The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka

by Clare Wright

  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.