The sailing Woodburys

With a lifetime growing up on the Hawkesbury River, often in areas where the only access for the family was by water, it seems likely that many of the Woodbury children were competent boat people. Jean Purtell (1995) notes that William carried goods and produce for tradespeople in Windsor before the railway was completed in1864. This included carrying materials for Mr Atkins, a builder in Windsor and wheat for the flour mill owned by Henry Moses. William owned and sailed in a vessel named William and Mary but unfortunately, details of his vessel are not known at this stage. 

There was another vessel named William and Mary in the region at an earlier time, a sailing vessel of 12 tons with a crew of 6, first registered in 1800. We know that this William and Mary was attacked by “natives” at Pittwater in April 1805, where the owner, William Miller, was forced to defend the vessel against being boarded and robbed. This vessel also featured in reports of the floods of 1811, when “Mr Miller’s vessel” broke from its mooring and drifted a long way down-river, before being rescued (Purtell, J. 1995). This vessel is probably not the vessel owned by William Woodbury who was plying his trade some 40 years later, in the mid-1850s.

We know very little about the William and Mary [1] that William owned. We can assume that it must have been somewhat substantial given that it traded between Windsor and Sydney, a trip that goes offshore between Broken Bay and Sydney Heads. Many ships have come to grief in this stretch of water. To do this trip, vessels need to be able to cope with the shallows and sand bars in the Hawkesbury River yet be robust and sea-worthy enough to cope with an offshore passage. 

William had interests in other vessels also. He was briefly the owner of a 32-foot cutter [2] a locally built vessel called Matilda, which was wrecked in 1849 in the hands of a subsequent owner. William also owned Defiance in 1854, another cutter of 31-foot with a capacity of about 14 tons. The last vessel used for trading by William was a vessel named Pearl but nothing else is known about it.

It may be just a coincidence that the name of William’s vessel served for him and his wife, Mary, or he may have chosen that name, or a vessel so named, in deliberate celebration of his marriage. There is no record of William commissioning the building of a new vessel or of a vessel being renamed to carry that name.

Jeremiah (Jerry) Woodbury, (probably sometimes with his brother William) traded to Windsor in the 1870s and 1880s, in the vessel named John and Herbert. This was probably a much smaller vessel built to cope with the shallows, snags and sandbars in the Hawkesbury River, in what became known as the “mosquito fleet” due to the small size of these craft (Purtell, J. 1995). Some of Jerry’s trips to the wharf at Windsor in the John and Herbert are recorded in the local newspapers, principally in The Australian and the Hawkesbury Chronicle and Farmers Advocate. Examples are as follows:

• 31 March 1877: John and Herbert (Woodbury) from Wisemans Ferry with lemons, maize, poultry, eggs and sundries.

• 18 July 1881: John and Herbert from Wisemans Ferry with maize, poultry and eggs (Woodbury)
  
  

• 18 July 1881: Ada from Wisemans Ferry with maize, poultry and eggs (Woodbury)
  
  

• 30 July 1881: John and Herbert from Lower Hawkesbury with maize etc (Woodbury)
  
  

• 1 April 1882: John and Herbert from Lower Hawkesbury with melons (Woodbury)
  
  

• 1 April 1882: Ada from Lower Hawkesbury with melons (Woodbury).
  
  

• 19 August 1882: John (and) Herbert from Wisemans Ferry with maize, poultry and eggs (Woodbury).
  
  Note that on two occasions in these examples, the vessel Ada carried produce for Jerry Woodbury, presumably when the John and Herbert had more than a full load.

The prices of some of the products at the Windsor markets in August 1882 were:

Maize (bushel#) 5 s.0d (5 shillings) 

Fowls (pair) 5 s.6d (5 shillings and 6 pence)

Eggs (dozen) 1 s.6d

Butter (pound) 2 s.2d.

# 1 bushel of maize is equivalent to the contents of a 25-kilogram bag.

At the time of Jerry’s trip on 19 August 1882 (above) the newspaper noted that many of the boats approaching Windsor Wharf were anchored in the channel, unable to reach the wharf due to silting and low water levels. Siltation in the Hawkesbury River was the result of ongoing urban development upstream and in the Blue Mountains and the effects of persistent floods (then droughts) in the river.

In 1849, Jeremiah and Richard briefly owned a 29-foot cutter of 10 tons capacity named Endeavour, launched in April 1836. It was used mainly for trading in the Hawkesbury River but was noted in the register as “lost Hawkesbury River” in 1850. The Richard mentioned here is likely to be Richard Jnr (born 1811), joining his brothers in the freight-carrying business, rather than his father, Richard Snr, who at that time, was 72 years old and busy establishing his 60 acre property at Bathurst Reach, 2 miles up-river from Wisemans Ferry.

Windsor was a very busy river port in the days that Jerry Woodbury was in command of his small cutter-rigged packet; [3], the John and Herbert. In her book, The Mosquito Fleet, Jean Purtell (1995) includes an excerpt from a story by journalist G C Johnson writing in the Hawkesbury Herald in 1905, looking back at the heyday of Windsor port:

“... it was a pleasure to stand at the rail in Thompson’s Square and look down on the animated scene – the loading and unloading; the perspiring horses and the cracking of whips, as the heavily-laden drays were hauled up Punt Hill; the chaffing and chiacking of the boatmen ... one cannot easily forget the picturesque scenes at the wharf on the arrival of the river fleet, or the eccentricities of old Jerry Woodbury in his Salvation shirt [4], the old Scandinavian Barnsdorff ... or skipper Morley. There were some queer characters among the river skippers, and old Joe Butler and Jerry Woodbury were by no means the least interesting among them.”

The Age of Steam

In 1881, the first steam-powered vessel made its appearance at Windsor.  She was the paddle-steamer Alma of 28 tons gross, owned by the new Balmain Steam Ferry and Tug Company in Sydney. The advent of steamers, which were able to go directly to Sydney markets (bypasssing Windsor Wharf) and the siltation and then drought in the Hawkesbury River, meant the inevitable collapse of the Hawkesbury “mosquito fleet” and of Windsor as a trans-shipping freight port. Windsor river port never recovered its dominant produce-handling role in the region.

Footnotes

[1] At that time there were many vessels named William and Mary. A much larger vessel (536 tons) named William and Mary bought 166 female orphans from Plymouth in England to Port Jackson in 1849. The popularity of the name was partly due to the popularity of William III and Mary II, who became the first and only joint sovereigns of the English throne in 1688. They reigned together after having assented to a Bill of Rights which granted power to the English Parliament to be the sole rule-maker for the sovereign’s subjects.

[2] A “cutter “is a sailing boat with a single mast, a fore-and-aft mainsail and one or two foresails (usually with a long bowsprit to accommodate both).  Cutters are often called “sloops” in the USA.

[3]  A packet-boat is one that is plying a regular service between two or more ports for the carriage of mail, goods and/or passengers, sometimes to a scheduled timetable.  It refers to the service that the vessel is providing rather than the craft itself.

[4] People who converted to the Salvation Army were given a uniform as soon as possible after their conversion and many wore it (or part of it) as a sign of their salvation and the change that had happened in their lives. (Salvation Army Centenary 1887 – 1987). Note also that Jerry’s youngest brother, George (born 1831) and his family became founding members of the Salvation Army in Inverell from about 1887. See the page, George James Woodbury (1831 - 1905) on this site.

Acknowledgement

Much of the information about the vessels owned and operated in the Hawkesbury River in this period  is from the encyclopaedic work compiled by Jean Purtell in 1995 about the vessels used by the traders on the Hawkesbury River over a 200-year period. 

I acknowledge her skill, dedication and expertise regarding these vessels and the people who used them.  

Bibliography

Purtell, Jean: (1995). The Mosquito Fleet. Hawkesbury River Trade and Traders 1794-1994. Deerubbin Press.

Ross, Valerie: (1989). A Hawkesbury Story. Library of Australian History.

Salvation Army Centennial (1887 – 1987). In the beginning. An account of the beginnings of the Salvation Army in Inverell, NSW. Copy of magazine article provided by Ian Woodbury.

The Australian. Windsor, Richmond and Hawkesbury Advertiser, 

(31 March 1877, 3 June 1882, )

Hawkesbury Chronicle and Farmers Advocate: “Arrivals of River Craft at Windsor Wharf.”

(6 July 1881, 30 July 1881, 1 April 1882, 13 May 1882, 19 August 1882)

Page created on 23 September 2024.