PASSENGERS, CREW, SHIPS AND CONDITIONS ON BOARD
Bob Sexton
The question on everybody’s mind today will be ‘What did my ship look like?’
Of the 1836ers, there is a magnificent portrait of the Lady Mary Pelham, and there are also plans depicting her sister-ship, the Marchioness of Salisbury. These were prepared by the Navy after they took over the Post Office mail service. Previously, the mails had been carried in fast-sailing ships owned by private contractors, this fleet including both the Duke of York and the Lady Mary Pelham.
As to the general appearance of HMS Buffalo, we have the excellent pen drawing passenger Hutchinson made in his journal, whereas an oil painting of the ship in a storm and a sketch of the shipwreck have lesser value. The Buffalo was the only naval ship involved, and had been built of teak as the merchant ship Hindostan at Calcutta in 1813. An inboard profile and deck plans were prepared immediately upon purchase by the Navy for use as a storeship, but of greater interest to us are the drawings made when preparing for the first of three voyages to New Zealand to obtain spars. On this first and the third voyage, the ship took convicts, and even on the second voyage one poor unfortunate was transported from South Australia to Botany Bay. As well as deck plans showing arrangements made for them that would have been equally suitable for the free emigrants, there were construction drawings of two other features which are to be seen in sketches of emigrant accommodation: water-closets and bed-places. There were only two water-closets to serve the 179 women convicts, and not that many more for the emigrants. Rather than having a simple bucket emptied overboard, there was a pan to which water was delivered from an overhead cistern, and the contents were periodically released to a waste pipe when a plug was pulled. The bed-places comprised two tiers of bunks on a light frame, and Rosina Ferguson describes them perfectly as being ‘six feet long by four feet wide. They are like press shelves, one above another. Ours, fortunately is an under one. There is no more division than a piece of canvas on the side partition. They are like my mother’s hens’ nests’. On these platforms was placed a straw filled mattress, known to sailors as a ‘donkey’s breakfast’.
Colonel Light’s painting of the Rapid survives in the form of a copy, there are several useful thumbnail sketches of the Cygnet, and we have Skipper’s watercolour of the saloon of the Africaine. However care must be taken: a well-known drawing of the Tam O’Shanter for instance lacks the poop mentioned in advertisements, let alone having the masts at an unlikely spacing. Beyond these sources, we have to rely on description.
When it comes to photographs of the earliest ships, we have only those of the Royal William of 1834, and the Mary Dugdale of 1840, and these taken long after the event.
It was not until the drastic revision of the Merchant Shipping Act in the 1850s that crew lists and an official log had to be lodged at Customs. For the 1836ers, the naval logbook is available for HMS Buffalo, but the muster roll, evidently taken from official records, was only published 50 years later. The South Australian Company retained the very informative logbooks of their ships, the Duke of York, Lady Mary Pelham and John Pirie. The names of officers and crew engaged for them were recorded in the Directors’ minutes, and the names of the crews in the Colonization Commissioners’ ‘Register of Emigrant Labourers’ as well. Thus we learn that the full complement of people ranged from the 10 on the John Pirie and 17 of the Rapid, to the 24 and 26 of the whalers Duke of York and Lady Mary Pelham, while the Buffalo carried almost 80 seamen and 20 Marines.
The colonising ships all had two decks, and most people were accommodated in the between-decks, the crew right forward and the Captain and passengers, as opposed to emigrants, in the stern cabins. Only in the case of the Buffalo is there official mention of a poop containing further cabins above the main deck, but poops are to be seen in sketches of the Cygnet and are mentioned in an advertisement for the Tam O’Shanter. In the case of the Rapid, a caboose containing the galley is seen standing on the upper deck in Colonel Light’s drawing.
The logbooks tend to concentrate on navigation and ship-handling, but there are many references to conditions for those on board which are complemented by the impressions of passengers as recorded in their diaries and other papers. These sometimes give hints as to the appearance of the ships themselves. The ships ranged in size from the Buffalo with a length of 37 metres to the John Pirie just 19 metres, with a beam of 6 metres, which with her undoubted rounded shape in the Scottish style may have led to her being described as a ‘washing tub steered with a tiller’, and also, that she was ‘built for stowing rather than sailing; one end of her is very much like a packing case’. This comment no doubt referred to the blunt outline of her bows, but such a shape would have added buoyancy, thus leading to Captain Martin’s claim after encountering tremendous gales that he had never been in a better sea-boat.
The food served on these emigrant ships was much the same as on naval ships since it had to be capable of being preserved for long periods. The precise quantities vary between authorities, but we can take it that, as on the Africaine, for each adult the weekly ration was 5 or 6 pounds of bread, 3 lbs of salt beef and 3 lbs of pork, 1½ lbs of flour, several pints of peas, and small quantities of tea, sugar, vinegar and rum. The flour was used with suet to make dumplings, and the bread was in the form of dry biscuit. However, to get the low-down on the food, I can do no better than quote Daniel D. Heustis—a convict, or political prisoner depending on your point of view—transported during the Buffalo’s final voyage, since the difference in rations lay in quantity rather than quality. ‘The pork’, he said, ‘was not as bad as it might have been, but the beef had doubtless served an apprenticeship of seven years at Gibraltar, besides going two or three times around the world, before it was opened for our use. It was as salt as brine, hard as Pharaoh’s heart, and as nutritious as wooden nutmegs’.
I will finish with the comment that you never quite know when intriguing snippets about a ship will turn up in unlikely places. When it was decided that the Rapid should be sold, a list of stores was prepared and even the cooking gear was detailed: frying pan, gridiron, saucepans, stewpans, steamer, iron and copper tea kettles, fish kettle, baking pans, and a cullinder. There was a bread tray, pepper box, salt cellars, basin, decanter, 6 wine glasses, 10 table cloths, 9 plates and 4 dishes, a coffee pot and a coffee mill, 2 teapots, and that indispensable item, a corkscrew. Regrettably the list doesn’t record whether the six teaspoons were silver.