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Emigrant Ships to Australia in the Forties.
Before the discovery of gold in Australia, the trade of that Colony was at a low
ebb, suffering from want of enterprise and financial depression; whilst the
emigrant ships running from Liverpool and other British ports, owing to the want
of healthy competition, . were of a very poor description. The horrors of the
long five-months passage for the miserable landsmen cooped-up in low,
ill-ventilated and over-crowded 'tween decks, were fit to be compared with those
of the convict ship. The few vessels with humane owners and kindly captains were
in a class by themselves. These, indeed, thought of the health and comfort of
the wretched emigrants and did not content themselves with merely keeping within
the letter of ,the Government regulations, which might more fitly have been
framed for. traffic in Hell
For first class passenger the splendid Blackwall frigates of Green,
Money Wigram and Duncan Duqbar, and the beautiful little clippers of the
~Aberdeen'
White Star Line, provided excellent. accommodation and a comfortable and safe,
if not a particularly fast, passage. But the ordinary steerage passenger
had to content himself as a rule with a ship that was little better than a
hermetically sealed box: one as deep as it was long, with clumsy square bows and
stern, with ill"-cut ill-set sa.ils-its standing rigging of hemp a
mass of long splices; and with a promenade deck no longer than the traditional
two steps and overboard .Report on
Steerage Conditions in 1844
These Colonial
wagons were navigated by 'rum- soaked, illiterate, bear-like officers, who could
not work out the ordinary meridian observation with any degree of accuracy, and
either trusted to dead reckoning or a blackboard held. up by a passing ship for
their longitude; whilst they were worked by the typicalIy
slow-footed, ever-grousing Merchant Jack " "Of the past two centuries.
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