Two weeks out, and Louisa Timewell took it as a good sign that she had the strength to write in her ship journal: make a loaf with sour leaven every day. Details were beginning to come back into focus. I save some of the dough for the next day’s bread. Louisa could even start to see the humour in it. Although the ship swayed like a hammock in the breeze, she and the other women still needed to go about their daily business. They held their babies on one hip while washing out clothes, trying to keep the basin steady. It’s very laughable to see them pitching about so. Fortunately for Louisa Timewell, leaven and babies are strict taskmasters. I got on deck all day with the children, Louisa wrote after the morning’s baking was complete, and the time passed off very pleasantly watching the flying fish, sharks, whales, porpoises [and] fin backs.1
For the fact is that no matter how devoutly some passengers held to the familiar markers of their former selves, by the time the gold rush immigrants reached Ballarat, they’d already endured a life-altering journey of colossal proportion. A new era, as one shipboard journal proclaimed grandly, for men, women and children who had hitherto hugged the land. These novice mariners now committed their destinies to the wild world of water, seeking a far off land of Promise, where they may find wealth, social distinction and domestic happiness.2 A sourdough leaven might demand slavish reliability, but no ritual can hold together a universe that has burst apart at the seams.
Today it’s hard to comprehend that the journey can be as transformative as the destination. We can cross the globe so fast that we might not even speak to the strangers in the seats around us. We might grimace when they belch or remove their shoes, but our lives and bodies will not connect in any meaningful way. Unless disaster strikes, the journey itself does not change us.
For most passengers, the first few weeks of the sea voyage seemed anything but promising. MURRAY’S GUIDE advised what to take on the three- to five-month journey: pickles, anchovies, potted herrings, smelling salts, camphor, perfumes to burn, musical instruments and good humour, a close tongue about your own affairs, and a go-a-head spirit. It seemed a practical kit, but no amount of sensible preparation could hold back the forces of physiology. Few first-timers took to the sea unscathed; even old hands felt the effects. Like war and childbirth, seasickness was a truly democratising experience. Mal de mer. Seekrankheit. Mareo en barco. Wan syun long.
With land disappearing astern and the waving handkerchiefs dwindling to specks in the distance, the body knows what the mind has yet to register. It has lost its bearings. Lines of sight no longer find fixed reference points. The equilibrium between eye and ear is disturbed. Even when the ship ceases to pitch and rock and sway, still there is the constant nauseating motion in the head and, as familiar visual anchors come unstuck, the brain adjusts to a new paradigm for balance. It helps to keep busy and concentrate on mechanical tasks, as Louisa Timewell discovered; the worst thing to do is stay below deck with no fresh air and no horizon.
Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the new French consul to Melbourne, described the scene on the Croesus as it headed for open sea in 1854.
It jolted and tossed about on the waves so much that passengers and objects all came tumbling down on top of each other…The famous line ‘hare you sichowek’ (are you seasick?) went from one passenger to the next, some escaping to their cabins, others leaning over the side. The only reply one hears is moaning, groaning and retching.3
Céleste herself felt the initial effects of this horrible sickness, but she refused to yield to its power: I am fighting against it. She stayed on deck—alone—for all the passengers have disappeared as if by magic. Her husband Lionel remained in their cabin with his head between two pillows and didn’t emerge for three days. I was distressed to see him suffer so and I could do nothing to bring him relief, lamented Céleste. But neither would the headstrong Céleste, a former dancer and courtesan, keep vigil by his side in their dark, cramped cabin with the waves lashing against the sides of the ship, the planks, doors and masts cracking as if thousands of woodcutters are cleaving them with axes. Céleste was a fighter: I prefer to face the enemy and I go back up on deck. She stayed up all night, favouring fatigue to the suffering I see endured around me. Even her two dogs were curled up in the bottom of their wicker basket, playing dead.
Brave-faced Fanny Davis was mortified to discover that defiance alone was not enough. One week into her voyage she wrote, It was a great mistake me being ill as I did not mean to be; it offended Fanny’s dignity that crewmen needed to come down with mops and buckets to clean out her cabin. Agnes Paterson was, by her own admission, reduced to a most pitiful condition. Charlotte Spence was a pitiable mess, refusing all nourishment for days. Henry Nicholls distributed his recipe for bilious pills: four scruples compound extract of ‘coloquth’, one scruple powdered seammony, one scruple powdered ‘soccolorine’ aloes, six drops oil of cassia. The formula was probably more enterprising than effective. On the Lady Flora the doctor prescribed wine and porter for the invalids, which passenger John James Bond thought might explain why some of the ladies are again disposed to faint. Emma Macpherson worried at first that she didn’t have the necessary faith for her homeopathic tincture to work; she was delighted to find it relieved her distress. Frances Pierson, sailing from New York with her husband Thomas, drank salt water and found that she was a good deal better.4
For Bethuel Adams, seasickness was his first reminder that leaving England meant forsaking the comforts of his mother’s home. Popular mythology about male wanderlust would have us believe that men collectively revelled in the freedom from domestic constraints offered by frontier living; that women were but shackles on footloose masculinity. But listen to Bethuel Adams’ anguish as he reflects on the privileges of the hearth:
To be ill at sea is very dreadful, nothing but men to attend you and to perform those little kind offices which only come natural from a woman. Ah woman, we know not how to estimate your value until we are deprived of your presence!! Never before did I think so highly and with so much interest of the fair sex as I have since I have been at sea.
In his dismal queasiness, the future seemed to Bethuel not gloriously free but bleak and lonely. How I shall be able to endure a bachelor life for half a score years in the solitary bush of Australia I don’t know. The poor fellow didn’t have to worry for long. He arrived in Port Phillip on 3 January 1854 and died the following month in a shooting mishap, killed by his own gun.5
Only the most charmed of passengers avoided the gruelling initiation into life at sea. The rest may have failed to reflect, as they lay prostrate and retching, on the symbolic purging of old identities that seasickness represented. With heads reeling and stomachs churning, many immigrants prayed for death to deliver them from their misery.
Three weeks out, the passengers of the Lady Flora, the ship carrying Sarah Hanmer and her daughter Julia to their new home, petitioned the captain to put in to shore so they could happily desert, so sick of the sea were they. Poor winds meant the coast of England was still maddeningly in sight. One ship’s surgeon-superintendent summed up the predicament of his charges:
Unused to the sea, seasick, homesick, cold, wet, fearful and battened down, few aggregations of human wretchedness could be much greater than was to be found…in the close dark ’tween decks of an outward-bound emigrant ship.6
But when sufferers finally crawled out of the putrid cracks and cavities to face the light again, it was as if they were born anew. The first challenge had been overcome, and they were away. In time I might make a brave sailor, wrote Fanny Davis, marvelling at the new possibilities that suddenly seemed to arise before her.
For the vast majority of gold rush immigrants, those making their way from British ports, the early part of the journey proceeded in a southwesterly direction down the east Atlantic Ocean to the Equator. The English coastline might still be visible for weeks if conditions were poor, but eventually it receded into the distance. Then there was only the vast rolling ocean. The stars of the northern hemisphere constellations provided the last familiar markers. As Fanny Davis put it, the emigrants had entered the pathless deep. Heading south, the ship’s route would descend past the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the lumpy knob of West Africa, where the Tropic of Cancer was silently traversed.
The route for ships leaving the east coast of America, before the Panama Canal opened in the early 1900s, was south towards the Gulf of Mexico, then east across the Atlantic, joining up with the European clipper route in the tropics. Only six days after her departure, English schoolgirl Jane Swan noted it was getting perceptibly warmer.7 Bethuel Adams finally had the strength to look around him and appreciate the vast beauty of the ocean, especially at night when we can see the phosphoric lights dancing amid the spray like a shower of sparks from a blacksmiths anvil. Thirteen-year-old Jane was less transfixed: we get quite tired of having nothing to look at but the sea, she complained to her diary. Perhaps adolescence and ennui are universal bedfellows.
When passengers had genuine grievances about their circumstances, they were not bashful about making their concerns public. The gold rush immigrants were either paying passengers or voluntary exiles. Their ships were neither penal hulks nor navy vessels. There was no debt of obedience or gratitude owing. On the Lady Flora, J. J. Bond read the mood of disquiet: the ’tween deck people think they are living too much like pigs. These disgruntled passengers petitioned the captain to land at the nearest port so as to acquaint the owners of the ship that facilities were unequal to her crowded state. The captain did not acquiesce, but asked the people to be considerate of each other and promised that all would settle down in time. It did not, and by the time the Lady Flora docked, a ship-wide subscription for the captain could only raise an insulting £4.
Living like swine was one thing, but being infested by deadly viruses and vermin was another. Passengers knew too well the destiny that could await the criminally neglected ship: they would all have heard of the Ticonderoga. This famous ‘plague ship’ had arrived at Port Phillip in November 1852, after a hell voyage in which one hundred of its 795 assisted migrants had died, over half of them children. Three hundred passengers were suffering typhoid fever and hundreds more dysentery. Almost seventy people died in quarantine at the Heads. No family aboard was left untouched; dreams of happiness and prosperity lay in tatters. A report by the Immigration Board in Melbourne later stated:
The ship, especially the lower part, was in a most filthy state, and did not appear to have been cleaned for weeks, the stench was overpowering, the lockers so thoughtlessly provided for the Immigrants use were full of dirt, mouldy bread, and suet full of maggots, beneath the bottom boards of nearly every berth upon the lower deck were discovered soup and bouille cans and other receptacles full of putrid ordure, and porter bottles etc, filled with stale urine, while maggots were seen crawling underneath the berths.8
The plague ship’s captain, American Thomas Boyle, continued in his globetrotting life as a successful privateer, despite the fact that barely one of his passengers arrived without the loss of a family member.
Jane Swan’s family were immediately struck by the difference between the advertised and actual amenities on board the William and Jane. Just two days after departure, Jane recorded that our water cashes turned out very bad. We signed a petition all round and were supplied with good water from the tanks. Petitioning, like public meetings, had long been part of the political process at a local level. In English riots of the early eighteenth century, as historian John Bohstedt has shown, wherever people were bargaining over rights and bound together by geographical proximity, they formed a ‘community’ of interest, a local consensus, that had nothing to do with class cohesion or ethnic homogeneity.
The duration and conditions of the journey to Australia made the formation of a ‘community’, in Bohstedt’s definition, quite straightforward. Authorities feared hostile crowds, and most ship captains, carrying large numbers of people in confined spaces, were willing at the very least to hear petitions and delegations without taking umbrage. Indeed, they expected to be held accountable for the safe and healthy passage of the ship. In 1853, there were over seventy prosecutions against captains of private passenger ships bound for Australia for breaches of the Passenger Acts, largely relating to substandard provisioning and the illegal sale of alcohol.
When the ship docked in Port Phillip, the harbour master would board and ask each family these three leading questions: Have you any complaint against anyone on board? Have you been treated well on the voyage? Are you quite able to work?9 The stage was set early for the performance of individual and communal grievance.
By the time most gold seekers arrived on dry land, they had already made significant transitions, casting off old allegiances and forging bonds of sympathy based on a new understanding of shared space and common interest. Many passengers referred to the social organisation of the ship as being like one well regulated family. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE put this clannish feeling down to the depression that associates with ‘goodbye’ followed by the vast amount of physical suffering to be surmounted through seasickness. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE called the ship our Floating World. Thomas Pierson agreed: You can have no idea how much we love our ship…we feel so much interested for each other and so free towards each other just like one family.
This intense shipboard bonding, coupled with a sense of maverick privilege at having endured the ordeal, would become an important precursor to goldfields solidarity. And relationships forged on board could develop into important commercial and social associations on land. Charles and George Evans travelled on the Mobile with Henry Wright, Duke Paine and William Denovan, all men with whom they would later form business relationships in Ballarat. The Evans brothers’ close friend from Shropshire, George Morgan, came out on the Star of the East with brothers John Basson and Frederick Humffray. Both in turn would also become business associates of the Evans brothers. Anne Keane, travelling with her two brothers and a sister-in-law on the Star of the East, would ‘marry’ shipmate Martin Diamond (de facto, if not before a priest) once the young sweethearts reached the relative permanence of Ballarat.
Shipboard relationships often led to important expatriate networks. But this didn’t mean that everyone cohabited snugly, like peas in a floating pod. Where is the family that does not crack as much as it coheres? Quarrels are quite the fashion, noted Fanny Davis, there is not an hour in the day but the doctor is fetched to quell some riot. Indeed, it is one of the stubborn myths of the gold rush era that the months of fraternisation and friction on the sea voyage worked to dismantle old-world social structures irrevocably. In this widespread reading, ship society becomes a template for the new egalitarian society that will be re-created on the diggings. But, as many ship diaries reveal, the ‘Floating World’ embodied rudimentary signs of status demarcation, prejudice and snobbery. Community does not signify equality.
Englishman John Spence considered the third class rabble to be the scourge of the ship. These Irish poor are the greatest nuisance we have on board, ranted Spence. They were worse than vermin, stale biscuits, wild children or rank water. The great majority are a dirty disagreeable lot. Spence attributed the frequent robberies from insecure cabins to be the work of the Irish mob. I expect before we reach Melbourne we shan’t have a spoon left on us, he lamented. They are such expert thieves.
Sectarianism was not debunked; indeed, its prejudices and comforts were likely to be enforced in close quarters. Spence, for example, attributed ethnic tensions to the excessive drinking of the Irish, and personally attempted to encourage the entire third-class cabin to take the Temperance Pledge until Melbourne. His evangelism was sorely misplaced. Spence would have done well to follow Emma Macpherson’s resolution for shipboard sanity: think charitably and associate sparingly.
Religious intolerance surfaced too. During a fierce storm, James Menzies found just cause to disparage another denomination of his Protestant faith. The Methodists, he wrote, went to prayers, thought they were going to the bottom, they were all oh Lord have mercy on my soul enough to give any one the belly ache. Menzies wasn’t much for the Brotherhood of Man. Later in the voyage, he confided that he’d sooner be among a lot of Irish for they are all Cornish people except two or three and a more ignorant set I never was with in my life.10 Bear in mind that in the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Scots were just as likely to communicate in their native languages as in English. Prejudice against non-English speakers would have provided another obstacle to egalitarian integration.
Fanny Davis, ever an eagle-eyed narrator, sketched a more piquant montage of her floating world. On 21 July 1858, six weeks out from home, she sat on deck on a warm, clear night. As she looked around, she saw in one corner two dozen folks singing. In another corner, there was a group talking scandal about everyone, making complaints about certain cabin-mates that would make a cat laugh. In another section of the deck, there were a lot of Scotch girls dancing—one imitating bagpipes—not a one of them with shoes or stockings on. Then there were the Irish. The Irish will be squatting down under the boats talking over everybody’s business but their own and vowing eternal hatred of the English. Gossip, tittle-tattle, innuendo. Cultural kindling for the eternal flame of bigotry.
Ethnic and sectarian divisions weren’t the only forms of demarcation. Discriminating between types of women based on their sexual conduct, always a favourite cultural pastime, was evident on passenger ships despite the literal loosening of stays. As ships sailed towards the tropics, and temperatures rose, women stripped back their layers of feminine restraints: corsetry was unlaced, hosiery removed. And, liberated from the prying eyes of kin, single women and men indulged in flagrant acts of exhibitionism. On clear nights there was dancing on the poop; in stormy weather there was always a dark corner for a liaison. Of all the places of iniquity my eyes ever beheld, wrote one passenger sailing on the Star of the East in September 1853, an emigrant ship is the worst, men and women packed indiscriminately together, married couples and young girls, and I am sure some of the girls will have cause to remember the STAR OF THE EAST.
Anne Keane was one Irish lass who may have arrived in Victoria with an unexpected souvenir of her trip. By the time twenty-seven-year-old Anne and partner Martin Diamond played a pivotal role in Ballarat’s history just over a year later, they had already lost a baby.
Captains and surgeon-superintendents, particularly on government ships, had powers to keep the peace and could punish reprobates. Though women were ostensibly ‘free’, they were expected to conform to acceptable standards of respectable femininity. This was particularly true for the single ladies. On James Menzies’ government-assisted ship, the doctor was fetched to see to some shenanigans going on in the women’s quarters. The single females were making a noise at night, Menzies wrote, and the doctor went down and told them to be quiet and some of them was saucy to him, he told them that he would have a prison made for some of them. It wasn’t a bluff. The ship’s carpenters were called in. They used three-inch quartering to make uprights across the berths of the offending women. Menzies, who for some reason was a witness to this, chuckled that it put me in mind of the wild beast cages at the Surrey Zoological Gardens.
A farcical display of power aside, here was the contradiction that lay at the heart of the gold-seeking impulse: immigrants aspired to change their own lives yet expected that everyday social distinctions would remain the same. Could they have it both ways?
For some ships the danger was not over once seasickness passed and the saucy lasses had been given their comeuppance. Sexual misadventure might have been anticipated on a long journey of young, unchaperoned, often-intoxicated thrill-seekers, but some calamities were less predicable. Take the case of the Sir William Molesworth, the ship chartered by the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society with young Scot Alexander Dick on board. It was widely known that one child had been cleared of scarlet fever just in time to board. But others, it seems, had been incubating the disease. By the time the ship docked at Port Phillip a staggering five months later, ten per cent of her passengers were dead.
When Captain Watt ascertained the gravity of the situation in the mid-Atlantic, he stopped at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal, effectively isolating the ship for a month. There was no pier or landing place, just the remains of an old Portuguese penal settlement and the islands’ native population of mixed African and Portuguese descent. Cape Verde had once been central to the transatlantic slave trade, but by 1853 one of the primary industries of the natives, as Alexander Dick related, was carrying passengers from boats to the shore. The Sir William Molesworth arrived in considerable surf. Dick described the scene of moral pandemonium that ensued:
The ladies in our boat were utterly horrified to find that the only means of reaching the shore was by being carried in the arms of a stalwart nigger as naked as the Apostle Belvidere and as black as Beelzebub.
Some refused to undergo the trial and returned to the ship. A few adventurous souls resigned themselves half unwillingly to the clamorous niggers who soon set them down on the beach tousled and tumbled and blushing like peonies.
How to read this remarkable scene? It’s no accident that historian Inga Clendinnen begins her classic work of contact history, Dancing with Strangers, on a beach, the archetypal boundary delineating fundamental states of being: water and land, here and there, coming and going. On Clendinnen’s beach, the shores of Botany Bay, the British and the (Indigenous) Australians find common ground, dancing hand in hand like ‘children at a picnic’, mutually lowering their guard in an act of ‘clowning pantomime’.
The scene on the Cape Verde coastline is analogous. Familiar sight lines are blurred, behaviours adapted, boundaries crossed. The women who are carried to shore by the islanders go only half unwillingly. They perform their scripted role as distressed damsels, but by letting themselves be carried away in the first place, they have engaged in an important theatre of inversion. No longer upstanding, they are tousled and tumbled and set down arse-about. The black demons are responsible for their fall, but also their rescue. Not all women jumped ship when the opportunity presented, but some relished the chance to throw off old vestiges of conventional femininity and surrender to this bewitching possession.11 For some, the corollary of roughing it was going native.
Like the seasickness that reduced strong men to whimpering invalids or sentimental fools, this unexpected encounter on the cusp of sea and land was the first of many acts of reversal as immigrants headed south. ‘Going south’ was in itself an inversion. The Antipodes as the opposite of true north. Women themselves were constructed as a kind of vessel in the cultural armada of colonisation. As symbols of home, civilisation and order, women represented the goals of British expansionism, with the loyal wife and marriageable domestic servant cast as the good imperial subject. But as the unsettling episode at the Cape Verde Islands demonstrates, the authorised script could readily be abandoned for improvisation if necessary. How should a precious English rose act when suddenly thrust into the arms of a buck-naked black man, who is not her bête noir but her saviour? If the knight in shining armour is not a handsome prince but a savage, does a maiden blush, laugh or fervently embrace the startling possibilities of this altered reality? For many immigrants, the ship voyage fractured timeworn fairy tales abruptly.
Of course, you didn’t need to be unexpectedly beached to experience the magnetic pull of limbo. The ship itself was a liminal space. Neither on land nor of the sea, neither leaving nor arriving, immigrants stood betwixt and between, caught in the vast hiatus of transhemispheric travel. It was a topsy-turvy time, when judging the distance between the real and the fantastic, the defensible and the inadmissible, was increasingly problematic.
Sometimes this disarray was literal. On the night of a tremendous storm, Fanny Davis described the effect of the mountainous waves like this: It is like being in a great cradle only that instead of rocking us to sleep it rocks us more wide awake for every now and then it seems as if we’re going to turn bottom upwards. How frightening, that the hand that rocks the cradle might be malevolent, not maternal after all. Ever watchful for edifying details, Fanny also tells us that she observed a Catholic prayer service, below deck, conducted by a young woman. What had possessed this girl to subvert the strict institutional hierarchy of her faith?
Other moments of chaos were not so much quietly irreverent as madly entertaining. Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian Episcopalian, described the scene on the promenade deck at night, where the ordinarily staid space assumed the appearance of a dance hall. There were fiddlers, tambourines, dancing. Folks stood in a ring, clapping and cheering. Had it not been for a sober and quite respectable company, wrote Boynton, one might have imagined himself in an Ann Street gathering: in short, we had a regular break down. The geographical reference here is to the red-light district of Boston, centred around Ann Street, where the city’s blacks and whites would notoriously intermingle. So here is a vivid tableau of moral disintegration, as sexual and racial decencies are openly flouted. But for Boynton the prospect of a break down was not threatening; he enjoyed the bonhomie, the way he became encircled in a sphere of companionship and mirth.12
John Hopkins, travelling aboard the Schomberg, enjoyed a silly affair when the lads in his cabin put on a show: the star was a ‘beautiful young lady’ with a beard. And girls just wanted to have fun too. Fanny Davis described one of her ship’s full dress balls where women went to pains to out-do each other’s outfits. Some of the girls, she wrote, dress in the Highland costume as men. It looks first rate. Such carnivalesque gestures—overturning polarities—were a longstanding feature of going south. When women don men’s clothes, argues cultural studies scholar Jean Howard, they become ‘masterless women’, signalling a breakdown of systems of control and compliance.
The collapse of sartorial superstructures was aided by geography. Six weeks out from London and Jane Swan’s ship was lodged firmly in the dead calm of the intertropical convergence zone—otherwise known as the doldrums. We can never get a night’s rest for the heat, she groused. The thermometer gauged an astonishing 108 degrees (42 degrees Celsius). With no breeze and no movement, the passengers were taking it in turns to row out to sea. Some ladies ventured out, tattled Jane, so that you may judge what sort of day it was! Strange days indeed. Fanny Davis, also stuck in the doldrums, was finding things most peculiar too. She could report that it was very hot, and they were almost completely becalmed. An awning had been rigged up on the deck for the ladies, but many did not use it. The sun begins to turn the colour of our skins, wrote Fanny, we shall all be black soon. The MARCO POLO CHRONICLE reported the same phenomenon: fair faces brown rapidly. What would James Hopkins have thought of this display of scorched flesh? Upon reaching the tropics, he was astonished to discover that the ladies from the First Cabin had nothing upon their heads. For sixteen-year-old Sarah Ann Raws, sailing on the Bloomer in 1854, reaching the tropics was a revelation. Although she and her brother could scarcely sleep in our beds for the heat, Sarah Ann delighted in lying on top of her mattress with only a thin sheet as cover, sweat rolling off our faces, sans stockings.13 And it would have been an unearthly moment indeed when, traversing the Tropic of Cancer, Frances Pierson was asked by her dinner companions to carve the dolphin.
All the mashing up and breaking down was but a prelude to the foremost conceptual navigation: crossing the line. The line-crossing ceremony, steeped in maritime tradition and still practised today, is a customary initiation rite celebrating a sailor’s first crossing of the equator and welcoming him into the Kingdom of Neptune. There is often an appearance by Neptune (Poseidon) and his wife, Amphitrite, a pantomime that provides an opportunity for sailors to compete for the accolade of being ugly enough to go in drag. The celebration is a ritual of reversal in which the inexperienced crew are permitted to take over the ship from the officers. If the full traditional fiasco is played out, a transition is made from the established order of the captain’s regime to the controlled mayhem of the Pollywog Revolt, followed by a return to order as the ‘Wogs’ pass certain physical tests and earn their right to enlistment in Neptune’s realm. Though the line-crossing ceremony is still honoured today, some of the more violent forms of ‘testing’—such as beatings and sodomy—have been outlawed.
On immigrant ships, the line-crossing ceremony was practised as a rite of theatrical observance rather than brute harassment. Many journal-writers noted some aspect of the colourful proceedings. It took most ships at least five weeks to reach the equator, but a slow passage through the doldrums could delay that milestone by a month. Crossing the line was a symbolic mid-point in the journey, and crews and passengers alike enjoyed marking the occasion. On Sarah Hanmer’s ship the Lady Flora, there was a Grand Procession. Neptune and his wife were drawn in a car with attendants dressed in unique costumes, carrying tridents and accompanied by dolphins. The event concluded with a hornpipe, much drinking, fist fights and squabbling, as occurs on most days. On James Menzies’ ship, passengers were included in the ritual. Neptune hailed the ship, he recounted, the water began to fly about, a great many got a wetting as all who went on deck copped a bucketing. What came next was strictly for the sailors. Lathered with tar and muck, their heads shaved, they were festooned in pills and wigs and fine gowns. As the passengers looking on in delight knew by now, crossing the invisible lines of conformity, propriety and erstwhile identity could take many guises.
During those first weeks at sea when all that was solid melted into air, there were only two things the unmoored passenger could use for ballast: the watery horizon and the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which everyone did, before electricity) kept passengers in touch with a familiar reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations to orient oneself, to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. And then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even that stellar certainty was stripped away. At the equator you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set, giving access to the entire celestial sphere: another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched further south towards Australia, it would provide a new reference point: passengers began to fix their mental compass on the Crux Australis. Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the equator on 15 July 1853: Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different to an English sky.
The Southern Cross was a beacon in more ways than one. It told of a new political identity, divested of old allegiances. But as a symbolic object—what Kleinian psychoanalysts might call ‘a good object’—the Southern Cross offered new immigrants the reassuring embrace of affective belonging. Though the constellations ranged across the night sky, and the moon waxed and waned in primordial rhythm, they were permanent anchor points on an otherwise shifting shore. As the horizon is for disoriented seafarers, the Southern Cross became a hitching post for existential certainty when all else was in mortal flux. Before long, that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.
After skimming the equator and breaking free of the doldrums, ships plunged into the South Atlantic, following the natural circulation of winds and current, heading towards the Cape of Good Hope and the roaring forties. The dancing and music making on deck came to an abrupt halt as ships entered the arctic trade winds of the Southern Ocean. Heavy seas and strong winds buffeted the ship. Passengers were forced to find their sea legs all over again. On a day that was blowing a perfect hurricane, Fanny Davis stayed below but one of her cabin-mates fell over trying to get on deck and knocked several teeth in. To avoid getting out of bed, Fanny and her friends huddled together under mantles and coverlets, telling fortunes in teacups to pass the time.
It was the little ones who suffered the worst in this final leg of the voyage. One boy on James Menzies’ ship had a shocking fit. The doctor worked quickly to extract five worms from the lad’s gut, each measuring eight inches long. On Fanny Davis’s ship, one pregnant woman had lain in the hospital since departure. She delivered her baby in the middle of a fearsome storm only a week out from Port Phillip. It was a night of terrors, with waves flooding the berths and snow blanketing the deck. The baby died as soon as it was born; the mother followed not long after. Another traveller, Mrs Graham, witnessed the sea burials of a baby and toddler from the one family, dead within two days of each other, and wrote: the body fell with a splash and all was over but the cries of the Parents who felt deeply the loss of the child.14 Four children died on John Spence’s ship. The babies, he wrote pragmatically, were nursed on the spoon, always more easily injured than those who nurse on the breast.
Sarah Raws witnessed another morbid scene. A lady died this morning in our cabin. Her death came as a great shock; she had only been confined to bed for one day. The woman left ten grieving children. She was much respected in our cabin and had become very intimate with Sarah’s mother and father. The woman’s husband was a Baptist deacon, already settled in Australia. Sarah attended the funeral. They sewed her up in canvas, and it was an effecting [sic] sight to see the bereaved family. The woman’s son offered £200 to the captain to bring the body to land, but the law prohibited this and so she was consigned to the deep. They had only three days left to sail.
It was grief and fear, not elation, that accompanied many passengers as they sailed into their dizzying futures.
When Louisa Timewell’s ship docked at Sandridge wharf (now Port Melbourne), she was dumbstruck by the jetsam of prosperity. Passing down the Yarra Yarra, she wrote, we saw thousands of bullocks’ and sheep’s heads lying at the edge of the river a little way from the slaughtering house, rotting in a heap. I thought how many poor families would be glad of them in England. What an extraordinary land that would discard good meat as so much waste. As the anchor dropped from Sarah Raws’ ship, shouts of joy rang out. It appeared like coming out of Sodom into Paradise, she remarked. Fanny Davis swore that her ship had experienced the worst passage in years: We are all totally worn out in mind and body and want of sleep. On the morning of the Ascutna’s arrival in Port Phillip, Mrs Dunn gave birth to a son in the stateroom adjoining Frances and Thomas Pierson. The ship’s unassuming captain, George Pepper, named the boy George Pepper Ascutna Dunn.
The hours leading up to Margaret Howden’s reunion with her dear Jamie prickled with tension. At just eighty-two days, the Hurricane’s voyage had been lightning fast, spared serious illness and blessed with agreeable company and generous conditions. But for Margaret the day of reckoning—the much-anticipated meeting that had kept her spirits buoyant all these weeks—was about to be realised. Was dear Jamie craving his young Maggie as much as she ached for him?
July 29 Saturday
A beautiful awakening at 4 o’clock. Saw from my porthole Cape Otway lighthouse, a most cheering sight, and at 6 o’clock saw land of the country we had so longed for weeks to behold. At last that comfort was granted us. My feelings were more than can be described. To think that my own beloved Jamie was residing in that land. I saw the sun rise for the first time on my new place of abode. Oh! I sincerely trust that the hour, God willing, is not far distant when I shall meet my Jamie again, in perfect health, and all I could desire.
It had been, after all, more than six months since the last communication with James. Anything could have happened since then. He might have been struck down by that fearful colonial fever. He might have left his government post. He might, God forbid, have found a currency lass to love. Margaret, for all she knew, could be alighting in a land where she knew no one but her shipmates—and they, surely, would scatter on the winds of their new destinies.
July 31 Monday
A memorable day. All the forenoon, walked on deck with Mr Robertson feeling very unsettled at the prospect of a termination to our voyage…Came down, then I put the cabin in order in fond expectations. We anchored at 5 o’clock. Oh! How thankful I feel. Several Scots came, but alas! my own Jamie was not among the number.
Margaret ran from one porthole to another trying to get a glimpse of her fiancé, but it was no use. He was simply not at the docks. So she returned to her neat berth and the routines of ship life: tea, walking, prayers, staring at the horizon.
August 1 Tuesday
A most anxious day as I was looking out for my beloved but alas! did not come.
By Wednesday, Margaret was compelled to leave the Hurricane. She packed up her own dear cabin, said farewell to new friends, and stepped onto the wharf at Sandridge. Margaret bravely walked to the Bedford Hotel. Once again on dry land.
August 3 Thursday
Oh! I long for my Jamie.
August 4 Friday
Thought of my Jamie first thing. In very low spirits. Another day passed.
Then, miraculously, mysteriously, Margaret’s diary is missing the pages for August 5 to August 10. So we know nothing of how, where or when the day of reunion with James Johnston happened—but happen it did. Margaret and James were married on Wednesday 9 August 1854 at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Eastern Hill. They were about to endure the honeymoon from hell.
The Lady Flora, carrying Sarah Hanmer and her daughter, Julia, cruised through Port Phillip Heads on 13 August 1853. We have been taken in, complained Hanmer’s shipmate J. J. Bond. Nothing but discomfort from beginning to end. The captain spent most of his time drinking below. The first mate was mad with ill temper. The steward and attendants were insolent fellows who laughed at our misery. The passengers were three parts starved. The salt beef was inedible, the sea biscuits musty, the coffee burnt. Dirt, confusion and noise have prevailed in place of order and regularity, Bond lamented.
How much more acutely must William Timewell have felt this sense of injustice, of being royally duped? His wife Louisa would contract colonial fever only months after their arrival, leaving William with a clutch of motherless children and a sourdough leaven in need of constant feeding.
For Sarah Hanmer, about to shed six of her thirty-two years when the immigration agent at Port Phillip asked for her age, the performance of grievance was poised to find a new and very public stage.