Mal de Mer on a Convict Ship

John Grant, a gentleman convict sent out in 1803, wrote that for three weeks after sailing from Portsmouth, the violent motion to the ship left him lying in the hospital ‘so Sea-Sick as to be almost incapable of motion’.[1] The following is another of the very few accounts by a convict describing what it was like in the prison in those first few days at sea:

'No sooner were the sails unfurled than sea-sickness commenced, and in a short time became general. There were only half a dozen persons in the prison who escaped the malady. ‘Accounts were cast up,’ without ceremony, not only on the floor but in the berths; and our apartment was rendered truly horrible.' [2]

It was often impossible to empty the tubs or clean the floors for days on end, due to the lurching of the ship and a shortage of prisoners capable of carrying out the requisite scrubbing and swabbing. If the weather permitted, the hatches and scuttles would be thrown open to let in the air and the deck sprinkled with hot vinegar. And when the sickness finally abated, it would be necessary to take up the bottom boards of the berths to thoroughly clean the floor below. Prisoners berthed close to the privies suffered most from the stench, and those assigned to a bunk near the hatchway were grateful for the privilege.

A mariner who sailed out as a cabin boy around 1820, recalled decades later the misery of the women:

'Sea-sickness is a disease at which those who have not suffered it, and those who have, are wont to laugh; the former because they know nothing about it, and the latter from the selfish pleasure we are too apt to feel in the misery of those who are undergoing a seasoning that we have passed through. Consequently, the miseries of sea-sickness are not duly commiserated. Even with it before them, the exempts laugh; but its severity. . . made it a point of duty, as well as of expediency, to put in at Spithead, and give the passengers a respite, after the (to them) boisterous passage from the Nore.' [3]

On one ship, the sickness was so bad, particularly among older and pregnant women, that the surgeon superintendent insisted that the ship touch at Tenerife so they could recover. Some suffered for the entire voyage; Reverend Samuel Marsden, who sailed to the colony with his wife in 1793, was sick on and off for most of the time and wrote about it almost daily in his journal.

Constipation and other bowel complaints often followed, another of the discomforts of long-distance voyaging that is not often mentioned except in the surgeon’s journals.

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[1] John Grant to his mother, 2-22 May 1804, Papers of John Grant, 1769-1810, National Library of Australia, MS737.

[2] Linus W. Miller, Notes of an Exile to Van Diemen’s Land, Fredonia, N.Y.: W. McKinstry & Co., 1846, pp.245, 246-247.

[3] James F. O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years in New Holland. . ., Boston: B.B. Mussey, 1836, p. 26.