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Ten years later, the Guiding Star, also outward bound from Liverpool, disappeared in the ice
and dark of the Southern Ocean: 546 people vanished with her. The Cospatrick caught fire on
her way to New Zealand in 1874. Of the 473 on board, only 83 managed to get away in
lifeboats. Of these, all but three were dead when they drifted ashore. The following year, the
Strathmore was wrecked on the uninhabited Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Of
the 400 on board, 38 got to the shore, where they endured for six months before being rescued
by a whaler.
Ships were more often wrecked on British shores. In 1854 the Tayieur, two days out from
Liverpool, struck an Irish island - 290 drowned. Five years later, the Royal Charter, a new
auxiliary ship on her homeward run, was driven onto Anglesey hours before she was due to
dock. Over 350 died: many were gold prospectors who had made a small fortune and were
returning home.
Amazingly, some people in these shipwrecks always survived. The loss of the Guiding Star is
the only case on the Australia run of all the passengers and crew on a ship perishing.
Nonetheless, at least 26 emigrant ships in this period were lost, and more than 2,500 people
were drowned.
In August 1848 William Honeycombe may have read about the destruction by fire of an
American ship, Ocean Monarch, outward bound for Boston: nearly 200 people died. And in
December, 72 were suffocated during a storm in the Irish Channel as the steamer,
Londonderry, with hatches battened down, crossed from Siigo to Liverpool. Even the Great
Britain had had an accident, having run aground in Dundrum Bay in 1847; she was repaired in
Liverpool. It was not until May 1852 that she was able to sail for New York.
Yet, overall, more people died of disease at sea than of drowning. There was never a ship in
which no one died - of typhus or cholera, TB, measles, pneumonia and other virulent nineteenth
century maladies. Some women died in childbirth. Conditions on land for the masses of
emigrants may have been unhealthy and full of hardship. At sea, conditions were even worse.
Some of this would have been known by William Honeycombe. But he would have had little
concept of the physical reality of Australia: the animals and insects, the gum-trees and the bush,
the dust, the Hies, and the heat. Australia was as remote as the moon, unimaginable though in
view. Pictorial representations were very few; no photographs then, just the occasional
newspaper pen-and-ink sketch. And once there, the likelihood was that the emigrant would
never see England again.
We cannot really know what persons and events influenced Wifliam's decision to emigrate: what
discussions in beer-houses, music halls, or at firesides, added to his resolve - what happenings
in his personal and working life in 1849 made him choose a date of departure from Plymouth in
February the following year.
Was his thinking, or that of his wife, Elizabeth, similar to that expressed by Mrs Micawber in
David Copperfieid, which had been serialized in a monthly magazine since May 1849 and
would conclude in November 1850?
The Micawbers were on the eve of emigrating to Australia. Said Mrs Micawber: 'My dear Mr
Copperfieid, Mr Micawber's is not a common case. Mr Micawber is going to a distant country,
expressly in order that he may be fully understood and appreciated for the first time... From the
first moment of this voyage, I wish Mr Micawber to stand upon that vessel's prow and say,
"Enough of delay: enough of disappointment: enough of limited means. That was in the old
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