The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (25 page)

Employing humor to pull through the worst of times, Ludlow must have lovingly fingered the arsenic bottle, weaving wicked fantasies about the authorities on board. Holding at bay the fomenting anger she felt toward her situation and her captors, she pulled a bright blue bottle from the cabinet and presented it to Mr. McDonald: “Bromide, it says, sir, swallowed with a sip of water, cures the dysentery.” Common sense and restraint sealed the deal for Nurse Tedder. Ludlow’s literacy was the fortunate break ensuring her safety and, most important, Arabella’s. With their homeland casting them adrift, the surgeon superintendent unknowingly offered mother and child a lifeline that ensured survival for this voyage and their future.

Ludlow was savvy enough to know that if she fell from the crew’s grace, Arabella was certain to suffer. Every ship left port with barrels of rum stored for the mariners’ daily ration, and drunkenness ran rampant among the crew. Like any protective mother, Ludlow grew disgustedly uneasy with the sly glances sailors cast at her young daughter. She knew what was at stake.

Small victories like this, many dependent on sheer luck, often determined who lived and who died. The fabric of her future woven by chance, Ludlow held tight to a very satisfying win in being chosen as the
Hindostan
’s nurse. The benefits offered both mother and daughter a bright ray of hope on the uncertain landscape stretching before them.

Ludlow’s Cure

It was May 9, 1839, a day Widow Tedder would never forget. As light broke over the horizon, sailors turned the windlass, and in a few heaves, the anchor broke ground. The
Hindostan
and her cargo sailed steadily east toward the North Sea. Slowly making their way down the Thames, the transports watched passing towns disappear one by one. The sun fell behind them and the moon began to rise before they reached the river’s mouth and headed into choppy open waters. Answering the sea’s mighty force, the coastal lights disappeared behind the rising waves, and the tenuous cord that connected Ludlow to England finally snapped. Nostalgia gave way to her stern resolve: Survive at any cost.

The
Hindostan
approached good weather as she traveled through the North Atlantic. By the time they reached the Portuguese coast, Nurse Tedder and Arabella fell into a comfortable routine, gaining their sea legs and eating regular meals in the hospital quarters. Because of Ludlow’s position, Arabella enjoyed the freedom of playing on deck when the weather permitted. Perhaps a few homesick fathers among the crew found some comfort in her wide-eyed innocence because they would not be seeing their own daughters for another eight or nine months at least.

With her arms resting on the rails, Ludlow watched the endless blue horizon, inhaled a deep breath of fresh sea air, and, for a moment, felt at peace. They were only two weeks into the journey and heading steadily southwest. On board, mother and daughter were better fed than in Newgate. As a result, Arabella gained a little weight. On some voyages, the prisoners’ health actually improved if they were given full rations from a relatively honest crew. For transports from the poorest neighborhoods, being fed twice a day more than doubled their previous calorie intake. Surgeon Superintendent John Love, responsible for a large group of children aboard the convict ship
Mellish
, observed: “The general improvement in flesh and appearance was very evident in the whole of them, especially the children amounting to 61 in number, many of whom were puny, delicate and mostly affected with worms.”
⁹

As Ludlow cast a glance back at her playful, sun-kissed Arabella, a little chuckle escaped from her lips. This was the best job she’d ever had. As a housekeeper, she had barely a moment to herself. Aboard the
Hindostan
, there was hardly anything to do except take care of a few seasick patients and tend to a bit of syphilis. Her shipmates were put to work scouring the decks clean and helping in the galley. When the weather turned stormy and the hatches closed over the orlop deck, the women opened the burlap bags Mrs. Fry left with them and began piecing together hundreds of colored scraps of all shapes and sizes, stitching quilts by candlelight as the waves crashed against the beams.

By the fourth week, the
Hindostan
crossed the Tropic of Cancer into the seas off the west coast of Africa. Nurse Tedder no longer found her job so easy. As the filth belowdecks percolated in the rising heat and humidity, dysentery and a host of tropical diseases ran rampant. As Ludlow was pressed into round-the-clock nursing duty, not a single bed lay empty in the floating infirmary. Earlier in the voyage, prisoners sometimes hid their illness and distress, fearing painful nineteenth-century treatments more than anything else. Symptoms had now grown acute, and Ludlow treated ulcerated tongues, high fevers, dislocated limbs, delirium, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Though primitive, the medical care was more than the transports ever received on the streets of London, Glasgow, and Dublin. Some of the children boarded the ship suffering oozing eye sores from untreated infections. Surgeon Superintendent McDonald and Nurse Tedder gave them the first medical attention of their lives.

Through trial and error, Ludlow soon learned how medicine of her era was an inexact science. The remedies were often worse than the afflictions, causing pain, blisters, and bleeding. Calomel (six parts mercury to one part chloride), laudanum (tincture of opium), and unguent mercuriale (mercury used as a salve for treatment of syphilis and other venereal diseases) killed as many patients as they cured.

Ludlow, opportunely, knew how to temper her nerves as she administered medical treatments that seemed cruelly absurd. Surgeon Superintendent McDonald taught her to apply acid to a patient’s skin, burning it to provoke a blister. It was common belief that draining the blister forced out disease, like an unwelcome lodger to be evicted as quickly as possible. Bleeding, purging, and blistering were thought to relieve the body of “morbid” elements. Head shaving was one of the treatments used to reduce fever.
¹⁰

On both land and sea, bloodletting was a widely practiced “cure.” Ludlow learned to use lancets to bleed women suffering from fever, indigestion, convulsions, pneumonia, tuberculosis, or insanity. Because nineteenth-century medicine dictated that a patient’s blood be removed to affect a cure, some prisoners and crew were weakened toward death in the floating infirmaries. Despite these rather frightening treatments, only one woman died under Mr. McDonald’s care.

Forty days into the voyage, on July 28, Ludlow turned forty-six. She still looked much younger than one would expect of a woman who had already lived well beyond the life expectancy for most of Britain’s poor. In spite of everything, she’d survived, although she certainly hadn’t expected to be off the coast of Africa on her birthday.

By the time the
Hindostan
crossed the equator, Ludlow had witnessed most every form of physical and mental malady. At the onset of the voyage, women battling alcohol withdrawal suffered tremors and delirium. In desperation, some offered their bodies to the crew in exchange for liquor and a return to hazy comfort. Others defaulted into abstinence, slowly and painfully unmasking both sobriety and the frightening reality of transport.

Captain Lamb would tolerate no troublemakers at sea. Two tiny cells, squeezed under the ship’s bow, were reserved for solitary confinement and contained those deemed unruly, regardless of the cause. As their destination drew closer, incidents of panic and hysteria escalated throughout the women’s claustrophobic quarters. Sometimes the penetrating pressure of the unknown was too much and drove women over the edge and into madness. Victorian medicine ignored the possibility of treating mental illness, deeming it fake or incurable. Physical restraint by ropes or straitjacket was generally the only remedy prescribed.

Cabin fever, depression, rape by sailors, and outbursts from the mentally ill were conditions for which Surgeon Superintendent McDonald had not been trained. Even if Nurse Tedder wanted to intervene, she had first to consider Arabella and her safety. Heading through the Indian Ocean, the criminally insane were sometimes seen banging their heads against the ship’s rail, mimicking the rhythmic pattern of crashing waves.

During the final push eastward through the Indian Ocean, Ludlow witnessed another type of high seas drama when an emigrant ship named the
Cornwall
raised a flag of distress. It had departed from Graves-end, England, on May 12, three days after the
Hindostan
, and had followed the same route around the Cape of Good Hope on its approach to Sydney. Responding to the
Cornwall
’s signal, Captain Lamb dispatched a whaleboat with several officers, including Surgeon Superintendent McDonald and perhaps Ludlow, because she was now his competent and trusted nurse.

The
Cornwall
’s Captain John Cow asked Mr. McDonald to examine Surgeon Superintendent King, who had fallen ill amid a very rough trip. Under his watch, eighteen passengers had died, most from scarlet fever and rubella. Returning to the
Hindostan
, McDonald “declared Dr. King to be in no serious condition. . . . [He] was very apprehensive however and refused to take the powerful sedative prescribed. He nervously walked the deck all night in the company of the captain and mate. By the next day his ‘nervousness’ had abated.”
¹¹

Surgeon McDonald also examined the
Cornwall
’s emigrants, “whom he pronounced to be in much better state of health than the convicts on board the
Hindostan
.”
¹²
Although he and Nurse Tedder had lost only one patient, many were barely standing. Both women and children were weakened by an array of ailments made worse by poor nutrition and miserably overcrowded conditions, not to mention the “cures.”

On Wednesday, September 11, 1839, the
Hindostan
glided into Sullivans Cove and set anchor at the far southeast coast along Van Diemen’s Land. With the seasons occurring in reverse from the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox signaled the beginning of spring, and the air smelled of new blossoms and fresh leaves. This was the same day Agnes McMillan turned nineteen, stuck in Oatlands, more than fifty miles away from Hobart Town at the island’s interior. A full year would pass before Agnes would meet Ludlow inside Cascades.

None the worse for wear, Ludlow and Arabella finally landed in Van Diemen’s Land 126 days after their journey began. In the eyes of colonists and male convicts, another boatload of “strumpets” had arrived, arousing Hobart Town to a state of pitched anticipation. Bear grease, talc, and witch hazel were brought out from dusty cases and smeared over the men’s unwashed bodies. Surely the overeager onlookers were shocked by the appearance of the women, many of whom were pockmarked, missing teeth, and very skinny.

When she first boarded the
Hindostan
in May, Ludlow’s gaol report had made note of her “poor connexions,” referring to the questionable friends she had made during nearly five months inside Newgate. Back then, the surgeon superintendent had looked unfavorably on the company she kept in prison, because guilt by association followed the women wherever they went. Amy Wilson he labeled “quarrelsome,” and both Mary Grady and Ann Price “extremely insolent.”
¹³
But before disembarking, Ludlow’s exemplary conduct and her skills as a nurse were recorded by Mr. McDonald.

Anxious to step foot on solid land, Ludlow and her companions felt both relief and trepidation in leaving behind the stench of the ship and the pitch of the sea. Captain Lamb prepared for their departure and delivery. Principal Superintendent of Convicts Josiah Spode and Muster Master William Thomas Champ were on their way to the
Hindostan
to inspect the cargo and exchange records. In spite of illness and injury, there had been only one death, an excellent record for the journey of twelve thousand nautical miles. Captain Lamb stood proudly on the freshly scrubbed deck alongside Surgeon Superintendent McDonald. Courtly and formal in dress uniforms with polished buttons ablaze in the sun, the two officers exchanged polite congratulations and prepared to greet the small boat being rowed out from the docks. As the proper Englishmen prepared to greet one another, #151 and her daughter, Arabella, lined up for inspection with the rest of the prisoners. The two Tedders had arrived in good health, and the surgeon’s kind words ensured Ludlow the best possible assignment at the Female Factory. She had received a stellar recommendation, “the most attentive and best behaved on board doing duty as nurse.”
¹⁴

As one mess at a time was ushered onto the main deck, it took two days to complete their inspection. The officers lugged their big black books ashore to complete stacks of paperwork that transferred jurisdiction for the exiled women and children. On Friday afternoon, Surgeon Superintendent McDonald returned with signed documents for London and supplies from Hobart Town. He rewarded his nurse’s diligence with a clean bucket of water and fresh milk for Arabella. Ludlow splashed her freckled face and helped her nine-year-old daughter scrub off the heavy grime baked into her skin and hair. Reveling in a generous soaping and a clean towel from the infirmary, she washed and dried her daughter’s hair. For the moment, with Arabella by her side, Ludlow held fear at bay and prayed for the best.

White Pinafores

Hindostan
passengers still healthy enough to walk were brought ashore and delivered to a waiting contingent of scarlet-coated soldiers for the march along Macquarie Street. Ludlow kept Arabella close at hand as they made their way through the strange sights, sounds, and smells following them uphill to the base of Mt. Wellington.