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For passengers journeying to Australia by ship in the 19th century, rough seas, rats and drunken outbursts were daily realities. But these raucous voyages also involved dancing, theatre and wildlife spotting as they waited for a glimpse of land.
For passengers journeying to Australia by ship in the 19th century, rough seas, rats and drunken outbursts were daily realities.
“THE RATS I FRIGHTEN away by throwing books or anything hard at the spot at which they commence their gnawing.Two or three blows are generally sufficient to send them flying with dreadful squeals,” wrote emigrant Janet Ronald in a journal she kept on board Invincible in 1857.“I often hear them nibbling away, and will always have to keep a look out, which is not a very pleasant occupation. I have a great horror of them, I must own, and feel afraid too.”
Janet, who recounts in her scribblings the war she engaged with rats attempting to gnaw their way into her cabin, was one of about 1.6 million emigrants, including about 160,400 convicts, who travelled to Australia by ship between 1787 and 1900.
Invincible was among the great many ships that transported free settlers from Britain and Ireland to Australia in the 19th century. Even if you were a first-class passenger occupying a cabin on the deck, you were tossed around by seas during storms.You endured days of seasickness, and were dazed by the heat of the tropics, then chilled to the bone as the ship journeyed into the southern latitudes.
But people on these ships also formed communities, putting on plays, developing sometimes lasting relationships and taking part in wild nautical rituals. The vessels that brought them halfway around the world were sailing ships, and, by the mid-19th century, also steamships, which travelled under sail for stretches of the journey to conserve coal.
Gold discoveries in New South Wales and Victoria in the early 1850s saw the steady flow of emigrants increase drastically for most of the decade. Emigrants continued to come to Australia in the latter half of the 19th century, as travel became faster and more comfortable and as the reputation of the Australian colonies as ‘A new Britannia in another world’ took hold.
It’s hard to imagine today, when many of us even dread the mere 24-hour flight required to get from Australia to the UK. But if you read the diaries written by those who came by ship in the 19th century, the brief and relaxing flight home from London’s Heathrow (in an air-conditioned cabin, with food and inflight entertainment) can’t be compared with what these people endured.
The same journey 150 years ago could take more than 100 days, non-stop. If you were an assisted emigrant or a convict you were cramped up for all that time in crowded quarters on the lower decks (although you were allowed to come on deck at times). Single women and men were housed in separate areas of the ship, to preserve respectability, and families lived in close proximity to each other, making privacy impossible.
MANY PEOPLE ARE under the impression that most voyages to Australia were unrelieved ordeals, and passengers routinely suffered extreme privation while making the journey to the new land. While this was undoubtedly sometimes true, it was by no means the universal experience. Indeed, for many of those who came to Australia in the 19th century, the biggest problem was staving off the boredom of the days and weeks at sea.
One of the many ways of filling in time was to keep a diary. It is thanks to these works penned at sea, and now in the collection of the National Library of Australia and other repositories, that we have a better understanding of what it was like to voyage to Australia. Passengers sometimes wrote to let off steam, and to vent their feelings about people and circumstances on board that vexed them. For others, a diary was where they recorded their philosophical or religious reflections.
The accounts are written mostly in purchased notebooks with cardboard or leather covers. An exception – one of the most evocative as an object – is John Gregg’s diary of his voyage as a carpenter on a convict ship in 1862, which is bound in canvas and carries water stains. Some diaries are meticulously handwritten in ink, others are in pencil, and there are wide variations in the legibility of the writing and literary styles.
Some of these diaries feature sketches and paintings, often depicting scenes of shipboard life. These include caricatures of the captain and other crew members, fellow passengers and their activities, the islands they passed, phenomena such as waterspouts and phosphorescence, and – favourite subjects of many diarists – birds and marine life. Many diaries carry representations of albatrosses, flying
fish, jellyfish, whales, sharks, Cape pigeons and storm petrels, some of them of excellent quality.
Those of a more literary bent turned to words to capture their wonder at the sights they observed from the vantage of the ship. Margaret Walpole, wife of a ship’s doctor aboard SS Pathan on the way to Western Australia in 1883, wrote a lyrical description of sunset over the Spanish coast:
“It became rather rough later on in the day and I spent most of it in my cabin, but came on deck in time to see the sunset… Mountain after mountain peak after peak as far as eye could reach while the sun like a globe of fire sunk down behind them & dashed their dusky shadows with a golden glory.The deep blue water of the Mediterranean stretched out before us & met in hazey [sic] distance the horizon line, the sky was dotted from end to end with tiny crimson clouds.”
Other passengers were not content with such sedentary activities, and blazed away with their guns at anything that moved, taking pot shots at passing whales, sharks and dolphins, and bringing down seabirds, including large numbers of albatross, clearly unperturbed at the possibility that they might suffer the fate of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, cursed for shooting one of these majestic birds.
The biggest problem was staving off the boredom of the days and weeks at sea.
IF YOU WERE an assisted emigrant (one of those who came to Australia in response to emigration schemes that attracted free settlers to the expanding colonies), you became a member of a ‘mess’ in which you would take turns to cook meals from the rations supplied.
If you had planned ahead, you would have brought some condiments and other foodstuffs to vary the monotonous diet.You would experiment with ways to make the rations more palatable, before taking your concoctions to the cook to boil or bake them. A manual for emigrants warned that it was “useless to prepare boiled puddings on baking days, or bread and cakes on boiling days, and it should be ascertained what can be done before commencing, to prevent disappointment”.
If you were a first-class passenger, by contrast, you would be served by a steward in the cuddy or saloon, eat several-course meals, and enjoy fresh meat from animals