Marryat and the Mighty HMS Minden, Hong Kong Hospital Ship
Frank Marryat’s first impressions of Hong Kong, of Britain’s brand-new colony, were far from positive. Marryat took issue with reports of crime, a swamp named Happy Valley, and the daily deaths of sailors as advertised by the flag flying at half mast aboard HMS Minden, which anchored in Hong Kong Harbor was serving as a hospital ship. His later impression of Kong Kong, aboard the Minden, would far worse.
The hospital assignment was partial retirement for the Minden, a powerful warship that sailed (largely) Asian waters for three decades and one Marryat praised. The Minden was a 74-gun Ganges class third-rate ship of the line, built at Bombay’s new shipyards in 1810. The ship joined the British invasion of Java in 1811, beginning its long career in Asia and elsewhere.
At some point, a myth sprang up that the Minden was the ship Francis Scott Key was aboard the night he wrote the Star Spangled Banner’s lyrics, a legend that has lived on on the internet. Yet the Minden was on the other side of the globe during the War of 1812, when Key wrote his poem. Larrie Ferreiro of George Mason University wrote an excellent summary of the myth here. (On a side note, Frank Marryat’s father, Captain Frederick Marryat, would be able to confirm the Minden was not present; the elder Marryat served in the British Navy off the American coast during the war.)
In 1840, the Minden was severely damaged during a fire at Devonport dockyard, and shortly after was sent to Hong Kong to serve as a hospital ship, after the Hong Kong’s Royal Naval Hospital was destroyed during a typhoon. Unfortunately for Marryat, it was in this capacity that he came to know the vessel. This later experience in Hong Kong gave him some powerful material to supplement the drawings he sought to publish. Wrote Marryat in his book Borneo and the Indian Archipelago:
“We sailed for Chusan the same evening, but this time I unfortunately was attacked by one of the prevailing diseases of the country, and was confined to my hammock. We revisited Amoy, and then shaped our course for Hong Kong. On our arrival, we found no ship there but the Castor, the admiral and fleet being employed on the coast of Borneo, subduing the pirates in Maludu Bay. The ship being again about to start for the northward, I was considered too unwell to remain in her, and was sent on board the Minden hospital ship, to live or to die, as it might please God.
“The Minden hospital ship is a fine 74 [gun ship]; and has all the guns, masts, and stores, had been landed at the time that she was selected for the duty, there was great accommodation on board of her; but great as it was, unfortunately there was not sufficient to meet the demands upon it in this unhealthy climate. A description of her internal arrangement may not be uninteresting.
“The quarter-deck and poop was set apart for the convalescents; but the heat of the sun was so overpowering, that it was not until late in the afternoon that they could breathe the purer atmosphere. Long confinement below had left them pale and wan, and their unsteady gait proved how much they had suffered in their constitution, and how narrowly they had escaped the grave. To some this escape had been beneficial, as their constant perusal of the Bible established; others, if they even had during their illness alarms about their future state, had already dismissed them from their thoughts, and were impatiently awaiting their return to health to return to past folly and vice.
“The main deck was allotted to the medical and other officers belonging to the ship, the seamen who composed the ship’s company, and also on this deck were located the seamen who had been discharged cured, and who then waited for the arrival of their ships, which were absent from Hong Kong. On this deck, abaft all, was the inspector’s cabin, and adjoining it the mess-room of the assistant-surgeons, who, like all their class, rendered callous by time and habit to their dangerous and painful duty, thought only of driving away the memory of the daily mortality to which they were witnesses by jovial living and mirth. Indeed nothing could be a more harassing scene than that of the lower deck, where the patients were located.
“Under any circumstances an hospital is a depressing and afflicting sight, even with all the advantages of clean well-regulated wards, attentive nurses, and pure ventilation. Imagine then the feelings of a sick wretch, stretched on a canvass cot, who is first hoisted up the ship’s side, and then lowered down a dark hatchway (filled with anxiety and forebodings as to his ever leaving the vessel alive) to the scene of misery which I am about to describe — the lower deck of the Minden hospital ship.
“This lower deck has on each side of it three rows of iron bedsteads, for the most part filled with the dead and dying; an intolerable stench, arising from putrefaction, which it is impossible by any means to get rid of, salutes his descent; and to this is added the groans of lingering sufferers. He may chance, God help him, to be lowered down at the very hour of the inspecting surgeon’s visits. The latter is seated by a bed, having probably just performed, or in the act of performing, an operation. The goodly array of instruments meets his eye, and he wonders, as they are displayed, what these several instruments of torture can be applied to; the groans of the patient fall upon his ear, and his nerves are so shattered and debilitated by disease, that the blood curdles to his heart.
“The inspector writes the particulars of the case on a printed form, while the dressers are passing bandages round the fainting patient. As soon as he is out of the cot which lowered him down, the new arrival is washed, and clothed in hospital linen, ready to be put into a bed. Not unfrequently he has to wait till room can be made for him, by removing the corpse of the last occupant, just deceased. He is then placed on it, a coarse sheet is thrown over him, and he is left to await the inspector’s visit, which, as that officer has all his former patients first to prescribe for, may perhaps be not for an hour or two, or more. At last he is visited, prescribed for, a can of rice-water is placed at the head of his bed, and he is left to his own thoughts, if the groans of those around him, and the horror that he feels at his situation, will permit him to reach them. If he can do so, they must be any thing but agreeable; and a clever medical man told me that this admission into the hospital, and the scene which the patient was introduced to, was quite sufficient, acting upon a mind unnerved by disease, to produce fever.
“Excepting that the hospital was too crowded, which indeed could not be prevented, there was, however, every arrangement for the comfort of the patients which could be made under such a climate. No one was to blame — the hospital for the military was building, and until it was ready for the reception of the patients, the men of both services were received on board of the Minden.
“But if the day is so trying, who can describe the horrors of the night? The atmosphere becomes still more foul and pestilential, from the partially closed port-holes, and from the indifference of the nurses to the necessary cleanliness required. The whole becomes alive with cockroaches and other vermin, creeping over the patients; and the mosquitoes prey upon the unfortunate sufferer, or drive him mad with their unceasing humming preparatory to their attacks. Add these new trials to the groans of the dying, which, during my residence on board, never ceased, and at night were more awful and painfully distinct.
“The nurses were all men, obtained from the scum of the sea-ports, for no others would volunteer for the duty — a set of brutes indifferent to the sufferings of others. As long as they were, during the day, superintended and watched by the officers, they did their duty, but at night the neglect was most shameful. In fact, these wretches composed themselves to sleep instead of watching. Patients may in vain call, in a feeble voice, for water — the only answer is a snore. On one occasion, having listened to the call of a poor fellow for more than an hour, and each time in a weaker voice, for drink, I was obliged to get up myself to wake the nurse, that the man might not die of thirst.
“My cabin, for all the officers were separated from the men, commanded the whole view of the lower deck, and I was compelled to be witness of scenes of the most frightful description. …
“Almost every day there was to be seen a Roman Catholic priest administering the last unction to some disciple of his faith, some Irish soldier or sailor, whose hour was come. On these occasions the amputation table was his altar, and a brass flat candlestick the only ornament. He never failed to be at his post every day, and was a good old man. At the same time that the old priest was officiating by the side of one bed, the chaplain of the ship would be attending the last moments of some other victim. On these occasions all would be silent on the deck, even the groans were stifled and checked for the time, and nothing would be heard but the muttered prayer of the Catholic priest, or the last, and often futile, attempts of the clergyman of our own creed to extract some sign of faith and hope from the fast-sinking and almost senseless patient.
‘He dies, and makes no sign! O God, forgive him!’
“At times the uproar on the deck would be appalling. Some powerful man in the strength of delirium would rise from his bed, and, bursting from some half-dozen of the nurses, would rush through the tiers of beds roaring like a bull, and dealing blows right and left upon the unfortunate sick men who fell in his way. Then there would be general chase after him, until, overpowered by additional help, he was brought back to his bed and confined by force. An hour or two afterwards, the nurses who watched him would quit the side of the pallet; a sheet would be thrown over it; no other communication was necessary to tell me that the storm had been succeeded by a calm, and that life’s fitful fever was over.
“At the forepart of the hospital deck is a bath room; adjoining to that is a small dark cabin, with no other furniture than a long white-washed board, laid upon two tressels, with hooks fixed to the carlines of the deck. Above these the dead bodies are removed: immediately after their decease a post mortem examination is made by the assistant surgeon, a report of which is sent into the inspector. A port-hole has a wooden shoot or slide fixed to it, by which the bodies are ejected into the boat waiting to convey them for interment.
“The church service is read every morning on the hospital deck, and during the performance the strictest attention was paid by the patients. When convalescent I enjoyed the privilege of walking on the poop with the others who had been spared, and truly grateful was I for my recovery. Such scenes as I have described could not but have the effect upon me: I hope that I left the hospital a wiser and a better man.
“At last the time came when I was pronounced by the doctors to be quite cured, and at liberty to leave the ship. …”
Marryat survived the disease he does not (or cannot) name, and he would go on to gain further, more-pleasant impressions of Hong Kong.
As for the Minden, it was replaced by the HMS Alligator in 1846 and the HMS Melville in 1857. In 1873, the Melville was sold for HK$35,000 with proceeds funding a medical facility onshore.
To be continued: Part 4 coming soon.
