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Who was the shipmate the Norgroves shared their house with when they first arrived in Wellington?
Sarah says :
Your Father walked to the town early the very next day.
He hired an old mud whare the floor was only clay.
Three rooms a thatched roof the rent sixteen shillings per week.
A shipmate shared it with us, when it rained how the roof did leak.
No glass where the windows should be some calico nailed up tight.
Through the crevices came the wind, and some of the bright sunlight.
The whare was on Thorndon flat…
That’s not very helpful, Sarah. “A shipmate” implies one person rather than a family. Of the single men and women travelling on Gertrude, there were 14 men and three women who weren’t travelling with other family members.
One of the men and one of the women can be discounted straight off. Rice Owen Clarke, a 25 year old clerk and former Lloyds insurance underwriter, travelled as a single man. Ann Inglesby, 25, travelled as a single woman, as a servant to cabin passenger Ellen Garrett, the very young and pregnant wife of the ship’s doctor. During the voyage, rumours circulated that Clarke and Inglesby were actually married, but they evidently went their separate ways on arrival in Wellington. Clarke later married Louisa Felgate, and in September 1849 was charged with bigamy, on the grounds that his first wife, Ann Inglesby, was still alive. The first witness called at the trial was our William, who said that the two had lived as a married couple for about a year, before Ann left the colony – however, he didn’t think Ann was dead because he has seen and spoken to her a couple of months ago.
The two remaining women are Ann Duling and Amy Brown. Duling was a 22 year old seamstress who just disappears from history after arriving in Wellington. I can’t find any further mention of her in available records – not even a marriage. She seems pretty unlikely as a potential housemate. Amy Brown, on the other hand, is a distinct possibility. She was a 40 year old laundress who travelled on Gertrude as the ship’s matron, with her 13 year old son, who was unnamed on the passenger list.
The other single men were :
• George Ade, a 22 year miller
• Joseph Angell, 25, a gardener who worked as a labourer before becoming a small farmer. Angell later became the postmaster at Tawa Flat. In 1868, concerns about his laid-back approach to mail delivery reached the local newspaper, which printed a hilarious exposé of his deficiencies
• Charles Barrow, a 21 year old agricultural labourer who had been a surgeon’s assistant on Gertrude
• George Bartlett, a 14 year old labourer – was he emigrating alone, or was he travelling with family members with different surnames?
• William Benson, 18, a labourer
• Edmund Chatfield, a 16 year old agricultural labourer
• Robert Conway, 20, agricultural labourer
• William Durrant, a 25 year old labourer – he may have gone off to Nelson shortly after arriving
• James Rumsey Forster, a 22 year old former bookseller who found clerical work on arrival in Wellington
• Edward Lowe, the other assistant to the surgeon on Gertrude. Lowe was a 19 year old clerk
• James Russell, 21, a gardener
• Stephen Sherring, 17, agricultural labourer
• William Wilson, a 32 year old baker
So does is matter who the housemate was? The existence of the housemate certainly matters, because it affects the Norgrove family dynamic. In England, William, Sarah and Ovid had lived as a single family unit, rather than with extended family. They had spent six months living cheek by jowl with dozens of other families on Gertrude. They were probably looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet as a family, even if their first house in New Zealand was a leaky shack with a mud floor and no glass in the windows. On the other hand, 16 shillings a week in rent was a lot of money. Labourers were earning about £1/10 a week; “mechanics” or skilled tradesmen could earn as much as £2/14. Even if William was earning over £2, Sarah would have been grateful to have someone else contributing to the rent, even if it meant cooking and doing laundry for an extra person.
But who was the housemate? Well, this is where I find the lines between biography and novel get blurry. I’m writing a biography in the form of a novel – there are no rules here. I know I have to make things up so that the story hangs together without any nasty gaping holes where I’m lacking in facts. I try to make sure that what I invent makes sense, both historically and for the people as I know them.
So I need to include the housemate in the story – who’s it going to be? I think it’s likely that the Norgroves only shared the Thorndon flat whare, and when they moved to Lambton Quay on 1842, they left their housemate behind – probably in possession of the whare. The 1842 and 1843 burgess rolls for Wellington don’t show any of the single men living on Thorndon flat – so whoever it was either didn’t meet the financial qualification for voting, or was too young, or was a woman.
It’s tempting to pick one of the very young single men as being the least likely to find accommodation on their own and needing to lodge with a family. George Bartlett, at 14, is the youngest, but I find it hard to believe he was travelling on his own. One of the families or young couples on Gertrude must have been related to him – an aunt, or a sister perhaps, to account for there being no-one else with the same name. Next youngest are 16 year old Edmund Chatfield and 17 year old Stephen Sherring, but as agricultural labourers, chances are that they would have been snapped up by employers almost as soon as they came ashore. One of the others, perhaps? As the eldest of a large family, Sarah probably wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at taking a young lad under her wing; William, with only a much younger sister, might have enjoyed having a temporary younger “brother”.
I think the most likely candidate for housemate was actually Amy Brown and her son. I know Sarah said “a shipmate”, singular, but she was trying to make the words fit her verse – and it’s likely enough that she would count the adult and discount the child in her thinking. Amy Brown would have been able to get laundry work quite easily in one or more of the wealthier households, but this would have been most unlikely to be a live-in position. It would make sense for her to have taken over the lease of the Thorndon flat house when the Norgroves moved to Lambton Quay – then she herself could have taken in a lodger to help with the rent.
I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to find out for sure who the housemate was. I could just invent some entirely fictitious character, I suppose, but picking one of these gives me somewhere to start from. Everything else about them will be fiction anyway.
A bunch of us spent yesterday helping our friend Helen move house. It wasn’t the greatest of days – it always seems to pour with rain as soon as you’ve got the beds on the back of a trailer. So there we were, somewhere between cloudbursts – Helen and I were stuffing stereo components and soft toys in the boot of her car, Mac was tying down furniture on the back of his trailer, Em was trying to persuade baby Isobel that sleep was a good idea, and Murray, Dennis and Ivor were hefting furniture onto another trailer at the front of the house – when Helen said, “how do people who don’t have friends manage this?” Good question – I guess they pay people, or struggle along by themselves. And, as I’m still working through William and Sarah’s first few days in Wellington, the big question for me was, how did the Norgroves manage their move from the immigration barracks at Kaiwharawhara to their first house on Thorndon Flat?
The Norgroves had friends, yes, although possibly not like 6-foot, six and a half inch Dennis, able to pick up large sofas and “persuade” them through narrow doorways. They didn’t have family on hand – no parents looking after the kids and organising sandwiches and bacon-and-egg pie for the workers’ lunch, no sister and brother-in-law to help out. But then again, they didn’t have beds and sofas, sideboards and fridges either. The assisted immigrants who travelled steerage to New Zealand couldn’t bring any furniture with them, unlike the cabin passengers, who could bring whatever they could squeeze into their cabins. The only furniture William and Sarah had for their home was the table that William made for that first cup of tea when they came ashore from Gertrude. There might have been some very basic items of furniture on the mud whare that became their first home – maybe shelves and hooks on the wall, perhaps a rough chair or bench, but probably not even a bed.
Many settlers slept on the floor to start with. The first primitive bed was often made from stout stakes rammed into the earth floor, with a rope and sacking hammock base slung from them, and a sacking mattress stuffed with plant material on top. The wooden boxes that brought possessions from England served double duty as both storage and seating. One large tin tub would have been used for everything from washing dishes to bathing them and the baby.
If William and Sarah couldn’t bring furniture, what would they have brought in the boxes that travelled in Gertrude’s hold? William’s tools were a priority – not just the tools of his plumbing trade, but general purpose tools as well. Sarah tells us that on that first day, William unpacked “saw, hammer and nails”, and began making a table.
Sarah would have brought her essential kitchen cooking equipment, including a camp oven; their first kitchen would also have had their tin or pewter plates, cutlery and mugs from the voyage, as well as their share of Gertrude’s left-over provisions. The immigrant ships stocked provisions for six months, and each mess could elect to use less and draw the remainder on landing. Sarah would have had their share of a month’s rations – around 15 kgs of preserved meat, 25kg of ship’s biscuits, and lesser amounts of flour, rice, preserved potatoes, peas, raisins, suet, butter, sugar, tea, salt, coffee, pepper, mustard and vinegar. She wouldn’t have had anywhere to store it, and one of William’s early priorities would have been the manufacture of some kind of food safe, to keep rats and mice away from the supplies, and perhaps some storage bins to keep the flour, rice and sugar dry.
We have no idea of what else William and Sarah brought with them. They would have had their own clothes, and Ovid’s, and Sarah would probably have brought quantities of several different fabrics along with her sewing bag. Would they have brought a china dinner set, or like many settlers, assumed it could be readily replaced on arrival? I’m sure William would have brought books as well as his painting and drawing materials. And Sarah would have asked, just as friends and family have asked me every time I move house, “do you really need all these books?” And like me, William’s reply would have been, “of course”. In fact, like me, William would have probably jettisoned shirts and trousers and jerseys to fit in a few more essential books! Did Sarah have quantities of best linen – embroidered pillow-cases and table cloths – in addition to the sheets, blankets and towels brought along for use on the ship? Would she have tucked treasured knick-knacks and ornaments, sugar bowls, and glasses, in amongst the clothes? What difficult choices had to be made by these people who had far fewer possessions than most of us these days; what should go to the new country, and what should be left behind?
At least having little luggage and only one piece of furniture should have made moving from the immigration barracks to the new house relatively easy. The distance was around two to three kilometres – half an hour to an hour’s walk. John Plimmer tells us that he “hailed a man who was driving a team of bullocks, and asked him if he would take my luggage to town”; Plimmer viewed the man’s rates as extortionate, but accepted them, and so the Plimmer family left the immigration barracks. The Norgroves had no friends and family rolling up in cars with trailers, and there were no household removal firms. Did they find someone to carry their belongings in a bullock cart, or did they walk to the new house, William perhaps making several trips to bring their boxes? I don’t know; for the purposes of the story I have to guess, and my guess is that they walked, carrying Ovid and their bags. At least it would have given William time to try and prepare Sarah for the fact that their new home was nothing like what they had left behind, although probably nothing could have really prepared her for the first sight of that mud whare with clay floors. And while Sarah might have wanted to collapse on the floor and cry her heart out in disappointment, I bet she just straightened her shoulders and set about turning that rough dwelling into a home for her little family.
There are always emails circulating on the internet about the importance of a woman’s friends. I was reading one yesterday that had been sent to Mum, which she wanted to share with her friends. It reminded me that the last bit of research I was working on was to try and identify some of Sarah’s friends – and that the main reason I hadn’t been researching and blogging for the last couple of weeks (apart from exhaustion – I’m sure humans are meant to hibernate in winter) is that I’ve been spending time with and helping my friends.
The reason it’s important to me to identify some of Sarah’s friends is because, like all those emails say, it’s your women friends who get you through the tough times, who share life’s joys and pains and humdrum moments with you. Your friends are the ones who tell you where to find the super-duper on-sale bargains. They go shopping with you, and know how to answer the question, “does my bum look big in this?” They hold your screaming baby so you can have five minutes peace and quiet in the loo. They put the kettle on and make cups of tea while you go and wash the tears off your face. They put your 10 year old daughter in make-up and high heels and smuggle her past the no-children-under-16 sign to visit you in hospital. They turn up in the afternoon and cram you and the kids in the car for an impromptu trip to the beach. They come to the fence to hand you cake still warm from the oven because they just had to tell you how happy they were that they’ve finally cracked the perfect marble cake recipe. They help you shift house. They lend you a table when you don’t have one. They sew with you. They send you cheery texts when you’re sick. Your women friends are there to hold you up when you can’t cope, when your marriage falls apart, when the kids are driving you crazy, when you don’t know how you’re going to pay the electricity bill, when you want to kill your boss. Your women friends celebrate with you when you’ve found a new love or had a baby or passed a test or just because it’s Friday.
When Sarah came to New Zealand, she left behind her mother, her sisters and her friends. Many of those relationships survived through letter-writing – we know about the family ones because some of the letters have survived, but we know nothing of the friends she left behind. And letters would have been small comfort in a new and unfamiliar country. New women friends would have been Sarah’s support, sharing with her the experiences of the rawness of early Wellington, the longing for the familiar things and people of home, the struggle to make do and get on in their new life. They would have watched out for each other’s children, helped deliver each other’s babies, shared news of home and worries about money. They would have laughed together at the small things women manage to find funny, and they would have cried together at heartbreaks and fears, tragedies and pains.
For the early days in Wellington, I can only speculate about who Sarah’s friends may have been. Eliza Plimmer is likely to have been a shipboard friend – the Plimmer and Norgrove bunks were adjacent, and like Sarah, Eliza was a young mum following her husband to a new country. How much time they might have spent together after arriving in Wellington is debatable – the Plimmers lived initially in Vivian St, while the Norgroves lived on Thorndon Flat. With busy lives and no access to transport, opportunities to meet must have been very limited. They would rapidly have grown apart socially, as well – John Plimmer’s quicly found success in business, as well as increased social and political influence, while William’s business ventures met with only patchy success.
Also on board Gertrude with the Norgroves were John and Amelia Gill, and their one-year old son, Frederick. The Gills settled in Thorndon Flat, so for the first year or so would have been close neighbours. With sons of the same age, and the shared experience of the voyage, it seems likely that Sarah and Amelia could have been friends. There are one or two other Gertrude families who also lived in the area who I’m targeting for some further research. Some time soon, a surprised descendant of a Gertrude passenger is going to get a email from me asking if they mind their great-great grandma being written into my great-great grandma’s story!
One friend we do know about is Emma Lumsden, who arrived in Wellington with her husband William on the Oriental just a few days before the Norgroves arrived on Gertrude. William Lumsden was a gardener and nurseryman. The Lumsdens don’t seem to have ever lived particularly close to the Norgroves – newspapers, almanacs and electoral rolls show them in Wadestown in the mid-1840s, Hawkestone St in 1849 and Tinakori Rd in the 1850s and 1860s. Somehow, though, a connection was made, and a friendship formed that lasted even after the Norgroves left Wellington – evidenced by one surviving letter. In 1863, by then widowed, Emma sends bulbs and seeds to Sarah, along with a very affectionate note to Emma Norgrove, then about 14 – could the young Emma have been named for Emma Lumsden even?
Then there’s Mrs Earll. We have a couple of letters written by Sarah later in life, one to daughter Gertrude and her husband Joe, who had moved to Wellington, and one to the family in Blenheim while Sarah was herself in Wellington visiting family and friends. The Earlls are mentioned in both letters – in fact Mrs Earll accompanied Sarah on the Wellington trip – Sarah says in her letter that “I should have been very dull but for Mrs Earll”, although her letter outlines a very busy and sociable time. William Earll seems to have been a joiner who had a sash and door factory in Blenheim, so it’s possible that the women may have met through their husbands who would have been connected by their jobs.
I’ve pondered long enough on Sarah’s friends. I’m going to and eat some of my friend Anne’s marble cake before it goes cold!
Last week my friend Helen asked an interesting question – how did Sarah carry Ovid? Okay, so initially it didn’t seem much of a question. At the time, we were sitting together on the train, and Helen had her 15-week-old Isabel slung across her lap, and I had teeny little Izzy-feet pummelling my thigh, and it seemed kind of obvious how any mother would carry a baby. But what she meant was, how did Sarah carry Ovid when she needed her hands free? Helen pointed out how women in most cultures had some kind of sling arrangement for carrying small babies. Maori women carried them in a kind of kete, or sometimes a sling made out of beaten lacebark. Izzy herself had arrived on board the train in a nifty stretchy sling, tied and knotted around Helen’s body so that the baby was pressed firmly face-first into her mum’s chest.
I have no kind of mental picture of women of Sarah’s time and class carrying or wearing babies in this way. You don’t see it in art; you don’t see it in photographs – although with the long exposure times of early photography, there aren’t many candid snaps – everything is carefully posed, adults and older children frozen straight-faced. Very young children are often blurs in these early photographs because they simply couldn’t keep still. It seemed to me that western women had moved away from baby-wearing before the nineteenth century, and didn’t rediscover it until the 1960s and 70s. Some quick internet research confirms this – baby-wearing seems to have remained normal practice for women from all over the world except western women.
Helen speculated that perhaps Sarah and other young settler mums might have taken up the baby-wearing idea from Maori women. Would they have done this, or would they have been more likely to follow the more western pattern of simply leaving babies lying in their cradles while doing household chores? I imagine that Sarah’s later babies might have spend time in a perambulator, popularised by Queen Victoria later in the century; but that Ovid and the older children would either have been carried in arms, or not carried at all. American pioneer experience shows that young children were left to their own devices far more often than in earlier or later times, simply because their parents were working too hard to spare much time for them. It seems likely that early New Zealand settlers were in much the same position, and this raises a more interesting question about how Sarah coped in the first few years.
Back in England, although William and Sarah lived in their own little house, both of their families were reasonably close at hand. In her early days of motherhood, Sarah would have had ample help and support from the extended families. It would have even been likely that one of her sisters or sisters-in-law might have lived with them for a time to help out, although on the night of the 1841 census, two weeks before they left for New Zealand, the household consisted only of William, Sarah and Ovid. Leaving the extended family behind was a huge step, but to some extent the loss of support would have been buffered by the five months spent on Gertrude with other young families. The women would have helped each other out with child-care and other domestic tasks; older children and other adults would have been around to watch the babies and toddlers. It wasn’t until they went ashore in Wellington that William, Sarah and Ovid were truly on their own – although perhaps not even then, as they shared their first house with a shipmate. [Sarah herself uses the word “shipmate”, which suggests a single man rather than a woman or family.]
Would the friendships and support systems developed on Gertrude have held up once the steerage passengers came ashore? Or would they have been so scattered, and so busy trying to survive, that they were isolated into their individual families? How did Sarah cope with an active toddler while doing everything she had to do to care for her family? I suppose Ovid wasn’t the first toddler to have ever been tied to the kitchen table by leading strings to prevent him falling in the fire while his mother cooked the dinner!
More children, paradoxically, might have made things slightly easier for Sarah. Older children (often even toddlers) were pressed into service to care for their siblings. Chances were that Ovid carried and held Oscar at least as much as either of their parents did, and that Gertrude was watched over and petted by both of them. Modern mums would probably have fifty fits if they saw their two year old lugging the newborn around the house, but the reality of large families in lower socio-economic households has meant that this has always happened, and probably still does.
The facts of how Sarah managed are lost in the past. In terms of my story, the bits that hold the known facts together, I now have Helen’s thoughts tucked into my sub-conscious to percolate. I can see, perhaps, that in desperation, Sarah might have fashioned a make-shift sling to cradle a fractious infant while leaving her hands free to peel the potatoes. I can see that William would have needed to whip up a rocking cradle for Oscar, that Sarah could have rocked with her foot while sewing or writing letters. I can’t see her wearing any of the babies in a sling while going out of the house. On the other hand, a carry-cot, Moses-basket style, would have been a distinct possibility… Anybody have any more ideas?
A little bit more of the story - pure fiction, this part.Finally it was their turn to disembark. Mr Ellis, the Third Mate, called them forward to the steps leading to the accommodation ladder. Sarah balanced Ovid on her hip, her workbag stuffed between his body and hers to leave one hand free for holding on. The winds were still quite strong after last night’s spectacular storm, and she had earlier tied her hat down with a scarf to prevent it from being ripped from her head.
Mr Ellis bared uneven and discoloured teeth in what he must have intended as a reassuring smile.
“You first, missus, and I’ll carry the lad for you”.
She gripped Ovid more tightly. She had travelled the last months in constant vigilance, full of worry that Baby might fall overboard, but she was never more afraid than when asked to entrust him to arms other than her own. Her fears must have been written clearly on her face, because as Mr Ellis reached for the boy, he winked and said, “Don’t worry, missus. I’ve not dropped anyone in the briny yet.”
That made her feel slightly foolish; after all the Mate was an experienced seaman, and she had never once seen him stumble even in the roughest of seas. Her face warmed with a blush, and she hid it in ensuring that Ovid’s sun-hat was set firmly on his head. The wind was worrying at it, although she had tied the strings tightly under his chin. She gave it another tug to be sure, before moving closer to the steps.
Mr Ellis grasped Ovid firmly around the middle and lifted. To her surprise, he hoisted the boy over his head and onto his shoulders. As Ovid crowed with delight and waved wildly to his father, the Mate secured both little ankles around his neck by grasping them together in one big, sea-roughened hand. Sarah hesitated, wanting to be sure Ovid was safe; wanting more than anything not to have to go through the frightening climb off the ship.
“Hold tight, lad”, Mr Ellis said, and she relaxed a little as Ovid wrapped his arms around the man’s head. He seemed perfectly happy taking in the view from his lofty perch, and she could see that the Mate held him quite securely.
She had no excuse left; she could delay no longer – there were still many behind her waiting for their turn. She looped the drawstrings of her workbag over her right wrist and took a tight grip on the wooden railing with her left hand; her hat was going to have to take care of itself. She stepped carefully up onto the platform beside Mr Ellis and Ovid. From behind her, she heard William’s low tones.
“Try not to look down, dearest.”
It was too late. She had already looked over the side, and the sight of the sea so far below made her stomach lurch; suddenly light-headed and fearing she might faint and topple headlong overboard, she grabbed for the railing with both hands and hung on. The swelling pewter sea was a very long way down, and the longboat waiting for them at the base of the ladder looked impossibly small. How was she going to do this?
Familiar warm hands gripped her shoulders.
“We’re almost there, dearest,” William said softly, his mouth close to her ear. “Take a few deep breaths. I’ll be right behind you.”
She inhaled obediently. William’s touch and the salty air were calming; after a moment she felt able to let go with one hand to reach for the whitened rope of the ladder railing. William’s hands slid away as she turned to face the side of the ship and began her cautious descent. She kept both hands firmly on the inner railing and tried desperately to keep from looking down. The ship and the ladder rose and fell dizzyingly together in the sea’s slight swell, and her stomach suddenly rose too. She was not going to lose her breakfast in front of all these people. She took another great breath, and concentrated her attention on the side of the ship, mere inches from her nose.
How strange it was to see Gertrude from the outside after all these months; the wooden hull which had been so new and perfect when they left Gravesend was marked and scraped, and damply encrusted with crystals of salt. William’s closeness was reassuring as she shuffled slowly down the ladder, feeling her way one foot at a time, the workbag swaying with every step. The sea made slopping sounds against the side of the ship, and the longboat bumped against the bottom of the ladder with a regular thud as they descended. Finally, she could hear the murmurs of encouragement from the men in the boat and she knew the ordeal by ladder was almost over.
At the bottom of the ladder a seaman reached out to guide her down the last few steps. His hands were big and roughened red by years at sea; he was missing at least two fingers, but his touch was gentle as he lifted her into the boat where other hands waited to guide her to a seat. The boards in the bottom of the boat were wet and suspiciously fishy, and she slipped twice in struggling over seats and sea-bags, between the pairs of sweating oarsmen to the stern. A sailor helped her turn to face forward, and held her arm as she lowered herself carefully onto the damp seat.
Awkward with embarrassment at being handled by all these strange men, she took a moment to fuss with her skirts, pulling them up a little to keep them dry, and shifting the workbag to her lap. Then, with order and composure restored, she looked up to find what had become of the rest of her family.
William had worked his way across the longboat to stand across the seat in front of her. The Mate bounded confidently down the accommodation ladder, one hand lightly on the railing and the other still clasping Ovid’s ankles. Ovid was finding his hat a great trial; he had fidgeted with it until it was twisted down over one eye. He pushed at it with his little hands, and before she could call out a warning, a sudden gust of wind caught it and whisked it off his head. She almost laughed out loud at the Mate’s surprised look as the hat flapped past him and dropped into the sea. It wasn’t funny though – she had made the hat herself, during the endless hot days of the doldrums, because Ovid’s own caps and bonnets had no brims to protect his delicate face from the sun. She had sacrificed one of William’s neckerchiefs and part of her own petticoat for it, and although it wasn’t high fashion, it would have done for a year or two yet. Now, though, naughty Baby giggled and pointed to where the errant hat drifted near the longboat.
At the base of the ladder, Mr Ellis lifted Ovid off his shoulders, and lowered him into the boat. The oarsmen passed him back, weathered hands securely wrapped around her precious boy as if he was the Crown Jewels. As she reached to take him from his father, the little boy announced “Hat, Mama,” in quite triumphant tones, and twisted in her arms to look for it in the water. “Your hat is lost and gone, Baby,” she told him, but as William sat down, the sodden hat was presented it to him on the blade of an oar, its dripping strings trailing like seaweed.
I've never been able to find out what happened to the good ship Gertrude, which brought the family to New Zealand. It doesn't really matter - it's not germane to the story - I was only looking to find more documentation about the ship. I had assumed that like many of the migrant ships, Gertrude would have made more than one voyage to New Zealand. And if she did, I could imagine that William and Sarah would have taken the children down to the harbour to show them the ship that Mother and Father and Ovid came to New Zealand on. So I checked for later voyages, and found none. There was another Gertrude, a much smaller brig, that made a couple of migrant voyages later in the century, but the barque Gertrude never returned. I wondered if she had gone on to do migrant voyages to America, Canada or Australia, or had even been wrecked, but despite the plethora of websites - and the multitude of fishing boats and steamers called Gertrude - I can't find her. I'm curious. I'd like to know, but it's a side-track.
What's more annoying is the mystery of the disappearing ship's papers. The passenger lists of the New Zealand Company migrant ships, and in fact the passenger lists of all the later migrant ships carrying assisted immigrants, survived because they were essentially accounting records. Other records of the New Zealand Company ships, such as the captain's and surgeon's diaries, and the plans of the steerage accommodation, survived because they were part of the official record - they might have been required, for example, if there were complaints about a particular voyage. These papers are held by Archives New Zealand.
When I was a very new assistant archivist at National Archives, as it was then, I was very excited to discover this. As soon as I had a chance, I pounced on the box of records for Gertrude - in those days, the papers for each ship were in distinctive, individual green boxes, although I think they were probably re-boxed when we moved to the Mulgrave Street building. I was gob-smacked to discover that all of the really good stuff - the diaries and the ship's plan - were missing. They had been there, but at some point when security was rather slacker than it is today, someone had taken them. It's hard to believe that someone could be so unbelievably selfish as to think, my ancestors came on this ship, so it's my right to have these. There were 175 people on that ship - the descendants probably number in the hundreds of thousands by now! The whole point of archives and manuscript repositories is that everyone can share and have access to historic documents. Aaaargh! Twenty years later, it still makes me furious!
I never planned to write the story of William and Sarah's five-month journey to New Zealand on Gertrude. From the time I first planned to write Sarah's story, I knew these critical papers were missing. Subsequent research has shown that if any of the passengers were keen diarists, their observations on the voyage either haven't survived or are still in private hands. All Sarah left us were some poems containing recollections - nothing of the voyage - but at least a little about their arrival in New Zealand. So that's where my story starts.
The Gertrude arrived in Port Nicholson on the 31st of October 1841, but the passengers were not landed until the second of November - this would have been because of medical inspections as well as the sheer logistical nightmare of unloading an anchored ship via small boats - there were no quays for the big ships in the 1840s. For those two days spent on the ship anchored in the harbour, I do need to know a little more. The immigrants were shocked and surprised on discovering that Wellington was not what they expected, that it was nothing like the towns and countryside of England, and it was far less developed than they had been led to believe. Those last few days on Gertrude were the last link to their old life, and the end of the ordered shipboard life they had experienced for nearly five months. For me, this is where Sarah's story really begins. As soon as immigrants set foot on the shore of this strange new country, they were on their own, and they were left to make their new lives out of very raw materials.
It is very early in the morning - just after 5am. After a month on holiday, I've forgotten how to get up before dawn, before the birds even. It's back to work today, and I have that back to school feeling. I've made great progress on the house painting, in large part thanks to Mum and Dad, who have been helping out with gardening, painting and household repairs so that I can spend the afternoons in 1841. Anyway, I still have to finish the final top-coat of paint, and do the window trims, but one side of the house looks vastly improved - so much so that I kind of want to keep going and finish the whole lot. If the weather stays like this for the next few weekends, I will see how much I can get done.
Yesterday was incredibly hot and humid. It was a relief to be indoors with the fan going - which some of the time was a gentle November breeze blowing on William and Sarah as they stood on the deck of the Gertrude and surveyed their new home. I can till taste the salt-laden air. This morning I'll be back there - a literal commute to Wellington, rather than 1841, although I see the city in layers - as it is now, as it has been over the almost 30 years that I've lived and worked there, as it was during the early days when William and Sarah were there. I walk past them in the street sometimes - every night when I walk to the railway station (which is on reclaimed land, in an area that was water in 1841), I walk right past the place where they lived, past the Thistle Inn where William might have had a beer after work, and I think about them.
But for now, breakfast and 2008 await!
