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farewells, into row-boats that would have then ferried them to a wooden jetty or pier at
Sandridge or WiHiamstown. Perhaps the wind blew strongiy still, as it can do in Melbourne.
Perhaps the waters of the bay were calm that Monday morning and the sun shone brightly over
the bustling sea-port scene.
The local paper, The Argus., which recorded the Sea Queen's arrival in Hobson's Bay - as it
did of all other maritime arrivals and departures -remarked elsewhere in its tightly worded
columns on the 'favourable weather during the past week'.
But whatever the weather, the hearts and minds of the Sea Queen's passengers, including the
Honeycombe family, must have raced as they assembled on a pier or jetty before boarding a
ferry up the Yarra River to Melbourne and then standing at last, uncertainly, on the new earth
that they and their children would people thenceforth, breeding generations of men and women
who would one day be known as Australians and happily call Australia home.
Although the names of most of those passengers who disembarked from the Sea Queen that
Monday morning in July may have lasted down the generations, until today, their actual lives
generally become obscure or non-existent from the day they step ashore. Most of them then
disappear, the living details of their existence effaced by the passing of many years. Most have
no place in the memories of their descendants, of those alive today.
Their names, however, were written down in a shipping register and were published in The
Argus in Melbourne on Monday, 8 July. Among the 92 who had arrived on the Sea Queen,
were the names of six Honeycombes.
This recorded fact, when unearthed by this genealogist, should have been a cause for genial,
logical celebration. Alas; it led instead to error, confusion and doubt.
First of all, I initially assumed that because the Honeycombes had arrived at Melbourne on the
Sea Queen, they had left England on the Sea
PROLOGUE
In the middle of the Australian winter of 1850, a small, three-masted ship, the Sea Queen,
laboured across the windy, nearly land-locked waters of Port Phiiiip Bay, in effect an inland sea.
On the evening of Sunday, 7 July, she dropped anchor in Hobson's Bay.
There were 92 passengers on the ship, ail emigrants from England, and among them was a
family, six in number, called Honeycombe. And they were the first of that name, the first of their
Cornish clan, to come to this brave new world.
The landscape they saw was largely bereft of trees or of any vegetation, all of it having been
chopped down for firewood of for use as timber in various local constructions.
To the passengers' right 'ay a sandy beach called Sandridge dotted with shacks, sheds, tents
and small boats. In front of them was the broad muddy mouth of the Yarra River. To their left
was a short promontory, on which were the jumble of buildings, warehouses and wharfs of
Williamstown. Other ships, large and small, were docked there; several rode at anchor in the
bay. !t was a busy, chaotic scene, even at dusk, fui! of strange smells, and in the distance,
beyond Sandridge, a haze of smoke emerging from chimneys indicated the whereabouts of a
smaii new town called Melbourne.
Although the settlement had been officially designated as Melbourne since 1837, it was still
popularly known as Port Phillip, and in 1S50 it was still part of the British colony of New South
Wales, which had been named so by Captain Cook as long ago as 1770. The colony itself
covered an immense area of land and was still virtually unexplored and unknown. It extended
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