Close Confinement in Narrow Quarters

Tried Nerves and Temper

CLASS distinctions were firmly rooted in the minds of everyone in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and conditioned life on board. But this extract from a cabin passenger’s diary makes surprising reading to-day:

There are one or two of our fellow-passengers who   will   go among the   emigrants   and make themselves familiar with them. The Captain is very much annoyed at it, as it tends to lower the dignity of the ship. One of them absented himself from our meeting last evening, and was found amongst them. The Captain felt himself insulted at his preferring their society to ours. . . I have never spoken to one of them yet. A Scots steerage passenger said of conditions on his ship that the cabin passengers were gentry and had no intercourse with any other class; second-class passengers were would-be gentry, and wished no communication with the steerage. Over all pre­sided the Captain — ‘quite a gentleman, walks with his gloves, very haughty, and never speaks to us.’

Life was by no means idle aboard. While the gentry so aloof in the cuddy or chief cabin eagerly read up the few books then written about New Zealand, or taught each other’s children dead languages, there was just as intense educational activity between decks. If more than 150 emi­grants were on board, the Company shipped a qualified schoolmaster. Even without his aid the labourers who could read gave lessons in reading and writing to those who needed them, grown men as well as children. Captain Arthur Wakefield organised shooting practice on his ship, on which also were some apprentice surveyors filling in the long voyage by learning their profession from the Company’s trained men. Several of the early ships actually had Maoris on board, and the more enter­prising passengers took the opportunity to learn the native language in advance.

Very few ships got to their destination without friction of some kind. The conditions of close con­finement on board made the task of the surgeon and the emigrant ‘constables,’ whom he had chosen to aid him in keeping the peace among the people, well-nigh superhuman. When we consider the conditions, the three months’ voyage, the enforced idleness, the doubtful end, it speaks very well for the strict conditions of selection con­scientiously imposed on itself by the Company that there was so little trouble on board. Dr. Johnson once remarked that being at sea was like being in prison, with the added chance of being drowned. It is hardly surprising that an occasional emigrant, who somehow found the liquor, should have drunk himself stupid. Petty bickering and quarrels were far more frequent. Unfortunately the surgeon himself might often be involved in these. One surgeon who made the emigrants do work that should not properly have fallen to them, under threat of stopping their rations, was fined by the Company on arrival in New Zealand. On the other hand the emigrants on board the Whitby cheerfully volunteered to work the pumps daily for weeks together when the ship sprung a dangerous leak. Even if they failed sometimes in tact and allowed the emigrants to nourish grievances against each other or the authorities, the surgeons seldom failed in their professional duty. It was rare for a ship to lose more than six lives, in spite of a good deal of sickness on board. A sad excep­tion was the ship Lloyds, bringing out the families of the first Nelson emigrants in 1842, which lost fifty-eight children, more than a quarter of the total of passengers. The fact that forty-nine of these deaths were of children less than four years old shows that very young children could not always stand up to the hardships of a long voyage.