Life on board

For the most part, a voyage of six to nine months to the other side of the world was tedious. Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, wrote that ‘no one who has not been a long, dull voyage, shut up in one ship, can conceive the effect of monotony upon one’s thoughts and wishes’.[i] It was even more so for convicts who played no part in the day-to-day management of the ship.

Amongst the passengers at least, there was great anxiety about the possibility of being lost at sea: ‘confined to a little Vessel, in the midst of mountainous Seas, at a dreadful Distance from Land; and no possible Prospect of escaping Death, if any Accident should befall the Ship’.[ii] Sailors always downplayed the risk, so that journal accounts of the same ship in the same storm written by convicts and crew members read very differently.

In the 80-year history of Australian convict transportation, very few lives were lost due to shipwreck, on the outward voyage at least – in the period covered by this project (1787-1800), there was only the Guardian. Struck by an iceberg as she made her way across the Southern Ocean, she limped back to the Cape before foundering – four out of the 25 convicts on board took to the boats and were never seen again.

However, a number of other Botany Baymen in this period were wrecked later in the voyage – the two ships of the La Perouse expedition, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, (in 1788), HMS Sirius (1790), Matilda (1792), and the traders, Arthur (1796), Grand Turk (1797), Sydney Cove (1797) and Argo (1798).

For convicts on their way to NSW in the late 18th century, the risk of dying from typhus, dysentery or scurvy was much higher – around one in ten. The paucity of records means that it is impossible to estimate mortality rates among the mariners, but it was particularly high, for example, on the First Fleet where the lack of fresh provisions in the colony meant that men suffered badly from scurvy on the homeward voyage – three quarters of the original crew of the Alexander died on the return.

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[i] Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages, New York: The Library of America, 2005, p. 199.

[ii] Reverend Samuel Davies on a trans-Atlantic voyage, in Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life & Atlantic Crossings to the New World, New Haven: Yale university Press, 2015, p. 68.