UNSINKABLE THE MAUD
The diary of a devoted captain’s wife who, despite chronic seasickness and separation from her darling sons, kept spirits afloat as she sailed the world with her husband
AVICTORIAN dilemma: it’s 1883 and your stout, heavily bearded husband Harry Berridge, captain of the merchant sailing ship the Superb, is scheduled to sail to Australia and back via San Francisco, a journey that will take 14 months and involve going round both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.
You are prone to acute seasickness. You have two sons, Harold, eight, and Jesse, six. Do you stay in England to look after them, or do you travel to Australia with your beloved husband? Maud Berridge decided to go with her husband.
Maud’s great-granddaughter, Sally Berridge, stumbled upon her diary of the voyage on the website of the National Maritime Museum and has brought it to light.
She notes that Maud missed her ‘darling boys’ dreadfully, cried on their birthdays and spent countless hours on deck knitting jerseys and socks for them — but I worried that they would have grown out of them 14 months later.
Her decision to follow her spouse round the world, Sally suggests, was an example of the Victorian convention of husband-worship.
or perhaps, she surmises, ‘they just couldn’t bear to be apart’.
These diaries give fascinating insight into the life of a Victorian captain’s wife, but I felt physically sick after reading it. It must have been the descriptions of waves lashing over the deck; of porridge swamped with seawater sloshing from the galley to the saloon; of Maud lying in bed all afternoon feeling like death, but being stoical in her Victorian way for the six long weeks it took her to recover.
Anyone who has experienced seasickness for even an hour can only admire her.
At least, being the captain’s wife, Maud travelled first-class, so had a small private room with bed and washstand. Those in steerage had to bring their own hammocks.
We get annoyed these days if we have to follow a short diversion round a ring-road. But in 1883, the worst diversion of all was in place: the Suez Canal had been built in 1869, but was navigable only if you paid for a tug to pull your ship the length of the canal and that was extortionately expensive.
So the Superb had to go all the way round the bottom of Africa.
No one complained. Maud’s descriptions of the change of climate from the cold Channel to the balmy warmth near Madeira are beguiling. The ladies sat on deck reading novels and not watching the men on a different deck ‘indulging in saltwater baths in very negligé costumes, I hear’.
It’s impressive how far the ship managed to travel when the wind was good: 302 miles in 24 hours was an achievable target.
We’re in the world of the Victorian class system. Maud is one of only five ‘ladies’ on board. Thrown together for months on end, these women never call each other by their first names, just by their titles and surnames: Miss Bullions, Mrs Benson and so on.
Maud is rather snooty about one young man on board who’s going to Australia to farm sheep and whose accent is not cut-glass.
‘He talks incessantly about his ’ome and his ’ouse,’ writes Maud. ‘Though evidently a well-meaning man, I am glad we are not near neighbours at the dinner table.’
There’s also a dwarf on board who is going on the voyage ‘in the hope of growing’. Everyone teases him benignly and he’s nicknamed ‘The General’.
I was moved and charmed by the cheerful inventiveness of everyone on board, especially Harry and Maud, who laid on endless entertainments, from games of whist to concerts, plays and athletics tournaments, of which the handwritten programmes survive.
There was a fancy dress ball, for which Maud dressed up as a German fishwife and danced with ‘two brigands, an Arabi Pasha, a Ghost and a Clown’. All entertainments ended with everyone singing the National Anthem. Some programmes say (poignantly) at the bottom: ‘Carriages, 10pm’ — as if anyone could get away.
Harry Berridge was clearly a great captain: kind, calm, authoritative and devout.
Maud took choir practice every week for divine service on Sunday, at which the favourite hymn was Eternal Father, Strong To Save. S
HE had to be firm with one of the young ladies, still in her teens, who’d fallen in love with an older ‘gentleman’.
‘ I knew there was a special attraction,’ Maud writes in a headmistressy way, ‘ so I consented, though I had to read her a little lecture on the proprieties.’ Her role was to keep moods, as well as the ship itself, buoyant. The two on-board dogs helped: Harry and Maud brought their own old dog, Boxer, who liked to chase rats, and there were also four cats, as well as a great deal of squawking livestock.
one passenger, Mr Andrews, became chronically depressed. He gradually sank into silence and unconsciousness, died at midnight one night and was buried at sea at 8am the next morning, Harry taking the funeral.
So undemonstrative was everyone on board that when, after months of nothing but sea and sky, they at last spotted Cape otway in the distance, no one hugged anyone else. ‘The general inclination was to shake hands all round,’ she writes.
once on land, Maud and Harry had to spend weeks there. Maud’s sensibilities were ruffled by the more relaxed atmosphere: ‘There is so little stiffness out in Australia compared to England . . . classes are so mixed up that every now and then, one gets a shock!’
Eventually, the Superb was loaded with coal to take to San Francisco, and at San Francisco, it was loaded with wheat to bring back to County Cork.
At last, the final evening of the whole journey came. Maud spent it in her usual, sanity-preserving way: ‘Now I leave my diary for what we believe to be the final rubber of whist of the voyage.’
With the seasickness in mind, I’m pained to report this diary records one of five voyages to Melbourne and back that Maud undertook with her husband through his career. That 1883 voyage turned out to be their penultimate one; Harry died in 1891, aged 54.
Maud lived for 16 more years as a landlubber in London.
But her steadfast and unselfpitying intrepidness remains an inspiration for all who are willing to go to the ends of the Earth for the one they love.