Advance Australasia: A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia

Thirty-four years ago, in a fine American ship chartered by Messrs. Anderson Anderson & Co., I paid my first visit to Australia, and the only one I ever made thither direct from the United Kingdom. Those were the palmy days of sailing ships to the Australasian Colonies, and a splendid fleet of regular liners, whose names were household words, made wonderful passages for equally wonderful freights with full cargoes each way for the great firms of Green, Wigram, Devitt & Moore, George Thompson, Anderson Anderson, and many others of less note, but of quite equal stability and repute. Passengers were carried, of course, in great numbers, and were, generally speaking, fairly comfortable, especially in the first class, or cuddy, although, of course, many of the necessities of ocean travel to-day were then its luxuries. It often happened, though, that through pressure of cargo or passengers, outside ships—that is, not owned by the regular lines—were chartered for a voyage, and passengers who had booked with a great firm upon the reputation of their ships for comfort and attention to the needs of the traveller, were sometimes badly disappointed. It was certainly so in the ship in which I paid my first visit. She was a splendid Boston-built vessel, but with very scanty accommodation for passengers. The captain was a very old Yankee, really past his work; but in one thing he was full of vigour, and that was in his hatred of and contempt for anything or anybody British; and he resented bitterly carrying British passengers in his saloon at all, telling them, as I well remember, upon an occasion when they approached him with a complaint, "I wish to have nothing to say to you. If I had been consulted, I would have paid big money rather than have carried you; but since you are here, make the best of it, and don't bring any complaints to me, for I won't hear you."

So, of course, they were none too comfortable, especially as they had to wait upon themselves entirely, and bribe the cook to prepare their food, which, as he was a perfect fraud of a cook—a most unusual thing in American ships—did not help them very much. And unfortunately, however smart the old skipper may have been in his prime—and I cannot imagine a Yankee skipper not being smart—he was now, as I have said, quite past his work, and consequently we made a very long passage for so fine a ship. We commenced badly. Although the weather was beautifully fine, we took a Channel pilot—an almost unheard-of thing for an outward-bounder to do—and when we got well down off Plymouth, the captain forbade him to stand in for the English shore so that he might get a chance to land. So we carried him, fretting terribly and exhausting his vocabulary of abuse, half-way across the Bay of Biscay, where, meeting a homeward-bound steamer, the captain condescended to signal, heave-to and release the unlawful prisoner. His farewell was copious, involved, and highly decorated with flowers of sea-speech, at which I did not wonder.

The weather all the way out was exceedingly favourable, but the time taken to Melbourne was 137 days, the average passage for such ships as she was being about 95. The only people who really enjoyed the passage, and, I believe, could have wished it longer, were the fellows forward who commenced broaching the valuable general cargo before the ship was out of the Channel, and lived always like the proverbial fighting-cocks, washing down their huge meals of various preserved foods, biscuits, &c., with copious draughts of all kinds of liquor from beer to champagne. The fact that to reach the spoil they often had to crawl amongst, over, and beneath a consignment of gun- and blasting-powder, amounting to over one hundred tons, and that with naked candles, never seemed to trouble them. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to add that they all deserted immediately upon the ship's arrival at Sandridge Pier, and, not to seem peculiar, I followed their example a day or two later.