The mystery of the vanishing barque

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.

Back to work

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!