John Ayliff, a young weaver on the La Belle Alliance, who later wrote a heavily autobiographical novel, Journal of Harry Hastings, presented in the form of a diary, has his narrator, Harry, say: ‘February 4 – Oh dreadful sea sickness! At anchor … a foul wind, ship pitching dreadfully. Oh what a calamity is the sea sickness! Two hundred and fifty persons, men, women and children all at one time unable to retain a morsel of food in their stomach, and everyone looking as pale as death. Oh, thought I, is this a settler’s life?’
Those who were not so plagued by seasickness didn’t escape from the unhealthy effects of the ocean’s worst moods, in cold conditions and in hot. Thomas Philipps, the leader of a party from Wales, sailing on the Kennersley Castle, wrote on Tuesday 11 January: ‘In the night about 12 o’clock a sea broke in thro’ the cabin windows, washed poor Edward out of his berth … The two foremost berths escaped the deluge in which we eight got shelter for the night … all our clothes got wetted and all our arrangements discomposed.’
The next day he wrote: ‘The gale continued, another child died, one had died on Monday. Both had been previously ill and both about 12 months old. The doctor gives us hope that our numbers will not be diminished in the end, as we have several ladies in a forward state.’
Philipps assures us that the doctor was keeping the women well supplied with rum as a precaution against miscarriage.
One little boy, Thomas Stubbs, was deprived of his mother throughout most of the voyage. ‘My mother had a small cabin to herself,’ he wrote. ‘She was ill nearly the whole voyage.’
The eighteen-year-old Jeremiah Goldswain recalled an alarming experience on the Zoroaster at the hands of the violent ocean: ‘I was lying in one of the two lower berths and someone, after fumigating the ship, had put the fumigating pots in the berth over the one that I was lying in and in the night a breeze sprung up and … one or more fell over and upset the contents on to me. My bedclothes and my shirt that was on me was burnt and fell all to pieces but it never touched my body.’
There were more children than adults on the ships and, apart from the boredom and constant quarrelling reported by William Howard, they created further irritation and annoyance in an environment where nerves were already jagged. John Ayliff was struck by the same racket that irritated Howard and complains, even before the voyage has begun: ‘Oh, what a night have I passed, what with the noise of seamen, of the women, of some of the party which have come aboard the worse for drink, and the crying of at least 50 children. I was annoyed beyond description that the lazy mothers do not keep them still. Oh the horrible noise, fifty children screaming all at once. How I shall bear this for two or three months I cannot tell.’
By 8 February the Kennersley Castle was pitching and rolling in tropical seas and, on top of the seasickness, her passengers were experiencing the kind of temperatures that they could never have anticipated. ‘Children dying in the heat,’ Thomas Philipps wrote. ‘Same wind and weather but getting very hot, two children died, vessel fumigated all through – measles and hooping [sic] cough very general, our maid servant Patty very ill of the former.’
The Reverend William Shaw, sailing through tropical waters aboard the Aurora, writes in his journal on 16 March: ‘The heat has been so oppressive during the last week as to affect the health of many … sickly languor, rheumatic gout … diarrhoea.’
On 19 March he wrote of a death he had witnessed on board: ‘About half past six this evening, Mrs Jones, wife of one of the settlers, departed this life. She was a young woman of 21 years of age – and when she came on board this ship at Deptford had a fine healthy appearance but
’Nipt by the wind’s unkindly blast
Parched by the sun’s directer ray
The momentary glories waste
The short liv’d beauties die away.
She has been married a few months only, was in a state of pregnancy … She had been a member of the Hinde Street Society about four years and, as far as I can judge, lived and died in the enjoyment of the comforts of religion … I saw thee die on the deck – and the reflection quite unmans me.’
The master’s log of HMS Weymouth, a ship carrying about 300 passengers, shows that the death of a child was an almost everyday event, recorded by the captain in the same dispassionate tone used for the more mundane events:
‘Sat 5 February
Am: Light winds and variable
1: In studding sails and trimmed sails
4: Moderate and fine. Set top and gallant studding sails
9: Set larboard fore studding sails. Aired bedding
Departed this life SARAH HOBBS settler’s child …
Tues 8 February
Employed washing clothes
Departed this life JOHN COCK settler’s child
Committed the body of the above infant to the deep …
Thurs 10 February
Departed this life EMMA ROGERS settler’s child
Committed body of the above infant to the deep …’
February 1820 was evidently a sad month for many with all these deaths, but twelve babies were also born on the Weymouth, four of them in February.
With so many people squeezed into such a small space, dirt-spread infection was an enemy that invaded every ship, bringing disease and even death. The captains, keenly aware of the hazards, had to make strict rules for conduct on board. Hygiene featured prominently among them. They posted these rules up and most enforced them. Ayliff records the rules on board the La Belle Alliance:
‘1.All persons are to rise at 7 a.m. excepting such as are sick and proved to be so by the medical gentlemen.
2.All screens and curtains must be rolled up by 8 a.m. and not put down the whole of the day.
3.All beds and hammocks must be brought on deck by half past 7 and to be secured to the nettings all day in fine weather.
4.All lights must be extinguished by 9 p.m. and none to be allowed after but by special permission from the Agent.
5.Provisions and water will be distributed at the times stated and all parties not attending will lose their share. Mondays and Fridays, biscuit and beef; Wednesday, tea, sugar coaco, salt and soap; Tuesdays and Saturdays, rum, pork and mustard; every afternoon at 3 o’clock, water.
6.All disputes to be settled by a reference to the Agent and the Captain of the ship.’
Vessels that did not have strict regimes would most certainly succumb to ‘ship fever’ – typhus, spread by lice, which produced a frightening mortality rate if it caught hold of a ship’s passengers. Without the prescribed cleaning rituals, the decks would become strewn with leftovers, bones, rags and other rubbish that would work its way between the boards, producing maggots and an unendurable stench. John Ayliff described one of the regular spring cleanings aboard the La Belle Alliance: ‘March 11th. Today the ship underwent a thorough cleansing – a regular turn out of all beds, bedding, etc. on deck. All hands came on deck, the hatches were closed and the ship fumigated so as to destroy rats and cockroaches, numbers of which had bred in the ship.’
The captain of the Zoroaster was a strict disciplinarian, probably more so than most of his colleagues, some of whom did not keep such a clean ship. The Zoroaster had been chartered for the voyage only as far as Simonstown and the passengers, including Jeremiah Goldswain, were then transferred to the Albury for the rest of the voyage to Algoa Bay. When Jeremiah, conditioned by the tight regime of the past three months, boarded the Albury and looked around he realised that he had been spoilt by having been on board the Zoroaster for the major part of the voyage: