The solitary sea, to regions, where the very stars
Of Heaven will strangers be,
To some untrodden wilderness
Of Australasia’s land—a home, which man has here denied,
I seek at God’s own hand.
As for his father and mother, he bequeaths them nothing save his tears.
I leave them in a busy town,
Where pale mechanics toil
In irksome manufactories,
Shut from the sun and soil.
Having tramped about London all Christmas Eve trying to sell some of his ivory work, but not succeeding in doing so, Henry was sad to report that his and Clarinda’s only Yule fare, after two or three days without anything to eat, was their landlady’s daughter’s plum pudding and wine. But now he faced a challenge that most prospective emigrants, having set their mind on departing, must have feared most. His parents and sister read in the popular magazine Bell’s Life an account, which proclaimed itself to be an official report, of the harshness of life in New South Wales. Parkes consoled himself that certain people in his boarding house knew more about Australia than did someone in Birmingham. He wrote defensively to his concerned relatives, ‘A girl that was apprenticed to Miss Irvine [their landlady] went out to New South Wales some years ago. She returned to England about four years ago, the wife of a celebrated missionary. She made Miss Irvine’s her home during her stay in London. After laying out several hundreds of pounds in expensive articles of furniture she went back again to New South Wales, more glad again to leave than she was when she arrived in her native land. So you see, we can obtain some news about Australia without going far a-field.’
The family wanted him to have likenesses painted of himself and Clarinda, and sent him money for the purpose, but he had to use it to pay for expenses. Over the winter Clarinda had become pregnant, but the young couple received little support—a mere shilling in fact—from Clarinda’s father. By comparison with Mr Varney, Parkes’s father sent a pound on the eve of their departure.
Henry had time before going to the ship to be idolised as a poet by the old ladies in his lodging house, for the Charter published his verse. One old lodger made him a present of an ivory tablet, a set of reading books, a shoe-lift and a paper knife. They would have been wiser to give him cash, for by the time he and Clarinda boarded the emigrant ship Strathfieldsay, he had only the seven shillings that his sister had sent to have the images made. ‘Just enough to take us to Gravesend’, he lamented, but consoled himself that another poem of his would appear next month in the Village Magazine.
To enter the steerage of even a well-run emigrant ship daunted Clarinda and Henry, as it did other emigrants. ‘The hole allotted to steerage passengers had a most miserable appearance at first . . . The large hold of the ship, where the goods generally are stored, is divided in about the middle by a deal partition. The apartment towards the forecastle, or front of the ship, is allotted to the male steerage passengers; the other, towards the cabins in the poop, or the back part of the ship, to the females. There are two rows of berths, one above the other round each compartment. The berths are three feet by six feet [0.9 by 1.8 metres] just affording room to two persons to lie down. They are separated from each other by a slight low deal board about 10 inches [25 cm] high, so that when we are all in bed, our bodies rising higher than those boards which separate, it seems as if we are arranged side by side in one immense bed all round the place.’ The Parkes couple slept—like others—on straw mattresses, with a double blanket and a rug. They had to share their deck and the hold with a cow and a calf, twenty-four pigs, thirty sheep and numerous geese and fowls.
The emigrants were divided into messes, eight persons to a mess, each taking a turn at being mess captain for a week. This task involved getting the provisions for the mess from the ship’s steward, to see to their being cooked, and to wash the dishes. Meals were nothing but beef and soup and biscuit, though there was plenty of it.
On board, Parkes recorded, were many farm labourers from Sussex. ‘A rude set,’ Parkes found his fellow steerage-dwellers, the average urbanity further diminished by a crowd of ‘Irish-real emeralds’ who came aboard at Plymouth. Some passengers fled the ship before it left Plymouth Sound. ‘Came last night, a young Jew from London forfeited his passage money and left the ship the other day heartily tired of it. A man who was going out free also ran away last Sunday morning, as soon as we got here, and left all his clothes behind him.’
But the young Parkes couple had no option other than to stay the course.
THE ALMA MATER OF IMMIGRANTS
Though he was a sturdy young man, Henry Parkes would have found it difficult to read on the Strathfieldsay, since rude immigrants subjected working-class readers to ridicule. The rowdiness of the young men was inescapable, and was often compounded by marital quarrels or the cries of sick children, all in the terrible, dim, cheek-by-jowlness of steerage. And in storms, as one observer of an emigrant ship recorded, there would be ‘boxes . . . all adrift, flying about from one side to the other, with nearly fifty whining sick squalling children to complete the misery’.
Light was also the enemy of the intellect in steerage. In better kept ships a lantern was meant to be in reach of each berth, and oil lamps and candles might have been supplied by purser or passengers. Sometimes lights were made out of animal fat rendered down into a tin cup and supplied with a cotton-wool wick. These kinds of lights were often a good recourse also for the Australian bush, where the mutton-fat lamp was the only assured lighting.
Though steerage was irksome for Parkes, for some it was a tragedy. Sarah Davenport’s husband had been a soldier, and he and his wife had heard from friends in New South Wales and Port Phillip that there were good opportunities in both those places. They paid their debts and were told by the immigration authorities in Manchester that they would have to find £2 for each of their four children. Unlike the delays which beset Henry Parkes and his wife, the Davenports got to Liverpool on 4 October 1841 and resided in the dormitories of the emigrant depot, passed the board of commissioners the next day, and went on board their immigrant ship the day following—it sailed that evening. But the vessel went aground on a sandbank as ‘roughs were bawling nex my galley’, and as Sarah was nursing her violently ill children. Nonetheless, ‘I did not wish to begin life again in old England—I wanted to make a fresh start in a new country.’
After some weeks ashore they went on board the Champion of Glasgow. Ten days out from England a girl was coming down the hatchway with some gruel for her mother and was pitched by the sea off the ladder. Sarah was sitting at her berth with her infant son, Albert, on her knee. The boiling gruel splashed his head and he died four days later. ‘I could not cry one tear—I was stund— the young woman’s name was Ema Patmore and a good young woman she was aged about 15 . . . she could not cry but in one short month she died and was buried in the sea.’ The shock of Albert’s death brought on premature labour in Sarah Davenport, ‘and that babe was thrown in the sea—I was almost dumb with grief—I thought my trials was heavy but I cried unto God to help me for my children’s sake’. Her husband was in some sort of shock too. His kindness seemed to have vanished and he wandered the deck querulously. Some of the other women were very kind to Sarah, however, and she rallied herself with the idea that she must make herself useful. She helped a woman who was confined on New Year’s Day and went on deck to get her something hot from the galley as a wave struck which washed part of the galley away and sent Sarah sprawling under a longboat. Sarah went below, assessed her cuts and bruises, put on dry clothes, tried a return trip to the galley, and succeeded.
Just as they landed in Port Jackson in February 1842, Mrs Patmore’s own infant also died. There were ten deaths on the Champion of Glasgow but ashore lay the kindnesses and ready dispensing hand of the former convict Dr Bland, who issued prescriptions and pills as he rode about Sydney. Sarah Davenport, like many a steerage immigrant, praised the surgeons aboard her ship. Most
immigrants had better luck than her, though few could exceed her in ruggedness of soul. Sarah and her husband and children would ultimately settle on the Murray at Albury.
A Scots woman, Sarah Brunskill, travelling to South Australia in 1838, had similar bad fortune. It was common that young children suffered dehydration and convulsions from the combination of seasickness and harsh salt rations. If there was a cow aboard, it was possible to address the problem in most cases. But, ‘At ten minutes after seven in the morning our dear boy breathed his last on my lap. Oh! How can I proceed! My heart is almost ready to burst. Soon after four his body was confined to the deep about ninety miles from Oporto.’ The same day Sarah Brunskill lost her boy, her daughter was also taken by measles. ‘About half past twelve her dear spirit flew to that mansion from which no traveller returns, so you see in less than twenty-four hours our darlings were both in the bosom of God.’
Sarah Brunskill would settle with her husband on land near Adelaide, rejoiced in the speed with which the sun dried her clothes and, although she had intended to return to Britain after prospering, died an Australian matriarch at the age of eighty-seven.
Emigration was hard in a number of ways for young mothers, especially in cramped steerage, since they did not always realise that for the sake of preventing the spread of infection they had to consign babies’ napkins to the sea. An immigration manual instructed that, ‘These cannot be used again on board ship, and must, the moment they are removed, go through the porthole.’
Even without nappies, the water closets in steerage often malfunctioned or overflowed, but the early Victorians were used to living with the smell of sewage. To cut the fetid air below deck, surgeons added fumigants to charcoal burners and burned tar in swinging stoves. Chloride of lime mixed with vinegar gave off an unpleasant creosote odour, but probably saved lives.
There was a bad typhus epidemic on the emigrant ship Manlius, which put into Port Phillip Bay in 1842 from Greenock in Scotland. Forty-four immigrants had been buried at sea, a great number for what was, by the standards of the age, an apparently well-run ship. Typhus was a fever transmitted by the body louse, and was also known as spotted fever, gaol fever, ship fever, colonial fever, camp fever and, in Ireland where it would soon kill hundreds of thousands, famine fever. Children were underrepresented among the typhus dead because it did not usually attack those under about fifteen. Thus one Scottish couple died on Manlius and left behind five orphan children aged between two and twelve. The captain was savaged by the colonial press, and the reports were inevitably picked up by British journals. In some ways this impeded immigration, but it certainly helped to make shipowners scrupulous.
The ship was quarantined at Gellibrand’s Point near Williamstown, where a further seventeen passengers died. The government refused at first to reimburse the shipowner with the bounties for the arrivals but, after an enquiry, decided that neither the owner nor the surgeon was to blame for the outbreak of the disease. Like those who enquired into the behaviour of convict transport masters, the colonial and British authorities were anxious not to be too harsh in judgment, lest shipowners be discouraged from bringing immigrants.
Generally the journals of immigrants were full of praise for their ships, captains and surgeons. But perhaps the most remarkable tribute to a captain is that of Ellen Moger, who would land at Holdfast Bay, in the new colony of South Australia, in 1837, to walk with her husband and daughter across gibbers and through a thirsty landscape to the site of Adelaide. Ellen wrote, ‘Our captain took great notice of our children when he saw them gradually wasting away and would send for them into his cabin and give them port-wine, almost daily. In fact, wine and water was the only nourishment they took for weeks and that was given to them too late.’ So Emily, the daughter who trudged cross-country to Adelaide, was the only one of four Moger children to have survived—indeed, at sea, the Mogers had lost three in the space of twelve days. ‘They could eat none of the ship’s provisions and our vessel was not like many of the vessels that were sent out, provided with one or more cows for the accommodation of the sick.’
It was to such sturdy-souled steerage passengers of the immigrant ships that Charles Harpur, son of a convict schoolteacher, addressed his The Immigrant’s Vision:
Their Truth an abode on the forest-clad hills
Shall establish, a dweller forever,
And Plenty rejoice by the gold-pebbled rills,
Well-mated to honest endeavour,
Till the future a numberless people shall see,
Eager, and noble, and equal, and free,
And the God they adore their sole monarch shall be—
Then come, build thy home in Australia.
THE SCOTTISH WAVE
Despite the high profile of the Scottish Martyrs, Scots had not been much represented amongst the convicts, but semi-compulsory emigration to Australia remained an established British style and had its impact on the Highlanders and Islanders.
Until the early 1800s lairds—landowners—had hung on to their crofters, or peasants, and resented those who had emigrated to North America. To absorb some of the human overflow on their estates they had founded Highland regiments, but with the Napoleonic wars long over, the men of the regiments were back home, prices had fallen, and the lairds were, compared to their ancestors, hard up. Like those of many Irish landlords, their estates were encumbered with debt. Improvement of the estates, by replacing tenants with revenue-producing livestock, was a way out for the burdened gentry of both Ireland and Scotland. How fortuitous and providential it was—for the landlord, if not for the individual crofter, his wife and their hungry and squalling children—that just as the landlords of the Highlands and Islands came to bemoan their region’s density of population, the new world, and notably the Australian colonies with their willingness to underwrite migrant ships, cried out for more people.
Many lairds, even—and especially—those most sentimentally attached to the traditions of Scottish culture, became remorseless evictors of their tenants. The methods of clearing off the crofters from their notoriously squalid huts were often the same as those used in Ireland—military and constables at the ready, then the roof crushed in, even the house set afire. Betsy McKay, who lived in Skye in the valley of Strathnaver, remembered years later that her family’s farm had been attacked by a burning party which fired the house at both ends. Another witness remembered pulling one old lady out of the house after it had been set on fire. Oh, Dhia, Oh Dhia, Teine, teine, she cried in Erse, the Gaelic of the Scots. ‘Oh God, oh God, fire, fire.’
One commentator described a clearance or eviction of an entire village: ‘For some days after the people were turned out one could scarcely hear a word with the lowing of the cattle and the screams of the children marching off in all directions.’ Many of those screaming children would come to Australia as bounty emigrants. On the Isle of Skye, more than 40 000 people received writs of removal, and in some places one family was left where there had been a hundred. The owners and the gentlemen co-operated with the immigration agents to send off many ships of poor tenants between 1837 and 1839. As the novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote, the day would soon come when ‘the pibroch [a bagpipe call to assemble] may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered’.
Those evicted would become, in many cases, bounty emigrants, lured by speakers such as the New South Wales Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang, who was honoured at a public breakfast at the port of Greenock, his native city. He had come back to Scotland to attract Highlanders and Islanders to Australia. He predicted that whatever befell Britain itself, there would always be a Britain while such people as the Scots emigrants, descended from the ancient state, speaking the ancient language, pursued their fortunes and their Presbyterianism in a far place. Lang believed the Scots would make ‘the hills and vales of Australia resound with the wild note of the pibroch and the language of the ancient Gael’. Scotland would not lose the emigrants; Scotland would be enlarged by their t
ranslation to Australian places. On a Sydney pier, a Presbyterian minister addressed the arrivals on the Midlothian in 1837 in similar terms, and told them in Gaelic that they would raise ‘the altar of God’ in the areas they occupied—in their case the charming valleys of the Manning and the Clarence rivers in northern New South Wales. The Thunguddi of the region did not yet know what blessings were on their way.
Australia was a popular choice for Scots immigrants because it looked for common labourers and ‘artisans of very ordinary quality’. Or, more accurately, the Colonial Office did. As in England, a bounty was offered to immigrants to Australia—£10 was paid to the shipowner for every immigrant Scot safely landed in Australia.
Previously, landlords had placed tenants close to the shoreline where they could gather and process kelp for them. Their crofters held very small plots of land as well and paid rent generally in the form of labour and services. The chief work they did was picking kelp along the coast and processing it. Crofters called the kelp ‘tangle’, in fact, and used the name kelp itself to represent the ashes produced from burning the tangle. Its ultimate use was in glass and soap manufacture. But in the 1820s, the taxes on foreign imports of flax and kelp were abolished, and the lairds, having organised their estates around flax and kelping, could not compete with the foreign imports, and were left short of a source of income. And so too were the kelpers robbed of their usefulness.
Throughout the 1820s and 1830s Australia slowly became one of the chief destinations of displaced Scottish Islanders and Highlanders, even though the journalist William Cobbett declared that it was the worst of all possible destinations. The number of official executions, he said, was challenged by the number of murders of landowners by their servants and murdering natives. ‘If any man, not actually tired of his life, can prefer immigrating to a country like this to immigrating to the United States he is wholly unworthy of my attention.’ But he assumed the crofters had no informed choice in the matter. They were largely in the hands of the evicting landlords, despite their fears the natives of Australia spirited people away from their houses and that they were never seen again.