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taking what few possessions they could and were advised to take. They said their farewells, and
faced the prospect ahead of them of a fearful voyage to the other end of the world.
5. Mereweather and the Lady McNaqhten
They sailed from Plymouth on 24 February, 1850 on the 653 ton barque, the Lady
McNaghten, commanded by Captain Hibbert
The ship was not very large, and it was not a good month to go to sea, as the northern
hemisphere's worst winter months (January, February and March) led straight into the increasing
autumnal coid and gales of the southern hemisphere. The Honeycombes reached Port Phillip in
June, thus exchanging one winter for another.
There was of course no other way to get there, and the thousands who followed the First Fleet
to Australia were united by a common bond, whatever their ciass: they were all fellow-sufferers
of the lengthy journey by sea. Not a few swore never to entrust themselves to a ship again, so
awful was that experience. But nonetheless it played a part in melding them into a nation: they
had survived the voyage and all that this entailed, and this gave them an initial awareness of what
it meant to be an Australian - getting there made you one.
!t also can be claimed that the close circumstances of living together and eating together on the
cruei sea taught every passenger enduring lessons of consideration for others, of self-help and
group effort, which were affirmed later by their pioneering existence on the often inimical land.
The arrivals also had a common aim: for all those who travelled voluntarily were seeking a
better, fairer life, and were resolute enough to make their resolve a reality.
So a sea voyage was the emigrants' shared beginning, and remained so for nearly 150 years.
Passenger plane flights from London to Sydney via Singapore did not begin until 1S34. But
those plywood and fabric biplanes could carry no more than ten passengers. The flying-boats
that replaced them in 1938 carried 15, and those flights took five or six days. But this was
nothing to the four or five months taken by the smaller saiiing-ships a hundred years earlier,
transporting their tetchy human cargos halfway around the world.
Life on board a mid-nineteenth century emigrant ship subjected every passenger, whether
cabinned in the poop or confined below deck, to shared and unplumbed depths of misery,
sickness and fear.
On the other hand, some of those in steerage, who were inured to hardship and poverty on
shore, found the regulated life and regular food an actual improvement on their lot on land; and
those with open minds and imaginations found themselves strangely exhilarated by the sea's
power and mystery. Very few passengers on a ship, perhaps none, had ever been at sea before
- although a few might have enjoyed an outing on a paddle-steamer on a river or along the
coast. Some from land-iocked villages or city slums had never even seen the sea.
It was very much a journey for all on board through space as well as time. The ship itself, would
become, as William Golding portrayed it in his trilogy about
39
a Victorian warship, 'the whole imaginable world... an astonishment-., this extraordinary hamlet
or village built a thousand miles from anywhere'.
Before William Honeycombe and his family embarked, they may have had to find
accommodation in an inn or lodging-house for a night or two - unless they were already resident
in Plymouth.
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