Ticonderoga was a 169 feet 4 masted clipper

Clipper

A clipper was a very fast sailing ship of the 19th century that had three or more masts and a square rig. They were generally narrow for their length, could carry limited bulk freight, small by later 19th century standards, and had a large total sail area...

 displacing 1,089 tons, launched in 1849 at Williamsburg, New York. The Ticonderoga was infamous for its "fever ship" voyage in 1852 from Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 to Port Phillip

Port Phillip

Port Phillip Port Phillip Port Phillip (also commonly referred to as Port Phillip Bay or (locally) just The Bay, is a large bay in southern Victoria, Australia; it is the location of Melbourne. Geographically, the bay covers and the shore stretches roughly . Although it is extremely shallow for...

 carrying 795 passengers, arriving on the 22nd December 1852. It was a double-decker ship, overcrowded, and with more than its recommended load. Many passengers were small children, as the restrictions on the number of children per family had been lifted. Most came from the Highlands

Scottish Highlands

The Highlands is an historic region of Scotland. The area is sometimes referred to as the "Scottish Highlands". It was culturally distinguishable from the Lowlands from the later Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands...

 of Scotland but there were other families from Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

 on board.

The ship was not designed well for passenger carrying, sanitary provisions were totally inadequate, and the doctors were soon overwhelmed, and themselves caught typhus. The decks were never swabbed properly and there was no cleaning undertaken below decks; contemporary accounts mention the dreadful smell and the lack of sanitation. Bodies were bundled into mattresses in tens and thrown overboard during the voyage.

100 passengers died during the voyage of what was later determined to have been typhus

Typhus

Epidemic typhus is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters...

. When the ship arrived, it was initially moored off Point Nepean and the headland was turned into a quarantine

Quarantine

Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....

 station, where many more passengers died and were buried, rather haphazardly in shallow graves. Later memorials have since been erected by the descendants of survivors.

After the press furor about conditions, double-decker ships were no longer used for emigrants, and the restrictions about the numbers of children allowed were reinstated.

In 1872, the Ticonderoga was wrecked off India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

.