• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1643 0

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