Why I'd want to hug a tree

I get a lot of thinking done in the shower. In fact, I have some of my best ideas when I’m in the shower. Standing with my head under a stream of hot water, the sound of the water a kind of white noise blanking out everything else in the background – this guarantees ideas. Of course, quite a lot of ideas go straight down the drain with the shampoo, because there’s no way I can stop and write things down…

This morning it occurred to me to wonder what I’d want most when
I got ashore if I’d spent five months on a sailing ship like William and Sarah did. It didn’t take me long to decide on my top priorities :

1. fresh water. After months of drinking brackish, tainted, mud-coloured water which probably wasn’t of great quality to start with, I think I probably would have staggered ashore and thrown myself face down into the Kaiwharawhara stream and slurped like a dog. How many of the Gertrude passengers would have done likewise? I bet most of them at least bent to scoop up a handful to taste – how else would William have known how sweet and clear the water was?
2. privacy. Not a concept that the Victorians were particularly familiar with, given the large numbers in their families. But it’s something I cherish, and if I’d spent twenty weeks cheek by jowl with 170 men, women, children and babies, I’d want to go somewhere very quiet, all by myself, for a while. The immigrants might not have the same concept of privacy, and desire for it, as I do, but they were probably looking forward to getting away from their fellow passengers, especially the ones whose voices or manner or very appearance had begun to grate after such a long time together. No wonder the Gertrude passengers were less than thrilled when they discovered they were expected to squash themselves together again in the immigration barracks, and no wonder men like William wasted no time finding new accommodation.
3. cleanliness. I’ve grown up in a society that places a very high value on personal hygiene, unlike those early settlers. I wouldn’t just be face down in the stream, I’d be in there clothes and all with a bar of soap, scrubbing myself raw. Five months on a sailing ship with minimal washing facilities? Assuming the passengers were even moderately clean to start with, by Wellington they would be scurfy, greasy, smelly, lice-infested and disgusting. Apparently, if the wind was blowing onshore, the townspeople could smell the immigrant ships some distance off. Lovely. A good scrub might not have been a top priority for the Gertrude passengers, but it would be for me. This could also help answer point 2 above – my desire for privacy – I suspect I’d have the stream to myself!
4. salad! Five months without fresh vegetables would be almost unbearable. I’m not a fanatic for salads, but I’m pretty sure that by the end of five months eating boiled salt beef, doughy puddings and bad spuds, I’d be dreaming about crispy lettuce, juicy tomatoes and crunchy carrots. Not sure that my fellow passengers would be thinking the same way – the view that the only good vegetable was a well-cooked one dominated English and New Zealand cuisine well into the twentieth century. However they might feel about salads, the Gertrude passengers would have been looking forward to a change of diet, and fresh food.

And after all that, how about a nice walk, enjoying the sights we’ve been deprived of for so long? Trees, grass, simple stuff like that – contemporary accounts indicate that the immigrants were craving perfectly ordinary land-based scenery by the time their ships reached New Zealand. I think I’d probably feel like hugging a tree or two…