Hell Ship - The Journey of The Ticonderoga
Presented by Chester Productions and the QUT Gardens Theatre
Written by and Starring Michael Veitch
Directed by Peter Houghton
QUT Gardens Theatre
22-23 March 2021
Dr Gemma Regan
Veitch is a spell-binding orator!
Michael Veitch is a familiar face in Australian TV comedy starring in The D-Generation, Fast Forward and Full Frontal amongst others. However, he is also fascinated by history having written seven books on aviation and the second-World War. Lately, Veitch has turned his attention to his family history focussing on the horrific experience of James William Henry Veitch, his great-great grandfather onboard “the hell ship” The Ticonderoga, working as a 22-year old surgeon journey with 800 passengers aboard.
The stage setting was simple but effective, with a captain’s chair and a bed. A large white curtain backdrop was used for projecting a map of the journey. Veitch plays the now 75 year-old surgeon, caring for a boy overnight who is bedridden with a high fever. He relates the horrific tales of the doomed voyage in 1852 where 168 passengers and 2 crew members died of Typhus whilst travelling from Liverpool to Port Melbourne via the treacherous Point Nepean at the westerly point of the Mornington Peninsula, in Australia.
Veitch is a spell-binding orator relating the ill-fated passage from England to Australia over the treacherous seas with eloquence and aplomb. He transformed easily between each of the characters including the much-loved Irish Captain crying “Look Alive!” His emotive narrative is all the more poignant when it was the tragic experience of his own relatives. He tenderly describes how James met Annie Morrison on-board in such dire circumstances, yet love bloomed creating his own family line.
He describes how the 714 passengers with 48 crew were crowded onto a double-decked clipper ill-designed for such an overloaded journey. All were recruited to emigrate by the Colonial Land of Immigration from the Highlands, North England, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Ireland to start afresh in the new colony of Australia. However, only a cursory check was made of the health of each passenger and none were rejected, which led to the dreaded outbreak of Typhus. He graphically describes the fetid stench of rotting flesh at the onset of a blistering rash and fever as victims fruitlessly beg the young surgeon for relief. Bodies were rolled in bedding and tossed “like rag dolls” into the turbulent waters to be ripped apart by ravenous sharks.
Thomas Veitch, Michael’s equally talented son, punctuates the narrative playing his own three moving compositions the cello with, written as part of the Hell Ship Project. The stirring songs: Lowlands Away; The Boatman; and The Island Moon add pathos and melancholia to the important but now forgotten devastating Australian history.
Hell Ship is a tragic yet fascinating, heroic tale of the doomed voyage of the plague ship, The Ticonderoga related poetically by a descendant of the ship’s surgeon.