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by an ocean of bronze. Porpoises disporting round the ship: flying fish darting through the air
with incredible velocity: a train of petrels following in our wake, ceaselessly twittering. The
emigrants began at sundown to dance country dances to the sound of a flute and violin. No
grace in their movements - no picturesqueness in their costume, and a rudeness rather than a
heartiness in their merriment. During the whole of the voyage I saw only two groups worthy of
sketching. One was a young mother and her two children; the
59
other, three or four men listening to another reading aloud. Out of the mass of human beings on
board there was not one person, man, woman, or child, who would have been considered
interesting either by the artist, or the lover of the beautiful. No emigrants were here sailing from
old Greece, cherishing their household gods and their sacred fire, that they might reproduce their
fatherland in a distant dime, but a mob of sturdy Anglo-Saxons, hungrily inclined, flying from a
country where beef and mutton is seven pence a pound, to one where it is only three halfpence.
'21 March: In Latitude 6° N. Thermometer 84" in the cuddy. Early in the morning, one of the
female emigrants was safely delivered of a female child.'
The mother was either Mrs Chapman or Mrs Richardson, for both had given birth on the ship
by the time Adelaide was reached - as the shipping list in the South Australian Register for 15
June 1850 notes.
Mereweather continues: 'At night there was a great commotion on board. Some of the
unmarried male emigrants, instead of going to their berths at ten o'clock, according to the rules
of the ship, insisted on sleeping on deck. The doctor, who is nominally charged with the
superintendence of the passengers, insisted on their going below, knowing that most of them
were mischievous and depraved characters. They set him at defiance. He then appealed to the
Mate for assistance. Upon the Mate remonstrating with them, they laughed at him too. The
Mate then roused the Captain, who was asleep. But as the Captain was deficient in moral
courage, and not equal to cases of emergency, he refused to interfere. It is not improbable that
he thus wished to compromise the doctor; for like most Captains of emigrant ships, he was very
jealous of his powers, although what these powers actually are, it would be hard to say. So
these fellows have gained their point, and the ship is nightly in danger of taking fire from their
lighted tobacco flying about. The present arrangements for the social well-being of emigrant
ships are as yet most defective. Although each ship professes to have stringent rules and
regulations for the passengers; and a doctor is placed on board, partly for the purpose of seeing
that these regulations shall be carried out; yet this doctor has no power to enforce these
regulations, should any one set him at defiance. Thus, an emigrant may endanger the safety of
the ship by his carelessness, or put in jeopardy the health of his fellow-passengers by his
filthiness; or poison the morals of the young by his lewdness, without subjecting himself to any
punishment. The Captain has the power of putting in irons; but that is never resorted to except in
cases of mutiny or assault. And when we consider that now, when a steerage passage to
Australia costs no more than £15, the vilest of the vile, reprobates as bad as convicts, yet
unconvicted, crowd on board these ships just at starting, with the fruits of their last villainy in
their pocket, we must acknowledge that the want of stern discipline in such ships is loudly called
for. I have no hesitation in stating that some of the single male steerage emigrants on board of
our ship are the most obscene miscreants that it would be possible to conceive, and that, by
their dogmatic and practical infidelity, their oaths, blasphemies, and filthy jests, they create an
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