With the better weather further south, there was more opportunity for communal activities and religious services, which were well attended. The passengers were able to dry out their waterlogged belongings and some of those who were particularly susceptible to seasickness had some respite from that terrible condition.
Sometimes, even when a gale was buffeting the ship, the settlers managed to derive some pleasure from their association with each other. Thomas Philipps wrote: ‘Monday 31 January: This evening we had our clarinet as usual, about 7 the moon rose majestically whilst we were walking on the deck, we could not resist the opportunity for a dance and in spite of the unsteadiness of the vessel we managed to dance 6 couples for a couple of hours, between 9 and 10 o’clock we went below.’
In fair weather and in foul, human intercourse took its familiar turns. There were quarrels and fights but there was far more comradeship than bad blood. The passengers were ordinary people thrust together in temporary confinement and they did what people have always done in those cases. Something that evolved on all the ships were self-help groups that cared for the sick and protected themselves against theft and threats to their persons. Single young women were always in danger from crew members and other passengers, and they were offered protection by such groups. Some passenger behaviour was not only a nuisance, but downright dangerous and this prompted a firm reaction. For example, the gentlemen on the Northampton formed a committee to deal with the almost daily outrages perpetrated by Mahoney and his Irish party, namely drinking and fighting.
Jeremiah Goldswain was one of the fortunate beneficiaries of this corporate attitude. While the Zoroaster was still on the Thames at Blackwall, he unthinkingly put on a damp shirt and this led to pneumonia. He slipped in and out of consciousness, and was unaware of anything until they arrived at the Canary Islands. After that, he became so ill that he had made it onto the deck only once until they were three weeks away from Simon’s Bay. At one point the ship’s doctor told Goldswain’s party leader, William Wait, and his wife that they should be prepared to part with Jeremiah, as the doctor thought that nothing would save him. All through that time his berth mates cared for him, feeding him, changing his clothes and carrying him around. When they were anchored for two or three days at Madeira, ‘some of the men went ashore and brought me a little soft bread,’ wrote Goldswain.
When the Zoroaster’s passengers were transferred to the Albury at Simonstown for the voyage to Algoa Bay, the ship was overcrowded. Goldswain described the cramped conditions: ‘Most of us had to sleep on the hard boards. For my part I did not know what to do for where my bones had pushed through my skin while I had been ill had not by this time healed up. I was sitting in front of the berth of Mr Thomas Hartley, whose family had two or three berths. His eldest daughter, seeing me sitting there, asked me where I was going to sleep that night. I informed her that I must take the deck for it as there was no other place. She said that it was not a fit place for one who was so ill … “Here is a spare ship bed and a blanket, and you can have them if you will.” I told her that I should be much obliged to her for them.’
Such acts of kindness and humanity compensated to some extent for the hardships. Jeremiah went on to have a lifelong association with the Hartleys and they were close neighbours during the time the Goldswain family spent in Bathurst. The Hartleys built the Bathurst Inn – later to become the famous Pig and Whistle – and Jeremiah bought it from them in 1853. He enjoyed a friendship with the oldest Hartley son, William, which lasted throughout their lives.
The settler project occurred in a century when girls were deemed ready for marriage from their early teens. The colourful Sir Harry Smith, who was appointed governor of the Cape in 1847, was most famous for two things: his horseback ride from Cape Town to Grahamstown, which took just six days, and his beautiful young Spanish wife.
At the age of thirty-five, he had served under General Arthur Wellesley at the Siege of Badajoz in Spain. The day after the Anglo-Portuguese army forced the surrender of the French garrison, a well-born Spanish lady, who had lost everything in the destruction that had taken place, came to the British camp seeking protection. She was accompanied by her fourteen-year-old daughter, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon. Less than a week later, Juana Maria became Mrs Harry Smith.
When Jeremiah Goldswain married Eliza Debenham, aged nineteen, in 1821, she was already quite old for marriage, it seems. Her sister, Anne, had been married the previous month: she was just thirteen.
At the time of the settler project, older men seemed to have thought nothing of wooing teenage girls, even in the full glare of their parents’ gaze. Society at the time regarded it as normal and the fifteen-year-old Sophia Pigot was no exception, receiving (and enjoying) a great deal of attention from the captain of the Northampton, even though he had a wife and children at home in England. Sophia’s diary reveals a two-way flirtation, which she even boasted about. It is sprinkled with entries like these: ‘Captain Charlton very full of mischief, taking our things below … laughed very much’; ‘Working after tea – in Captain Charlton’s seat’; ‘Captain Charlton teasing me about my poetry.’
Sexual encounters were common, as we have seen, and the opportunities plentiful, given the sleeping arrangements. Several couples met during the voyage and subsequently shared their destinies on the frontier. And when not cowering beneath the dreadful waves, throwing up, fighting hunger, feeling ill or mourning dead children, the settlers made the most of the fact that they were surrounded by other people. On the calm, warm days and evenings there were many kinds of shared pleasures – in addition to the open-air prayer meetings and sermons.
Apart from the flirting among the settlers and between women passengers and crew members, and the less discreet bed hopping, there was a generally jovial relationship between passengers and crew. The worldly, well-travelled sailors enjoyed spinning tall yarns to the inexperienced and naive settlers, and they told their passengers stories about sea monsters, giant octopuses and other mythological wonders of the deep, not to mention weird accounts of the cultures on the islands they had visited.
When the Zoroaster was moored at Simonstown, its passengers were fascinated by the mountains that rose from the bay and they looked out for the sheep that they had been told grazed on the mountain slopes. The sailors, Jeremiah Goldswain wrote, had told them that they had seen sheep climbing the hills, ‘with their tails made fast to a little truck with two wheels. They stated that the hills that the sheep had to graze on were so steep that all their fat ran into their tails.’
When they reached Simonstown, he was disappointed that the sheep were nowhere to be seen, ‘but in the course of that day we saw one of those tails, weighing about five pounds’.
When the sea was calm, there were not only religious gatherings on the decks, but also parties, where rum flowed. And on every ship there was the customary ‘crossing the line’ ceremony where members of the crew dressed up as Neptune and his wife and their court members, and ‘boarded’ the ship to the accompaniment of music. This was an initiation rite of the sea, in which all the men who were crossing the equator for the first time were condemned by Neptune to be shaved, thrown into a lifeboat filled with water and made to drink rum whether they wanted to or not.
Most of those who wrote or gave talks about the voyage later mentioned that ceremony, which always occurred in extreme heat, of course. Little Tom Stubbs, on board the Northampton, recaptured his childish excitement at the event in old age. Being the son of a party leader, he had been in the privileged position of being able to watch the whole spectacle from start to finish from a seat on the poop, shaded by an awning. His father, John, was part of the pageant, as the organiser had asked him to provide the music by playing his fiddle: ‘That morning the “tiger hunters”, as the sailors called us, were battened down, with the exception of heads of parties who, with the cabin passengers, were accommodated with seats on the poop, having an awning over them … At about ten o’clock a gun was fired, and it was reported below that Neptune was on board. The old sea god and his wife soon made their appearance, she riding on a gun carriage, covered with a Union Jack, drawn by some fellows in masks, and with the violin playing in front. Old Neptune then gave orders to