We Are the Rebels (5 page)

With heads reeling and stomachs churning, many immigrants prayed for death to put
them out of their misery. But when they finally crawled out of the putrid stinking
belly of the ship 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.

OUR FLOATING WORLD

The vast majority of gold-rush immigrants were travelling from British ports. For
them, the early part of the journey proceeded in a southwesterly direction down
the east Atlantic Ocean. The ship's route would descend past the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon,
Madeira, the Canary Islands and the lumpy knob of West Africa, through the Tropic
of Cancer towards the equator. Sometimes, if conditions were poor and ships made
slow progress, the English coastline could still be visible for weeks. But eventually,
all familiar markers disappeared from sight.

The journey from Britain to Melbourne

Now there was only the vast rolling ocean.

Just six days after her departure, English schoolgirl Jane Swan noted it was
getting
perceptibly warmer
but, she complained to her diary,
we get quite tired of having
nothing to look at but the sea
. Passengers with more serious grievances were also
quick to make them known. After all, most of the gold-rush immigrants had paid for
their passage, or at least they were there of their own free will—not as convicts
or naval conscripts.

On the
Lady Flora
, J. J. Bond said,
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 they could
acquaint the owners of the ship
with the condition
of facilities that were
unequal to her crowded state
.

The passengers' objection to living like swine was fair enough. They would all have
heard of the
Ticonderoga
, the famous ‘plague ship' that arrived at Port Phillip in
November
1852 after a hell voyage in which one hundred of its 795 assisted migrants
died—over half of them children. A report by the Immigration Board in Melbourne later
stated that the ship:

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…receptacles full of putrid ordure, and porter bottles
etc, filled with stale urine, while maggots were seen crawling underneath the berths.

Jane Swan's family, on board the
William and Jane
, also signed a petition. This one
was about a bad water supply, and it worked. They
were supplied with good water from
the tanks.

Petitioning was something the English emigrants would have been quite familiar with.
It was part of a longstanding tradition in which people got together to complain
about and combat local grievances. The journey to Australia, being long and crowded,
made getting together to complain quite straightforward. Since nobody liked the idea
of hostile crowds in confined spaces, most ship captains were at least willing to
hear petitions and delegations without taking offence.

By the time most gold seekers arrived on dry land, they had already made friendships
and alliances: strong bonds based on shared space and sometimes common grievances.
Many passengers referred to shipboard life 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.
Our floating world
, they called it.

This intense bonding, coupled with the sense of having endured an ordeal together,
would later make an important contribution to solidarity on the goldfields.

A DIRTY DISAGREEABLE LOT

The ‘floating world' might have been novel but, as many ship diaries reveal, it still
had plenty of pride, prejudice and plain old snobbery.

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
—worse than vermin,
stale biscuits, wild children or rank water
—
and
a dirty disagreeable lot
. Spence
assumed the frequent robberies to be the work of the Irish mob.
I expect before we
reach Melbourne we shan't have a spoon left on us
, he complained.
They are such expert
thieves
.

What a literate Irish Protestant lass like Catherine Bentley might have thought
of such bla
tant bigotry is not clear. At any rate she quickly climbed the ladder
of social mobility once she reached Melbourne.

Religious intolerance surfaced too. During a fierce storm, James Menzies had a gripe
about his Methodist shipmates who
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
. 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 was common.

So was disapproval of women, and it was often based on their sexual conduct. As ships
sailed towards the tropics and temperatures rose, women stripped back their layers:
corsets were unlaced, stockings removed. On clear nights there might be dancing on
the high poop deck. In stormy weather there was always a dark corner for a liaison.

Of all the places of iniquity my eyes ever beheld
, wrote one shocked 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
. A shipboard
romance could leave a souvenir that needed feeding and changing several times a day.

Women were technically free to move about the ship, but they were expected to conform
to nineteenth-century standards of respectable femininity. This was particularly
true for the single ladies. On James Menzies' ship, there was
a disturbance in the
women's quarters and the ship's doctor
told them that he would have a prison made
for some of them
. It wasn't a bluff. The carpenters were called in to install wooden
uprights—like prison bars—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.

CROSSING THE LINE

It isn't particularly surprising if there were moments of passion on this long journey.
The migrants were young, hard-drinking thrillseekers, mostly unchaperoned. But sometimes
the steamy encounters took unexpected forms.

The
Sir William Molesworth
stopped at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal
in 1853. As the Scottish teenager Alexander Dick tells us, there was no pier or
landing place, and one of the primary
industries of the natives
—who were of mixed
African and Portuguese descent—was carrying passengers from boats to the shore.

The
Sir William Molesworth
arrived in considerable surf. Dick describes the scene
of moral pandemonium that ensued, with the ladies
utterly horrified
to find that
they could only reach the shore in the arms of a Cape Verdean man
as naked as the
Apostle Belvidere and as black as Beelzebub
. Some flatly refused, and returned to
the ship. A few daring souls
resigned
themselves half unwillingly
to the adventure,
arriving
on the beach tousled and tumbled and blushing like peonies
.

It was an extraordinary scene. Familiar standards were blurred, behaviours adapted,
boundaries crossed. The women who were carried to shore were only ‘half unwilling'.
No longer upstanding, but tousled and tumbled and set down arse-about. Wondering,
probably, how a precious English rose should act when her knight in shining armour
is not a handsome prince but a buck-naked black man.

Not all the women jumped ship when the opportunity presented. But some did grab at
the chance to throw off the trappings of convention and surrender to something new.
And it would have been only one of the disorienting experiences for the south-bound
travellers. For many of them, the ship voyage abruptly shattered old assumptions.

Shipboard, immigrants were neither on land nor of the sea; neither leaving nor arriving.
They were neither here nor there. Fanny Davis even observed a Catholic prayer service,
below deck,
conducted by a young woman
. What had possessed this girl to go against
the strict traditions of her faith?

Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian, described the scene on the promenade deck of his
ship at night, when it
assumed the appearance of a dance hall
with fiddlers, tambourines,
dancers. 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
. (Ann Street was the
red-light district of Boston, where the city's blacks and whites would notoriously
intermingle.)

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
.

Fanny Davis described one of her ship's
full dress balls
where women went to pains
to outdo each other's outfits.
Some of the girls
, she wrote,
dress in the Highland
costume as men. It looks first rate
. And out on deck she was finding things even
more peculiar. 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
.

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
. And no stockings.

What a sign of the topsy-turvy times.