Onboard entertainment
Passengers on voyages to Australia in the 19th century faced the challenge of how to pass the days, weeks and months of the voyage.
TWO NAUTICAL CEREMONIES provided welcome diversions during the voyage. A month out from sailing, the crew held a ceremony called ‘Burying the Dead Horse’, when sailors celebrated their first payday on board. The ‘Crossing the Line’ ceremony, when the ship passed the equator, was the cue for sometimes raucous celebrations. For much of the time, though, passengers had to make their own entertainment.
Lectures on life in Australia were organised, although Edith Gedge, one listener aboard the Sobraon in 1888, complained that “we heard a good deal about the drawbacks of climate”. Convicts aboard York in 1862 heard lectures on astronomy and “the customs and religion of the aborigines”.
Passengers staged concerts and amateur theatricals in which aspiring singers and thespians displayed their talents. Mock trials were popular, particularly ‘Bardwell vs Pickwick’ from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. The Midshipmen’s Amateur Comedy Company performed ‘Cool as a Cucumber’ for Sobraon’s passengers in 1881.
There was dancing, for free passengers and convicts alike, deck and card games, and reading. Clubs such as the Shakespeare Reading Society on Sobraon in 1888 brought like-minded people together to share their interests.