Because of the size of the group, Sephton’s party were allowed to take a minister with them, paid for by the government. They chose the twenty-one-year-old William Shaw, who was to become renowned as a tireless man of God, credited with bringing Methodism to South Africa. Shaw kept a journal that is remarkable in the writer’s consistent linking of every incident, experience and thought with God. Young as he was, Shaw saw himself as a leader who, like Moses, carried the authority of the Almighty on his shoulders as he led his people along a great journey. After the burial service of a young woman at sea, he wrote: ‘I thought it my duty in finishing my address to advise the people to attend to cleanliness, etc. in order to prevent the introduction (under Divine Providence) of such diseases as might prove fatal to numbers and to which I plainly perceive we are at present much exposed.’
For much of the voyage, the passengers longed for nothing more than to be dry. During stormy weather they had to stay below deck, crowded together among sodden bedding and clothing, sometimes for days on end, with the hatches battened down. With the deck off limits, the stench would become intolerable. By the time the word came to batten down the hatches, the huge waves sweeping over the ship had already drenched the sleeping quarters. Once wet, nothing would dry until the weather improved and the settlers were able to bring their belongings out to the open air and claim some breathing space for themselves again. It was only later, with the passing of the Passenger Ship Law in 1848, that a minimum space for each passenger was stipulated.
The provision of separate facilities for men and women on public transport is a modern concept. This was introduced into law under the same passenger act of 1848, where rigid rules were laid down concerning the separation principle that we take for granted today. But in 1819, when the ships set sail, men, women and children were assigned berths by party, and not by sex or age, although married couples and their children shared berths. For single adults, separation of the sexes would have been an alien idea and the situation inevitably led to the sleeping areas being sexual boiling pots.
Ten-year-old Thomas Stubbs, on board the Northampton, was in a good position to watch the grown-ups behaving in a way that was to some bad, and to others natural. His father, John, led a subsection of Clarke’s party, so his family was entitled to a room in cabin class, where his wife, daughter, Eleanor, and baby, Richard, travelled. As there was not enough room for their three boys, John, aged twelve, William, six, and Tom, John Stubbs slept steerage with them so that he could keep an eye on them, as well as on the settlers he was responsible for.
Half a century later, after a long and distinguished life on the frontier, Thomas Stubbs, crippled with rheumatism but with his memory in sparkling form, sat down to write his reminiscences. He had been alive to everything that was going on among the adults around him, and his memoir, Reminiscences, offers valuable insight into what it was like on the Northampton: ‘One night my father heard something like a man’s voice below him, and on getting out, saw a man jump out of Bet’s berth and run up on deck. He found a pair of shoes and on looking at them saw the name of Becky, our first mate. My father showed him the shoes the next morning.’
The elderly Thomas Stubbs, still amused by it decades later, recalls the first mate’s response:
‘By Jove, Mr Stubbs, where did you find them? Someone took them out of my cabin!’
‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Tom’s father.
Becky looked down, not wanting to meet Mr Stubbs’s accusing eyes.
‘But I would advise you to keep yourself and your shoes from my quarters,’ Mr Stubbs said.
Ruined as the young woman might have been by her night-time adventure, Thomas Stubbs ended on a note of relief: ‘Poor Bet was married to our butcher Dan Wood on board a man of war before we left Algoa Bay and I believe turned out an honest woman.’
Thomas Stubbs. Illustration: Ella Jones
Little Tom witnessed many such activities throughout the voyage: ‘Some young men on going to bed were continually turning in to the wrong berths, but it invariably turned out there was a woman in them. The consequences was there were some fights and lots of rows.’
Once the ships had left the shores of southern England, there was little chance of obtaining fresh food and water until they reached the Canary Islands and, later, the Cape Verde Islands, where the vessels loaded up with supplies that had to last until they reached the islands off Brazil, where they could refresh themselves and replenish their stocks again.
But even before the ships sailed, when the food was still fresh, the settlers were given inadequate and inferior rations. Jeremiah Goldswain described his first night on board the Zoroaster at Deptford, on the Thames, as ‘a bad beginning’. The ship’s kindly but correct steward told them on that first icy December night that they wouldn’t receive their bedding until morning because he hadn’t been given the authority to issue it, and that he couldn’t give them any supper either because, again, he had to wait until morning for the order to give them food.
It wasn’t until ten o’clock the next morning that they heard the ‘joyful news – come and get your rations’. They were given a wooden tub containing their rations for the day and told to form themselves into messes of six: ‘We had three quarters of a pound of busket [probably local dialect for bread] for each man, some oat meal, a little meat, and a very little bit of butter, and when we had got it we did not know what to do with it or how we were to cook it.’
Goldswain described eating it as ‘jawbreaking work’. There was also pea soup for dinner, which the cooks made on the deck in large copper pots every day for the rest of the voyage. Jeremiah pointed out that the rations weren’t enough for the young men, who had very keen appetites.
Nine-year-old Henry Dugmore, a passenger on the Sir George Osborn, was struck by his first encounter with the rations. In his lecture to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the settlers, he said: ‘I remember … the hard salt junk and harder biscuit of 1820 and how salty the puddings were that the cooks boiled in sea water.’
The gentlemen, for some of whom deprivation was an unknown phenomenon, brought their own supplies or bribed the officers who controlled the rations, so they were generally able to enjoy the culinary standards they were accustomed to. The entry in Thomas Philipps’s journal on 29 January reads: ‘We ate a hearty breakfast of coffee and chocolate, toasted cheese and a rasher of ham, the females are the greatest devourers of the latter delicacies … Anything agrees with us that has a sharp taste, mustard, pepper and pickles are grand requisites.’
That was early in the voyage, however, and there is no doubt that food was a major challenge on the ships. Its preparation was difficult: on most vessels the cooking facilities were insufficient for the number of passengers and they could not be used at all in bad weather. One warm meal a day was the most the passengers could hope for. Incidents involving water and food and its preparation were the greatest flashpoints in the relationships between individual settlers and between the social classes. Jeremiah Goldswain observed such a confrontation between the gentlemen and the lower-class settlers on the Zoroaster: ‘The passengers were allowed three quarts of water per day for everything. One morning, when they were called up to get their boiled water they hurried joyfully, as usual, and filled their teapots.’ But then, Jeremiah wrote, ‘if you had been present and heard the cries from fore and aft of the ship by the poor women in particular’… ‘Who had put vinegar into the coppers? If they knew who had done it they would join all hands and give him a good flogging.’
The vinegar in the water flushed the gentlemen out of their saloon. Out they came – Messrs Wait, Thornhill, Barker, all the Dyasons, Bennet and Hougham Hudson. By this time the cooks, John Badger and William Bear, had dumped the polluted water overboard and begun making the pea soup that they were going to dish out to the settlers at dinnertime. The gentlemen ordered the cooks to throw the pea soup out and boil more water for the ladies’ morning tea.