The Wandrahm

The Wandrahm

Wilhelm and Louise and their children sailed from Hamburg in Germany in 1865 in the ship, the Wandrahm.The Wandrahm of the Johann Cesar Godeffroy line was built between 1852 and 1854 at the Godeffroy shipyard at Reiherstieg near Hamburg and commissioned 5th April 1854. The ship was 44.1m (length of the upper deck) x 9m (the width at the widest point) x 7.30m (depth of the upper deck).

 

 This is the ship on which they travelled from September until January 1866 when they arrived in
Moreton Bay.  On board were about 400 passengers and 19 crew.  When they embarked they could not have guessed the appalling voyage that awaited them. 



 
 This is the interior of another ship of the Godeffroy line, so we can surmise that conditions on the Wandrahm would have been similar.

Doctor Purdie, who would later inspect the Wandrahm described conditions on La Rochelle, the German ship that arrived in Moreton Bay the month before the Wandrahm:

                the accommodation afforded by the ship was cramped and bad;
                the same is the case with  most German ships; 

The captain himself reported,

             “The closets were washed out every morning;
               sometimes the passengers helped to clean the ship; I made them clean the ‘tween decks;
               the sailors washed the upper deck;
               I had a disinfectant fluid on board and used it as often as needed.”

So it is not surprising that Typhus broke out during the voyage. The mortality rate was very high at 12 percent and 48 people died during the voyage, 30 of whom were children. Among them, was little Carl Friedrich, then only 13 months old, who tragically died of tonsillitis only two days before the ship arrived in Moreton Bay on 13th January 1866 after 120 days at sea. We can only imagine how his parents must have now looked at their new homeland.