Tedium on the high seas

Throughout the 18th century, voyages to India were exciting and at times harrowing. Ships were small; navigation was primitive; the risk of being shipwrecked was constant; and rations were limited, necessitating stops at islands like St Helena for fresh water and to enjoy some sightseeing. By the mid-19th century, however, as ships took on paying passengers who were not involved in work onboard, attitudes had shifted. As Henry Keene declared in 1897, looking back on his years in the East India Company: “Nothing can be duller than a long sea-voyage.”

Fanny Parkes, who sailed to India in 1822, felt the same way. Although she was bursting with enthusiasm when her voyage began, her ship was soon mired in a “a dead calm”. She pleaded: “Give me any day a storm and a half in preference! It was so miserable.” Near the Cape, she saw some whales, but was “disappointed” by their small size. The Indian Ocean brought terrible heat, and they were again becalmed, this time for 18 days. Despite her best efforts, there was no avoiding “the tedium of the voyage”.

The journey to Australia was even more arduous, lasting 120 days. The Great Circle Route (around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Ocean), mapped out in the 1840s, shortened the voyage by a month, but required passengers to sail out of sight of land almost the entire time. It was “Monotonous in the extreme”, one emigrant grumbled in 1864. Although steamships would quicken the journey, during the middle decades of the 19th century numerous passengers complained that they had “nothing to do”.