She was infamous for her "fever ship" voyage in 1852 from Liverpool (England) to Port Phillip, Victoria (Australia) carrying 795 passengers, arriving on 3 November 1852.

The ship was not designed well for passenger carrying: sanitary provisions were totally inadequate, and the surgeons were soon overwhelmed, and the senior surgeon, Dr Sanger, caught typhus leaving the junior surgeon on his first voyage to deal with hundreds of sick and dying people by himself, with supplies running dangerously low.

When the ship arrived in Port Phillip, flying the yellow flag, it was initially moored off Point Nepean.

The headland became a makeshift a quarantine station, where many more passengers died and were buried, haphazardly, in shallow graves.

Hell Ship, a history of the 1852 voyage of the Ticonderoga, was published in 2018 by actor and writer Michael Veitch, who also developed a one-person play based on it.