No Simple Passage

By Jenny Robin Jones

The Treaty of Waitangi had been in place for only two years when the London set out from England with a full shipload of wannabe pioneers. Driven by a variety of motives, many of them related to poverty and lack of positive expectations, they responded to slick advertising and set out for a new life at the other end of the world.

Jenny Robin Jones has created a startling record of life on board the London. By imaginatively stowing away alongside her ancestor Rebecca Remington. The narrative vividly pieces together the days at sea on this floating microcosm using the journal of the ship’s surgeon and that of a cabin passenger. Combined with the portrayal of the sometimes arduous voyage are accounts of the Wellington settlement as the pioneers will find it and the historical events they will become caught up in.

Coming face-to-face with the 258 emigrants, we discover the lives they left behind and their dreams for the future — who will flourish, who will founder and who won’t even make it to their new homeland.

Rich in historical detail and human spirit, No Simple Passage is narrative non-fiction at its most immediate and compelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jenny Robin Jones
• Release date: Jan 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780995102545

Jenny Robin Jones

Jenny Robin Jones explores history through a mechanism of unfolding narrative. The theme of pioneering is strong in her work and was explored in her first book, Writers in Residence: a journey with pioneer New Zealand writers. The theme of belonging is also strong in these books and is the subject of her 2018 publication, Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an Age of Loneliness. She has also written short stories, travel articles, author biographies and children’s non-fiction. A long involvement with the New Zealand Society of authors included many years’ service as its executive director and as its representative on the board of Copyright Licensing Limited. She was a long-term chair of the selection panel for the annual CLL awards. Jenny Robin Jones was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1947 and brought up in England. In 1970 she returned to New Zealand where she now lives.

Book preview

The Journey of the London to New Zealand in 1842

***

Jenny Robin Jones

Smashwords Ebook edition 2017

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Copyright Jenny Robin Jones

Epub ISBN 978-0-9951025-4-5

Contents

Maps

Ship’s Manifest

29 December 1841 – 2nd May 1842

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

Notes

Map of Britain showing where the adult emigrants came from and in what numbers.

Map of New Zealand showing where the emigrants settled.

Ship’s Manifest

Passengers on the London voyage 1st January – 2nd May, 1842

Cabin Passengers

Mrs Susannah Atwood

James and Georgina Kelham

Margaret Wills

Henry Torre

Charles Empson

William Shepherd

William Mackie Turnbull (Dr)

Intermediate Passengers

Robert and Anne Cheesman

Daniel and Sarah Dougherty

Mrs Emma Martin

William Calvert

Thomas Rider

Edward Abbot

William Hamilton

William Dale

Richard Wallis

Paying Passengers

Abraham Smith

Abraham Smith Jr

William Briggs

William Parry

Nathaniel Whale was listed as a passenger but had no embarkation order.

Emigrant Passengers in steerage

A’Court, James and Catherine

Andrews, William and Eliza

Barb, James and Mary with children Thomas and William

Barrett, William and Mary Ann with children Mary Ann, Sarah, Caroline, William, Sophia and Ellen

Bee, Francis and Ann with daughter Ellen

Benton, Timothy and Mary with children Eliza, Frances, and Thomas

Bidmead, Jonathan and Sarah with daughter Caroline

Bird, William

Bird, Mary

Brewer, William and Caroline with children Sarah, William and George

Burling, Henry and Mary with children Caroline, Henry, Rose, Alfred, Charles and Arthur

Cattell, James and Mary with children Harriet, James, Caroline and Eliza

Chamberlain, Thomas and Susannah with children William, Sarah Ann, Giles and Edwin

Clark, William, nephew of Louisa Fitchett

Clark, Joseph, nephew of Louisa Fitchett

Collier, Joseph and Harriet Amelia Ann

Collins, John Power and Margaret with children Jeremiah, John, Samuel and Raymond

Conlan, Richard and Mary with daughter Ellen

Dixon, Charles and Mary with children Sarah and David

Dixon, Joseph and Mary with children John and Joseph

Dockray, Samuel and Hannah with children Margaret, and Thomas

Eades, William and Francis with children Frances, James, Matilda and John

Edwards, Robert and Phoebe with children Giles, George, Israel, Jane, Charles, Herbert and Henry

Felgate, George and Martha with children Merinda, John, Benjamin, Louisa, Elizabeth, Maria and John

Fitchett, John and Louisa with children Louise, John, William, Alfred and George

Florence/Florance, Thomas George and Celia

Hall, William Jabez and Maria with children William, Joseph, David, John and Thomas

Harvey, William and Sarah with children Sarah, Charles, Alfred and John

Herbert, Joseph and Sarah with son Jesse

Hodder, Walter and Emma with daughter Elizabeth Mary

Holder, William and Martha with children Emma Phillis, Thomas and Mary

Hollingworth, Edward and Phillis with children Benjamin and Joseph

Hurley, Alexander and Ann with children John, Henry, Eliza, William and Daniel

Ikin, John and Jane with son John

James, John Charles and Eliza with children Edward, Amelia, Ellen, Clara, Emma and Louisa

Jenkins, William and Catherine Jane with children Jane Tutin and John Wesley

Jones, Henry and Mary with children Maria, John, Elizabeth and Mary

Judd, John and Selina with son Joseph

Lawreston, A. Rushton

Lockyer, Thomas and Elizabeth with children William, Christopher, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Eliza Ann

McCarthy, Joseph Michael and Mary Ann, [Charles Faustina born at sea, 16.02.1842].

Marshall, David Watt and Jean with children Alexander, Henry and Margaret

Mason, William and Lucy Ann with children Lucy Ann and William Frederick

Matthews, Charles and Elizabeth with son Edwin

Nicols, William

Poulter, Samuel and Mahalah

Remington, John and Rebecca. [Mary Ann born at sea, 02.05.1842]

Rogers, Charles and Eliza with daughter Ann

Saunders, Joseph and Rose with children Mary and Ann

Saunders, William and Maria

Scott, James and Catherine

Short, James and Charlotte with children Reuben, Job, Elijah and Ryan

Stockbridge, Stephen and Mary with children Louise, Caroline, James, Stephen and William

Tarr, John and Elizabeth with children William, Hannah and Mary Ann

Tattle, John and Ann with children Lavinia, Charles, Eliza, John Webber and Ann Elizabeth

Taylor, Joseph and Elizabeth

Thomas, William and supplier with children Margaret, Henry and son

Tomkins, John and Mary with children William, Emma, John, and, Maria and Mary

White, Amelia

Williams, David and Eliza with children Catherine and Elizabeth

Worsley, Thomas and Ann. Mrs Worsley is sister to Mrs Thomas

Wednesday 29th December 1841

First, introductions. I’m your great-great-granddaughter, Jenny. You begat Mary Ann who begat Eva who begat Barrie who begat me. So I’m creeping onto the London with you, Rebecca, hiding under your skirts, a wraith of the future. I’m sidling up the gangplank, glad to leave these murky London waters.

The voyage to Port Nicholson will take four months, so I’m going to keep a diary for the 124 days until you and your husband John Remington touch land again, and I’ll try to beguile you during some of these weary hours with stories of your lives to come. I know much that happened on the ship and I’ll find out more, even about things that affected you, Rebecca. Sometimes I’ll know only the weather. Charles Empson kept a diary, you see, quite a good one, although, in the manner of male recorders he’s a bit stuck on the weather, the latitude, the state of the ship. But he tells me other things too, like when a sailor falls off the rigging and is drowned. By the last days of the voyage I don’t want him to stop. He longs for the journey to be over but the closer he gets to land the more I’m crying inside: Don’t end! Don’t end! But he does. He steps ashore and dines at Dicky Barrett’s and that’s where his diary stops.

I wouldn’t know what happened to you after that, Rebecca, if it weren’t for Dr Turnbull, who also keeps a journal – and he tells me you had Mary Ann the next day in the harbour.

When I look back to 1842 and see the number of descendants there can be from just two people, I am sure ‘beget’ is the right word. Take Charles and Mary Dixon from Spittle Hill in Nottinghamshire, who are boarding with you at Deptford. By the time they and their children have finished begetting they will have 96 grandchildren. My God, think of the birthdays. And that’s just the beginning. By the 21st century you and the 54 other couples on board will have thousands and thousands of descendants. Great-great-great-great-grandchildren. ‘Begetting’ is a promise of so much more than ‘had’ or ‘gave birth to’.

I want to know, I want to know everything. About you and the Dixons and all the other emigrants. About Dr Turnbull, who gives you medicine if you are sick and stops your rations if you swear at him. About Charles Empson the diarist. The seven Maori crew. Albatrosses and porpoises. And what it’s like to leave your homeland and travel to another place and make a life there.

***

William Mackie Turnbull, MD, 21 years old, keeps a careful record of your ailments and his treatments. As well as dishing out the opium and committing bodies to the deep, especially those of children, it’s his job to keep you all under control. That’s quite a tall order at times. I mean, you women just refused to keep watch in the hospital. And as for Mrs Burling. He stopped her rations three times, you know.

The only other person who kept a diary was James Kelham, later Sir James, but his entries are very short and mostly a rehash of the captain’s log. His reports are hard to decipher, and frankly I’m not that fascinated by exactly where you are in the ocean and which sails are up and which down and whether or not they’re trimmed. Still, there are interesting bits too. I want to know what happens to you – you and your fellow emigrants – after you set foot on New Zealand soil. There are so many questions. How do people travelling 12,000 miles to a land on the other side of the world learn to make it their home? What makes your lives meaningful when you have been ripped away from your family and traditions? How do you get on with the people of the land, the tangata whenua, the Maori? Finding out the answers will take a lot of determination – and I think I’m the one for the job.

Before we set sail I need to know what your London was like. I’ve been reading up on the city in the 1830s, but the best way to grasp something of the feel of it is through Charles Dickens. I studied him at school in England (he lived near you) but reading Bleak House with you in mind feels so different. The stench of the open sewers coursing down filthy, narrow streets assaults my nostrils because you’re my great-great-grandmother and you were there.

You were there, as I would be later. I visited the Tower of London, which isn’t far from where you lived. Showcase after showcase of torture instruments took me back through time to destroy my childish optimism. Outside in the light I saw Grenadier Guards in fur hats standing still as posts so that little straps across their chins didn’t fall off. It all felt foreign. Even the pavements, because I didn’t know their history, were just a bunch of uneven flagstones that kept tripping me up.

The greatest city in the world then, wasn’t it? But out of control. All that dividing up the common land into private blocks has forced many of you off the land. Replacing spinners and weavers scattered throughout rural England with mechanised factory production makes sense, like so much in these times of breakneck change (which will come to be tagged the Industrial Revolution), but greater efficiency and production has led to many losing their livelihoods. Now people are pouring in from the country, from Ireland, from all the counties of England into the Fever Patch, the ‘Great Oven’ as Dickens called it. How could they all be accommodated when London had hardly changed from the century before? Only by wedging 2850 people into 95 tiny decrepit houses in St Giles and repeating the trick all over London. Small shops, small trades, lots of dirty red brick submerged in fog and decay. Shoddily constructed back-to-back houses without drainage. Once grand homes reduced to tenement status. Cheap lodging places. And disease. ¹

They say no Londoner was ever completely well: foetid food and fever with everything. Cholera, typhus, epidemic diarrhoea, dysentery, smallpox and death. Life expectancy for a working-class person in the city was only 22 years. Even adding in the luckier classes only ratchets it up to 27. Almost half the funerals in London were for children under 10.

Death only added to the problems of the living. They say body after body joined the piles waiting for burial, and graveyard workers sank up to their knees in human flesh, ‘jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space at the bottom of the graves’. ² Proliferating graveyards, for which the city fathers must be accorded due thanks, gave no respite from the odour of the dead.

You who were left had to ignore the stench and make a living, otherwise you risked ending up in the workhouse. Since 1834, when the new Poor Law came in, the workhouse has been your dread, yet the idea was to provide for paupers and keep beggars off the streets. In the north people rioted against it. Dickens’s Oliver Twist asking for more gruel was a new voice, the voice of someone who refused to accept unfairness. Soon the working classes will fight for trade unions and minimum wages and the 40-hour week, but not before thousands of you abandon the country of your ancestors and board emigrant ships.

So now, starting from 1839 and continuing for decades to come, you will be leaving the ports of England with or without your families and heading for New Zealand. Assigned at random to your vessels, you will never know how deeply their names will be etched into the consciousness of your descendants.

According to my calculations, on the 29th of December you are five months pregnant, two weeks married. Mary Ann will be born on the 2nd of May. It’s a long way to Deptford pulling a handcart from Lambeth, and you must have been longing to get on the ship. Perhaps when they said, ‘All passengers to be at the depot punctually at 10 o’clock’, you thought you’d be sailing soon after. I don’t know why there’s such a delay but even in my times it would take a while to inspect the baggage and bodies of 258 emigrants and issue each one with a mattress and bolster.

Was everyone able to bring enough blankets, sheets and coverlets for themselves and their children? Did everyone remember their knife, fork, plate, spoon and mug of tin or pewter? Did nobody exceed the baggage allowance? How could you tell beforehand that your belongings would weigh less than half a ton? And did ‘not more than 20 cubic feet’ mean any more to you than it does to me? I hope you brought your marine soap because there’s no fresh water for washing on board. And did you bring a linen bag big enough to hold a month’s supply of clothing? You’ll only be allowed to access the hold once a month.

Well, you must have got it pretty much right, since you were allowed on board. And John must have packed enough tools of his trade to satisfy the authorities that he’d soon be up and painting again at Port Nicholson.

The lucky cabin passengers getting on at Gravesend don’t have to get their baggage checked and don’t have to hang around. Still, ‘the colonists’ pay for the privilege: ₤75 each for a cabin and you’d certainly expect some service for that.

Saturday 1st January 1842

Here it is, 5 p.m. on the first day of the new year before you’re all – steerage, intermediate and cabin passengers – finally on board and at Gravesend. Even now the ship won’t depart until tomorrow but the surgeon has his first case. It’s little Joseph Dixon, Joseph and Mary Dixon’s 9-month-old son, who Dr Turnbull writes is ‘labouring under all the symptoms of pneumonia’, one of which is a spot or rash on the skin. Mary told the surgeon she noticed an ‘eruption’ last Tuesday, just when they were setting off. They had a long way to come, 146 miles from Worksop, and they got very cold and wet. This may be the railway age, with the new lines appearing all over the country, but so far it’s a conglomeration of bits and pieces better suited to joyriding than serious travelling.

Have you met the Dixons yet? Joseph is recorded as a sawyer, but his last job was gentleman servant. I’ve already mentioned his brother Charles (96 grandchildren to come), who’s a sawyer too.

Dr Turnbull finds the disease has settled in the lungs so he mixes his first recipe for the voyage. He starts, as he will go on, with Cephaelis ipecacuanha, extracted from the dried root of a South American plant. What useful stuff it is. For croup, whooping cough and bronchitis, it helps expel the phlegm. It’s also an emetic, helps to get rid of bile and makes the patient sweat.

Rx. Vini Ipecacuanh. One teaspoonful every 15 minutes until vomiting is produced, also Pul: Gregor: grs viii at bedtime, also a warm bath

I’ve decided not to give the doctor’s prescriptions exactly as he wrote them, in Latin. I doubt you would know, any more than I did, that ‘Pul: Gregor’, for instance, is a mixture of rhubarb root, magnesia and ginger, or that ‘gra viii’ means eight grains. I’m going to give the recipes in translation with medical explanations when necessary.

A warm bath at bedtime sounds so simple. I have to remember that it means heating up seawater and decanting it into a basin – and, I dare say, elbowing others out of the way in order to do it. And speaking of bedtime, what are the beds like? I understand you’re in the hold immediately below the main deck with no light except through the hatches if they’re open. Obviously, during storms you’ll be glad they’re firmly shut. So there you are ’tween decks, you and John, with 5 feet 9 inches by 7 feet 8 inches behind curtains to call your cabin. Families have to share the berths though the children aged nine to 13 have hammocks swung midships. Someone writing for The Times wasn’t impressed with conditions. What was a berth but ‘a shelf of coarse pinewood in a noisome dungeon, airless and lightless, in which several hundred persons of both sexes and all ages are stowed away, on shelves two feet one inch above each other, three feet wide and six feet long, still reeking from the ineradicable stench left by the emigrants on the last voyage.’ ³

But I think the London is better than that. Mr P.J. Reeves, the shipping inspector, has approved it ‘in every respect eligible for the conveyance of the colony’s Emigrants to New Zealand’. And Lloyds Register of Foreign Shipping considers her well adapted for the purposes of the New Zealand Company. Of course these assessments do beg the question of what standards these men see fit to apply to working-class Brits wanting to leave their motherland. Since the London’s first trip to Port Nicholson in 1840 under Captain Shuttleworth she has been caulked and recoppered, and when she arrives this time the New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator will report in glowing terms: ‘The beautiful ship London is now at Port Nicholson for the second time, and, like the Oriental, Bolton, Martha Ridgeway, and Brougham, seems like an old and welcome friend.’

You may wonder why your captain for the London’s second voyage to New Zealand is no longer Captain Shuttleworth. The reason is encouraging: Henry Shuttleworth, owner of the London, has fallen in love with New Zealand. He talks of the promising prospects of the settlement and the agreeable society he has found in Port Nicholson. Since he arrived there with the London in December 1840 he has wasted no time. Besides erecting several houses for speculation he is having a house built for his own residence, designed to ‘surpass any building yet erected in this harbour’.⁴

Records are so strange. According to Captain Shuttleworth’s tender to carry emigrants on the London’s first visit to Port Nicholson, her height between decks was 6 feet 6, but on her second voyage it was recorded as 7 feet. So the captain used a cloth tape measure that stretched? They lifted up the deck by 6 inches? The captain pulled a fast one? Or perhaps the method of measuring changed – as it did for ships’ weight, making the London 612 tons under the old act and 700 under the new.

Sunday 2nd January

Now that the ship has weighed anchor and is lying off Chapman Head for the night, Charles Empson has decided to begin his diary: ‘Having promised to keep a journal I have made up my mind to do so and shall therefore first copy the Log and then add private remarks when anything occurs worthy taking notice of for the use of my relatives. I am naturally in very bad spirits in leaving those near and dear to me but I have resolved not to fret myself as that cannot make it otherwise – I found it rather cold all day and this evening a fire would be very desirable.’

It’s not surprising that the young man is feeling lonely tonight. Most of those on board have at least some family with them. Still, he has brought his dog, a Newfoundland St Bernard of which he’s very fond. He comes of a good family, does ‘CE’, as he refers to himself. His father was a barrister for Bath and Leamington. Aged only 20, he has already travelled in Russia, France and Germany and speaks French and German. He’s going to set up in business as C. Empson & Co. and he’s come equipped with useful things to sell.

***

Little Joseph is much worse today and the doctor is now sure it’s pneumonia. He resorts to mustard to bring out the blisters and calomel, a drastic purge. It’s red mercury oxide spread on silk and applied repeatedly to the chest. More ipecac.

Endeavoured to bleed from arm but did not succeed…

Bath to be repeated.

Monday 3rd January

At 7 a.m. the London weighs anchor again and is towed to Dover Point under steam. Thirteen hours later, when there is enough wind to take her into the English Channel, the captain will cast off the tugboat. At midnight she will pass the South Foreland.

For many of the emigrants this will be the first time they have seen the open sea. Perhaps some of them react like a Midlands farmer when he saw the ocean for the first time, ‘What acres and acres of water,’ he is reputed to have cried. ‘What a pity it ain’t land!’ For many of the emigrants their exodus is all about land. Lack of it condemned many to lives of relentless poverty. This would have been the lot of Henry and Mary Jones had they not taken fate into their own hands. Even as a baby Henry was unwanted by his community. Four months after his birth his landless parents were ordered to return to the town in which he had been born. The authorities didn’t want the burden of another family and were legally entitled to expel them. Henry received little education and was sent early to work on a farm. He soon became adept at the ‘degrading vice’ of ‘profane swearing’, but his steps on the path to perdition were arrested by the Methodism of John Wesley. ⁵

Wesley had not intended to start a breakaway denomination from the Church of England but when Anglican churches barred their doors he began open-air preaching, averaging some 7500 miles a year on horseback. His answer to the drunkenness, hopelessness and poverty of 18th-century England as industrialisation took root was not to urge rebellion but to deflect people’s attention from things seen to the ‘more considerable things unseen’.

Henry began attending cottage prayer meetings, another black mark against him at a time when the parish church was the only respectable place to worship. The squire insisted that if Henry wanted to continue as a tenant farmer he must give up his new vice. Preferring to risk starvation, Henry surrendered the farm. In young Mary Willett’s eyes, this made him a hero.

There came a time when God ‘put his hook into the nose of the persecutors’. First the squire fell from his horse and broke his leg. Then the squire’s agent attended a prayer meeting at which he took down everyone’s names, but in the act he was seized with paralysis and became a permanent cripple. And lastly the squire’s mother, dressing for a ball, was taken ill and died inside two days. God could not have spoken more plainly. Henry married Mary, who joined the Methodist church. How they managed to make a living is not recorded, but in 1841 they read in the missionary notices that New Zealand ‘simply wanted the hand of cultivation’.

***

The dying has begun. Little Joseph Dixon died this morning – and the Jones’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who sleeps in the berth next to the Dixons, is complaining of a headache. Her skin is hot, her pulse is quick, she has a high temperature. I can’t read all the words – I think the ship must be heaving in the waves. Dr Turnbull wants her to take sublimated sulphur and ipecac.

I’ve passed over what must be a very hard time for you, Rebecca: the moment when you said goodbye to everyone you love in England, knowing you may never see them again. There’s nothing to tell me exactly how you feel but already you have done better than the poor servant girl in the Pekin who had to be allowed to leave the ship with the pilot. Luckily there’s plenty to keep you busy. It’s no easy task to find a place to put everything, and there’s plenty of noise and activity to distract you. Alfred Fell (Lord Auckland, 1842) helps to fill in my ignorance:

Those who have never seen a large emigrant ship…just before starting a long voyage can form no idea of the uproar both on deck and below; the women crying, the children playing regardless of everything, the men running about and almost knocking each other down, all of us driving away in the arranging of our berths, carpenters hammering, the noise of the pigs, sheep and poultry; the horrible shouting…of the sailors, the number of boats alongside with goods for sale, or ready to fetch you anything from shore (but at such a price), carcasses of beef and mutton hanging about the rigging, the luggage tumbling about on the deck, the multiplicity of ropes and spars, altogether forming a scene of confusion enough to drive one wild.

He also describes how he felt on his first night on board.

Before I went to sleep every scene, both of happiness and the reverse, right away back from my childhood, all came vividly to my recollection, every well-remembered face, all for whom I have ever had a regard, passing in review before me. At length, quite exhausted, I fell asleep, and dreamed of New Zealand being a perfect fairy land. ⁶

A perfect fairyland. I wonder if that is what you and John are expecting.

Mrs Worsley’s rations stopped for one week.

Dr Turnbull doesn’t say what Mrs Worsley has done wrong or if he’s docking all her rations. Perhaps he just means dinners, though since breakfast and supper consist only of tea or coffee and sugar, that wouldn’t leave much. It’s rather early in the voyage to be losing rations but Ann Worsley is well supported by family. Besides her husband she has her sisters Sophia Thomas and Amelia White, also from London, to call on. Sophia’s descendants don’t record why the Worsleys came out, though agricultural labourers were in high demand, but they tell a story of Sophia and Amelia.

Sophia’s first husband James died young in the unhealthy London climate and her second husband, carpenter William, also kept getting sore throats. Sophia feared she might be left a widow with three children, one by James and two by William. Her sister Amelia, a milliner, had also fallen on hard times. Married to a prosperous surgical instrument maker she was living quietly in London with their young son whose startling musical talent had already been demonstrated at Queen Victoria’s court, when one day a ‘blowsy middle-aged woman’ appeared and shouted at Amelia, ‘Get out of this house, it is my home not yours!’ Amelia then discovered that, in his student days, her husband had married the cook at his college. He had soon abandoned her and gone to London. For several years he heard nothing and hoped she had died. Now the law was on her side. Amelia was forced to leave her home and, even worse, to abandon her young son to the custody of his father.

It was the sisters’ father, Stephen White, who came up with a solution when he remembered a letter the family had recently received from their missionary cousin. John Hobbs was based in Hokianga but had visited Port Nicholson to negotiate land for a new Methodist mission site. Stephen reminded Sophia of the call for suitable people to go out as emigrants. Young families were specially wanted, and men who could help to build a new nation. Amelia could revert to her maiden name of White and start a new life. In his letter John enthused about New Zealand’s beauty and healthful climate.

Amelia will spend a lot of time locked up with the other single women at the far end of the ship. Her married sisters are allowed to visit her even though she can’t reciprocate. Today it’s a fair bet the conversation will be about the shortfall in Ann’s rations.

CE is busy putting his cabin in order and getting as much as possible into a small compass. He’s something of an organisational pioneer but it won’t be long before some bright spark – John Hursthouse, to be precise, who will be sailing from Gravesend on 6 August – has the idea of offering tips on how to create a sense of comfort.

Bring – Plenty of cleats made of wych elm, mahogany or some wood that will not split – ready bored to nail down to prevent your cabin furniture from getting adrift. A gimblet or two, pincers – and a hammer to use in your cabin. Plenty of hooks and nails to put into the beams to hang things on and a few staples. A few stout curtain rings or steel wd. be better, then you can hang up heavy bottles of liquid by tying them to a ring and putting the ring on a nail or hook otherwise the roll of the ship soon chafes the string thro. ⁷

CE says the weather is still very cold and unpleasant. Little Joseph got a brief mention in his diary. ‘A child died. Funeral service read by the Doctor and then buried in the Deep.’

Ah yes, the deep. There is no overcrowding in the deep. Baby Joseph’s corpse was inserted into a canvas bag which the crew loaded up with old iron and sewed together tightly. They tied a Union Jack over the top and after the service they dropped his little body into the ocean.

All his parents’ hopes for him dashed even before the pilot leaves the ship. Mother England would not let him go. Is it an omen for their future in New Zealand?

Tuesday 4th January

Good morning, Rebecca. There’s a fresh breeze blowing, CE says. His handwriting is hard to read. At first I thought it said ‘terrible sleep’, then I realised it couldn’t because he always starts off with the captain’s log and surely the log wouldn’t begin with those words. So I went back to the library and held the page close to my eyes.

At noon, just off the Isle of Wight, the pilot leaves the ship. He is everyone’s last link with home and the colonists are quick to take advantage. James Kelham asks him to deliver his life insurance policy by hand to Mr Bell at New Zealand House. Cabin passengers seem to have life insurance much on their minds. John Hursthouse paid ₤30 for his.

Charles Empson entrusts the pilot with the letters he has written. He has discovered the names of the cabin (or cuddy ) passengers (eight counting the doctor), which he has written out in full. He has the names of the 138 adult emigrants too, but does not think it worthwhile to copy them out. He tells us the names of the 17 intermediates (just below the cuddies in rank), but I don’t think it worthwhile to