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Honeycombes travelled steerage, enduring similar discomforts and privations to those suffered
by William's family and then by Jane. Eight passengers died on this voyage, and when the
Banker'sJDaughter anchored at Point Henry on 3 September, after 107 days at sea (the fastest
voyage ever made by a sailing-ship, 63 days, was made the following year), the ship was
quarantined for five days on account of some fever on board.
Measles and typhus were the main killer diseases then on ships. Ill-fed and ill-housed, emigrants
also had to contend with the fear, sometimes made terrible reality, of shipwreck, icebergs,
storms and fire. Most of them had suffered hardships all their lives, but those they experienced
at sea were more intense and with little relief. Of the 15,477 people who left England for
Victoria in 1852 - with as many as 800 on some ships crammed on two decks below -about
five per cent (849) died at sea. Comparatively few died in shipwrecks -although in the 60 years
of mass emigration, from 1830 to 1890, about 30 emigrant ships were wrecked and over 2,500
people were drowned.
The worst wreck, with the most fatalities, was that of the Cataragui in August 1845. It still
remains the worst civilian disaster in Australia's history. The ship struck King Island, north of
Tasmania, on a stormy night. Nine people got ashore - 399 died.
Interestingly, the word 'emigrant' was initially applied to those whose voyage out was sponsored
by the British government. Those who paid for their passage, like the Honeycombes, disliked
being lumped together with such poor and deprived persons as 'emigrants'.
Richard Honeycombe had his 24th birthday a few weeks after he stepped ashore at Geelong.
His eldest daughter was nearly five; the next was two; his baby son, George, who had been
born three months before the ship left Liverpool, was now seven months old. His wife,
Elizabeth, was 31. Their ages on the shipping list are all incorrect: Richard was said to be 32.
But the list correctly notes that he was a mason and came from Devon, where he was born.
Although we know that Richard and his family arrived in Geelong in September 1853, at the
start of the Australian spring and two weeks or so before
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the Victorian Governor, Charles La Trobe, laid the foundation stone of Geelong's Railway
Station, we have no evidence that the family were in residence in Geelong until the birth of
Richard's fourth child, Emma, on 16 May 1855, in South Geelong - the first Honeycombe to be
born in Australia.
In the registration of Emma's birth, her father's occupation is given as 'mason' and his age as 26
(he was 25). Her mother is said to be 29, but Elizabeth was still being coy about her real age -
which was 33.
Their fifth child and second son, Richard, was also born in South Geelong, on 9 September
1857 - the first male Honeycombe to be Australian-born. Richard the father is next recorded in
a street directory as living in Noble Street in 1858, next door but one to the Bible Christians'
Chapel. Noble Street was a long road in a newly developed area called Chilwell, and Richard's
father, William, lived there in 1854. Perhaps Richard and his family moved in when his father
moved out to lodge with Jane and Lawrence Mountjoy on their farm in the Barrabool Hills. Jane
had married in 1855.
As Richard and Elizabeth's next four children were also born in Geelong, between 1859 and
1866, it seems safe to assume that the family lived in Geelong from the time they arrived there,
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