Leaving the ship

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.

Ovid, Mrs Beeton and a wild Irish girl

Looking back over this blog, I think that from the outside, it must look like I’m taking a rather random approach to my research. I’m all over the place with the things I’m pursuing. The truth is, it’s not totally random. It’s not completely linear either, but there’s a method in my madness.

The organised, linear part of what I’m doing sits well behind the scenes. I have a huge spreadsheet with one workbook for each of the years in the 20-year period I’m concentrating on (1840 – 1860). Each year has a calendar, and everything goes in there – known facts and dates about the family; key dates in New Zealand history; notes on probable/possible dates of events. Most of the items are tagged with their source, so I can go from the date of an event to, for example, a newspaper clipping of it. I’ve got everyone’s birthday in there, every year, so I know how old each person was at the time of a particular event. And I’ve also (blush) charted the approximate duration of each of Sarah’s pregnancies, and colour-coded that block of dates in each year – which gives me an interesting perspective on the efficacy of breast-feeding as a mechanism of birth control – I can just about pick the date on which each baby was weaned!

The more random-seeming part is the research. I have lots of different things on the go at once. I’m chasing very specific bits of information in relation to the section I’m writing at any given time, but I’m also pursuing a whole range of other things as they crop up. As an archivist, I’m drawn to primary source material – there’s not a lot of Norgrove papers around, but there’s still a lot of useful material at National Archives and National Library. Their online systems enable me to identify particular documents or collections to investigate when I have time during the day when I’m in Wellington. There’s also a fair bit of primary and secondary material available via the internet, which is quicker for me to work with. Then there’s published secondary material – I’ve usually got two or three books on the go at once, and by the time I have finished with them, the pages bristle with neon marker flags. Sometimes I’m marking specific things to follow up and find more about; sometimes I just want to be able to go back and consider the relevance of something to Sarah and the family.

So, in no particular order, the last week’s work has meandered through the following :

• Background reading has been the book My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates – journal and letter excerpts from New Zealand women in the nineteenth century. I want to look at the complete source material from one or two of these women; also have lots of things to think about from their words
• Tuberculosis – Ovid died of TB at 18. According to Mum, who got it from great-great Aunt Emma, one lung was almost gone when he died. So I’ve been looking for general historical information on TB in nineteenth century New Zealand (not a lot of it out there), as well as more specific information on the treatment and nursing of TB at the time, and the social attitudes towards it. I know someone is going to ask why it matters – the answer is that having a family member with a disability or chronic illness has a profound effect on a family. It changes the family dynamic, and it affects the lives of the healthy family members. So it matters, because as far as I can see, Ovid would have been nursed at home by his mother and sisters. It could have been quite a long illness; he might even have contracted it while gold-mining in Victoria with his father.
• Which led me to see if I could nail down the dates of the Victorian gold-mining trip a bit better, by digging into what the various Australian archives have online. And although I still don’t know when William and Ovid departed for Australia (probably very late 1852), I know now when they came back! They sailed from Victoria on the Wild Irish Girl in April 1855, arriving in Nelson on 12 May.
• Nelson? But the family hadn’t moved to Nelson yet, and anyway, why didn’t my index search of the Nelson Examiner show their names on an inbound passenger list? As it turns out, they were in the Examiner, but somebody must have had lousy handwriting because they appear in the passenger list as “Mr Norysom and son”!
• Logically, William and Ovid should appear shortly thereafter on an outbound passenger list from Nelson to Wellington. Not according to the Nelson Examiner – so either they travelled on something so small that it didn’t make the newspaper (poor William – he did suffer so from sea-sickness) or maybe, having checked out Nelson, they went and had a look at the Wairau and sailed to Wellington from there. I can’t check that online because the relevant newspapers for the period aren’t there, so further pursuit of this line of inquiry is temporarily parked.
• Meanwhile, the search for TB info led to some bizarre recipes from Mrs Beeton (searching for nursing information); the effect of tuberculosis on architecture (ever wondered about all those enclosed sun-porches on old houses?) and Samuel Butler’s voyage to New Zealand (online books)!
  
  And so it goes on…………….

Time and seasons

I’ve been thinking about time – how my relationship with the clock is vastly different from what William and Sarah’s would have been. It’s a natural enough reflection as the days start to get shorter. Five days a week, I get up in the dark, year-round. At least in summer, by the time I leave the house, it’s bright daylight; but now we’re getting into autumn, and the street-lights are still on when I leave for the railway station, although it’s not yet so dark that I can’t see what I’m tripping over. My life is ruled by the clock – getting up and getting things done in time to catch my train; at work my Outlook calendar is always pinging to announce the next meeting; then it’s back to the station again in time to catch the train home; a short evening and then into bed in time to get enough sleep to get up and do it all again. I have clocks all over the house (each of them showing a slightly different time), and it takes three alarms to wake me up enough to get out of bed at the right time every morning.

So I was thinking – who wound the clock – William or Sarah? Did they even have a clock in the early days? Presumably William had a pocket watch. Without radio, TV and the cellphone network, how did they find out what the correct time was? Did it matter – presumably the only time they needed to be sure they were on time was for church on Sundays – and that’s what church bells are for, to call the clock-less faithful.

William and Sarah wouldn’t have been mucked around by daylight saving, either – it didn’t become permanent till 1929. Life back then would have been a bit more in tune with the seasons. As I yawn my way through winter, I often say that I’m convinced that humans are meant to hibernate in winter. I’d be only too happy to retire to my cave with a pile of unread books, a heap of DVDs, and a freezer full of food; I would emerge in spring-time rested and well read and probably 20kgs heavier. It’s daylight that gives us our get up and go, and there’s precious little of that in winter. [Two of my three afore-mentioned alarm clocks are actually lights on timers – by gradually increasing the level of light in the bedroom, my body is tricked into thinking it’s dawn, and I surface from sleep in a natural sort of way. Well, at least awake enough not to leap bolt upright in bed and put my back out when the real alarm clock starts blaring.]

The extent of artificial light available to us now means we extend the length our days way past what William and Sarah would have experienced. They would have gone to bed not much past dark in the winter time, at least at times when money was scarce – no-one was going to waste money on expensive candles or lamp fuel. No sitting around watching TV or surfing the internet! There wouldn’t have been much time for reading, particularly for Sarah, who would have been flat-tack from morning to night running her household and looking after the family. In a world that wasn’t ruled by the clock, would she have felt the same relentless pressure to get things done? Each day had its deadlines, I suppose – things to get done before the kids got up, before they got home from school, before William got home for dinner, before the daylight went. Weekly deadlines, like Monday being wash-day – Sarah probably hated Mondays just as much as working women do today! Occasional deadlines, like getting letters finished before the next ship left for England, or preparations for the next baby before “confinement”. I guess it’s all relative – Sarah might not have had to worry about train timetables and getting to meetings, but she wasn’t sitting around twiddling her thumbs and admiring the scenery either!

Was William a Chartist?

Was William a Chartist? He went to one Chartist meeting that we know of. This doesn’t necessarily make him one, doesn’t mean he signed any of the petitions or agreed with all of the Charter. He left England before the 3 million signature petition was presented to Parliament, as did many of the Chartists and their supporters. A quick search of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography shows that quite a few former Chartists ended up in Nelson. Former Chartist leader George Binns, in replying to an attack on him in the Nelson Examiner, said “I have nothing to do with Chartism in New Zealand, and my past enthusiasm might have been forgotten where there is no grievance to redress and no enemy to our weal”. It’s possible that many of the former Chartists in New Zealand felt this way – in the new country, where the English class system had not taken root, and where opportunity was available for all who were willing to put in the work, there were not the same grievances as in England. The former Chartists didn’t need to be activists – they could just get on with their lives. It’s possible that this was the situation William was in.

What adds spice to the mystery is that a few months later, in October 1856, at the public meeting for the election of the Superintendent of Nelson Province, William rushed in to propose Dr David Munro as a candidate. William showed a rather strange haste and lack of propriety – the Nelson Examiner noted that the two main candidates were quietly conferring as to which of them should be proposed first; and Munro already had an intended proposer, who was reduced to seconding the nomination. A third candidate, opposing Munro and his main opponent on a number of issues, was a former Chartist, JP Robinson. So why didn’t William support Robinson? Was it that he didn’t agree with Chartist policies? It seems unlikely, given that life in New Zealand had already provided him with a key aim of the people’s charter, the vote. Was he trying to make a bit of a name for himself in Nelson political circles – he had been there for less than a year, so was he trying to get noticed? Did he have political ambitions of his own? He would have known Munro in Wellington, although they moved in different social circles – did he want to win personal favour with the man?

So does it matter whether he was a Chartist or not? I think, for the purposes of telling this story, that it does. I had been wondering how much of “politics” was going to find its way into the story – the more politics, the more work for me. The context is inevitably political – the New Zealand Company and land issues; Maori and land issues; the Maori wars; and local body politics, which we already know William was involved in. And where does Sarah fit into it all, given that it’s her story? It’s even harder to find out what she would have thought about it all – after all, reported history is so much his-story, and very little her-story. There are a couple of clues which suggest to me that Sarah would have taken an interest in politics, and that she and William may have discussed these issues at home. First, William’s sister comments in a letter to her that she remembers “you were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford” – she encloses some of the local ones for her. Well, apart from advertisements, newspapers of the time were almost entirely political – so we know Sarah took an interest in the world around her. Second, two of her daughters signed the huge electoral petition that ultimately resulted in the 1893 Electoral Act giving New Zealand women the right to vote. Sarah died a couple of years before this; I don’t think the earlier petitions survived, and I don’t know if she signed any of them. But Emma and Kate, the two daughters who never married, did sign – and they had to have been influenced by the views of their parents, with whom they lived far longer than their siblings did. Slender clues perhaps, but I’m coming to the view that political issues were probably regular dinner conversation in the Norgrove household, and that therefore there’s a natural place for it in Sarah’s story.

Portraits

For the last couple of days, after the sun and heat have driven me indoors from sanding and scraping at old paintwork, I've been trying to get to know Sarah a little bit better. I started with photographs. Unfortunately, there are only 3 photos of her in existence, all of them taken later in life.

This one I've dated to 1864, so she would have been around 46 years old. Immediately I see that we have two things in common : (1) neither of us photographs well; and (2) we both have a tendency to portliness. Interestingly, the hair style dates from the early 1840s, so is probably how she wore her hair as a young woman. Back in the nineteenth century, people tended to get all dressed up in their Sunday best to have their "portraits" taken, so the hairstyle may have been Sundays-only. Although her hair looks as though it might be wavy, those corkscrewing ringlets would have meant going to bed with her hair twisted up in rags, and you wouldn't be wanting to do that every night of the week!

I've got no idea what Sarah looked like as a young woman. The best I can come up with are photos of one of her sisters, and one of her daughters, as likely guides to how she may have looked.

This is Caroline Hall, Sarah's youngest sister. The last time Sarah saw her sister in person, Caroline would have been a six-month old baby - Sarah's mother had Caroline six months after Sarah gave birth to her first child. Cal (as her father called her) and Sarah knew each only through letters and the occasional photograph.

And this is Kate Norgrove, the youngest of Sarah's daughters to survive childhood, and the one I think looks most like her. She is probably about 15 here, and obviously went to a lot trouble for her portrait - curling her hair in ringlets and finishing it off with a flower.

Discoveries!

Apparently it takes the first 10-14 days of a holiday to relax properly, which for most people taking a two-week vacation probably means they are only just getting into the swing of it when it's time to go home. I realised yesterday, which was roughly two weeks into my annual leave, that I had finally stopped vegging on the sofa in front of the TV and felt like doing something. Good thing I have another couple of weeks before I have to go back to work! I've ripped back into research for Sarah's story, and I've already made some exciting discoveries!

It surely can't be a year since I last visited Papers Past at the National Library website - it can only have been a few months? Since my last visit they have machine-read a whole lot of the old newspapers archived there, including a couple of the papers which up until now, I have had to read page by page looking for any mention of family. Now I can just plug "Norgrove" into the search engine and boom, a surprising number of hits in the Nelson Examiner and the New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian!

I'm only about one-third of the way through processing all the goodies I found, and fitting them into the timeline, but there were a couple of jaw-dropping moments - like William's advertisement in the NZS&CSG that he had taken over a private hotel and was fitting it out with a view to opening it as a boarding house! Huh? That definitely wasn't amongst the known facts of the family's early life in Wellington! So Sarah not only had 6 children and was pregnant with the 7th, but she was running a boarding house???? And then there were the advertisements in both the Wellington and Nelson papers advising creditors that William had assigned his property to third parties - was this some kind of receivership or were these agents? Was great-great grandpa some kind of dodgy dealer or just crap at business? Or were they simply handling his affairs while he was out of town, and if so, why third parties and not Sarah?

How I love research! Way more questions than answers! I'm itching to get back to it....