National Army Museum in Waiouru opens interactive exhibition on Spanish flu

The SS Tahiti set off from Wellington on July 10, 1918. Photo / Supplied

Once this Covid-19 lockdown is over, visitors to the National Army Museum in Waiouru will get the chance to experience life on the cramped "death ship" that carried the deadly Spanish flu on board with a thousand New Zealand soldiers.

The interactive exhibition, The Death Ship: A Fateful Voyage, starts tomorrow at the museum and will run for 12 months.

The exhibit is a redesign of a part of the SS Tahiti that carried the 40th NZ Reinforcements, who with staff totalled 1217 people aboard.

The Tahiti set off from Wellington on July 10, 1918, travelling via Western Australia, Cape Town and then, fatefully, Freetown in Sierra Leone.

Freetown had just been infected by the second wave of the 1918 pandemic and people on the Tahiti were prevented from disembarking.

But as local workers continued to resupply the ship while it waited in the harbour, the flu made it on board.

Seven weeks after leaving New Zealand the ship berthed in Plymouth, and 90 per cent of the passengers on board had been infected with the influenza virus and 68 had died.

A further nine would die onshore.

The exhibition will let visitors walk up the gangplank and into a part of the ship.

They can walk around inside and see how tightly everything was packed in. The ship carried almost twice the number of people it was designed to carry.

"We tried to create those cramped conditions," Jones said.

The cramped conditions and poor medical supplies were what created the settings for the Spanish flu to spread on the ship, he said.

The idea of the exhibit came from a man in the United States who created an interactive exhibit as part of his masters degree.

He found a sound recording from one of the medical officers on the Tahiti, contacted the museum and said he had it.

The Covid-19 pandemic of today also inspired the idea to create the Tahiti exhibit.

"And we thought it was topical," Jones said.

"The pandemic we're experiencing today really did head us down the direction to do it based on that Spanish flu pandemic."

Rightly or wrongly, Tahiti was dubbed the Death Ship, Jones said.

"Ships played a key role in the global spread of the deadly virus that claimed more than 50 million people worldwide.

"Our exhibition follows the journey of the Tahiti from cruise ship to troopship to death ship as it carried New Zealand's 40th Reinforcements to war."

The 1918 pandemic also came at a time of great difficulty for New Zealand, Jones said.

"The flu epidemic at the end of the Great War was a further blow to New Zealand, which had a population of just 1.15 million at the time."