ... Warm Bath has been frequently used with frictions, Blisters have been applied to his Back and behind his Ears, Enemas have been thrown up and Tinct. Opii and Camphor, given when he could swallow.” He also applied mercury. In other words, rubbing, burning, enemas, and poison.

At this point, William took a turn for the better, and he was given a three-day respite from his hardship. Long enough for hope. He developed an appetite, and his stools, which had been moving through the spectrum of greens and yellows, became healthy. But it wasn’t to last. He declined again, rapidly, the chronicle of his symptoms long and distressing, his tongue ulcerating, his body turning itself inside out. Both mother and child were resisting painful treatments; Elizabeth Wood continued to prevent blistering, and the little one “could not be forced” to take purgatives or receive enemas. On September 12, after a night of apparently relentless interventions, “death terminated his suffering”. He had been under Cochrane’s care for 22 days.

Looking back through this journal, another name caught my eye: Susannah Wood. Susannah was a three-month-old-baby, the daughter of a convict, who died on June 15. Cochrane does not make the connection, but the mother Elizabeth is the only adult Wood on the voyage, and to me this whole agonising episode with her son is cast into the realms of almost mythic tragedy knowing that she had lost her daughter only three months previously, and that she still had enough love and spirit in her to fight for her son’s comfort, even if it meant going up against the medical wisdom of the day, and even in the face of losing him, too.