Causes of death of British emigrants on voyages to South Australia, 1848-1885.

Abstract

During recent decades, great advances have been made in measuring death rates on a number of transoceanic routes over several centuries. This article builds on measurements of mortality on voyages to Australia in the nineteenth century. These have shown that it was on Australia-bound convict and government-assisted vessels, which operated under the auspices of government agencies, that the maritime adult death rate was first brought into line with that on land. The novelty of this article lies in its analysis of a new body of evidence on causes of death on 323 vessels arriving in South Australia between 1848 and 1885. Surgeon-superintendents, working under strict regulations, recorded the cause, age, sex, and date of death of every patient whom they had attended for days or weeks. This is, perhaps, an extraordinary situation that mimics, as it were, the records of a medical practice in a working-class area, over a thirty-seven year period. Surgeons faced intensive scrutiny upon arrival, and were fined if their records, or supervision of the voyage, were considered to be faulty. Hence, severe penalties for inaccurate reportage ensured a high degree of accuracy. Their records allow an assessment of the impact of seasonality on the outcome of the voyage and raise questions about why and how the pattern of deaths over the voyage leaves us with a hump-shaped curve when one might have expected the opposite.