The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (13 page)

When Captain Watt ascertained the gravity of the situation in the mid-Atlantic, he stopped at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal, effectively isolating the ship for a month. There was no pier or landing place, just the remains of an old Portuguese penal settlement and the islands' native population of mixed African and Portuguese descent. Cape Verde had once been central to the transatlantic slave trade, but by 1853 one of the primary
industries of the natives
, as Alexander Dick related, was carrying passengers from boats to the shore. The
Sir William Molesworth
arrived in considerable surf. Dick described the scene of moral pandemonium that ensued:

The ladies in our boat were utterly horrified to find that the only means of reaching the shore was by being carried in the arms of a stalwart nigger as naked as the Apostle Belvidere and as black as Beelzebub.

Some refused to undergo the trial and returned to the ship. A few adventurous souls
resigned themselves half unwillingly to the clamorous niggers who soon set them down on the beach tousled and tumbled and blushing like peonies
.

How to read this remarkable scene? It's no accident that historian Inga Clendinnen begins her classic work of contact history,
Dancing with Strangers
, on a beach, the archetypal boundary delineating fundamental states of being: water and land, here and there, coming and going. On Clendinnen's beach, the shores of Botany Bay, the British and the (Indigenous) Australians find common ground, dancing hand in hand like ‘children at a picnic', mutually lowering their guard in an act of ‘clowning pantomime'.

The scene on the Cape Verde coastline is analogous. Familiar sight lines are blurred, behaviours adapted, boundaries crossed. The women who are carried to shore by the islanders go only
half unwillingly
. They perform their scripted role as distressed damsels, but by letting themselves be carried away in the first place, they have engaged in an important theatre of inversion. No longer upstanding, they are tousled and tumbled and set down arse-about. The black demons are responsible for their fall, but also their rescue. Not all women jumped ship when the opportunity presented, but some relished the chance to throw off old vestiges of conventional femininity and surrender to this bewitching possession.
¹¹
For some, the corollary of
roughing it
was going native.

Like the seasickness that reduced strong men to whimpering invalids or sentimental fools, this unexpected encounter on the cusp of sea and land was the first of many acts of reversal as immigrants headed south. ‘Going south' was in itself an inversion. The Antipodes as the opposite of true north. Women themselves were constructed as a kind of vessel in the cultural armada of colonisation. As symbols of home, civilisation and order, women represented the goals of British expansionism, with the loyal wife and marriageable domestic servant cast as the good imperial subject. But as the unsettling episode at the Cape Verde Islands demonstrates, the authorised script could readily be abandoned for improvisation if necessary. How should a precious English rose act when suddenly thrust into the arms of a buck-naked black man, who is not her
bête noir
but her saviour? If the knight in shining armour is not a handsome prince but a savage, does a maiden blush, laugh or fervently embrace the startling possibilities of this altered reality? For many immigrants, the ship voyage fractured timeworn fairy tales abruptly.

Of course, you didn't need to be unexpectedly beached to experience the magnetic pull of limbo. The ship itself was a liminal space. Neither on land nor of the sea, neither leaving nor arriving, immigrants stood betwixt and between, caught in the vast hiatus of transhemispheric travel. It was a topsy-turvy time, when judging the distance between the real and the fantastic, the defensible and the inadmissible, was increasingly problematic.

Sometimes this disarray was literal. On the night of a tremendous storm, Fanny Davis described the effect of the mountainous waves like this:
It is like being in a great cradle only that instead of rocking us to sleep it rocks us more wide awake for every now and then it seems as if we're going to turn bottom upwards
. How frightening, that the hand that rocks the cradle might be malevolent, not maternal after all. Ever watchful for edifying details, Fanny also tells us that she observed a Catholic prayer service, below deck,
conducted by a young woman
. What had possessed this girl to subvert the strict institutional hierarchy of her faith?

Other moments of chaos were not so much quietly irreverent as madly entertaining. Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian Episcopalian, described the scene on the promenade deck at night, where the ordinarily staid space
assumed the appearance of a dance hall
. There were fiddlers, tambourines, dancing. Folks stood in a ring, clapping and cheering.
Had it not been for a sober and quite respectable company
, wrote Boynton,
one might have imagined himself in an Ann Street gathering: in short, we had a regular break down
. The geographical reference here is to the red-light district of Boston, centred around Ann Street, where the city's blacks and whites would notoriously intermingle. So here is a vivid tableau of moral disintegration, as sexual and racial decencies are openly flouted. But for Boynton the prospect of a
break down
was not threatening; he enjoyed the bonhomie, the way he became encircled in a sphere of companionship and mirth.
¹²

John Hopkins, travelling aboard the
Schomberg
, enjoyed a
silly affair
when the lads in his cabin put on a show: the star was
a ‘beautiful young lady' with a beard
. And girls just wanted to have fun too. Fanny Davis described one of her ship's
full dress balls
where women went to pains to out-do each other's outfits.
Some of the girls
, she wrote,
dress in the Highland costume as men. It looks first rate
. Such carnivalesque gestures—overturning polarities—were a longstanding feature of going south. When women don men's clothes, argues cultural studies scholar Jean Howard, they become ‘masterless women', signalling a breakdown of systems of control and compliance.

The collapse of sartorial superstructures was aided by geography. Six weeks out from London and Jane Swan's ship was lodged firmly in the dead calm of the intertropical convergence zone—otherwise known as the doldrums.
We can never get a night's rest for the heat
, she groused. The thermometer gauged an astonishing 108 degrees (42 degrees Celsius). With no breeze and no movement, the passengers were taking it in turns to row out to sea.
Some ladies ventured out
, tattled Jane,
so that you may judge what sort of day it was!
Strange days indeed. Fanny Davis, also stuck in the doldrums, was finding things most peculiar too. She could report that it was
very hot
, and they were almost completely becalmed. An awning had been rigged up on the deck for the ladies, but many did not use it.
The sun begins to turn the colour of our skins
, wrote Fanny,
we shall all be black soon
. The
MARCO POLO CHRONICLE
reported the same phenomenon:
fair faces brown rapidly
. What would James Hopkins have thought of this display of scorched flesh? Upon reaching the tropics, he was astonished to discover that
the ladies from the First Cabin had nothing upon their heads
. For sixteen-year-old Sarah Ann Raws, sailing on the
Bloomer
in 1854, reaching the tropics was a revelation. Although she and her brother could
scarcely sleep in our beds for the heat
, Sarah Ann delighted in lying on top of her mattress with only a thin sheet as cover,
sweat rolling off our faces
, sans stockings.
¹³
And it would have been an unearthly moment indeed when, traversing the Tropic of Cancer, Frances Pierson was asked by her dinner companions to carve the dolphin.

All the mashing up and breaking down was but a prelude to the foremost conceptual navigation: crossing the line. The line-crossing ceremony, steeped in maritime tradition and still practised today, is a customary initiation rite celebrating a sailor's first crossing of the equator and welcoming him into the Kingdom of Neptune. There is often an appearance by Neptune (Poseidon) and his wife, Amphitrite, a pantomime that provides an opportunity for sailors to compete for the accolade of being ugly enough to go in drag. The celebration is a ritual of reversal in which the inexperienced crew are permitted to take over the ship from the officers. If the full traditional fiasco is played out, a transition is made from the established order of the captain's regime to the controlled mayhem of the Pollywog Revolt, followed by a return to order as the ‘Wogs' pass certain physical tests and earn their right to enlistment in Neptune's realm. Though the line-crossing ceremony is still honoured today, some of the more violent forms of ‘testing'—such as beatings and sodomy—have been outlawed.

On immigrant ships, the line-crossing ceremony was practised as a rite of theatrical observance rather than brute harassment. Many journal-writers noted some aspect of the colourful proceedings. It took most ships at least five weeks to reach the equator, but a slow passage through the doldrums could delay that milestone by a month. Crossing the line was a symbolic mid-point in the journey, and crews and passengers alike enjoyed marking the occasion. On Sarah Hanmer's ship the
Lady Flora
, there was a
Grand Procession
. Neptune and his wife were drawn in a car with attendants dressed in unique costumes, carrying tridents and accompanied by dolphins. The event concluded with a hornpipe, much drinking, fist fights and squabbling,
as occurs on most days
. On James Menzies' ship, passengers were included in the ritual.
Neptune hailed the ship
, he recounted,
the water began to fly about, a great many got a wetting
as all who went on deck copped a bucketing. What came next was strictly for the sailors. Lathered with tar and muck, their heads shaved, they were festooned in
pills and wigs
and fine gowns. As the passengers looking on in delight knew by now, crossing the invisible lines of conformity, propriety and erstwhile identity could take many guises.

During those first weeks at sea when all that was solid melted into air, there were only two things the unmoored passenger could use for ballast: the watery horizon and the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which everyone did, before electricity) kept passengers in touch with a familiar reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations to orient oneself, to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. And then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even that stellar certainty was stripped away. At the equator you can see all the stars in the sky rise and set, giving access to the entire celestial sphere: another map begins unfolding. And as the weeks rolled by and the ship lurched further south towards Australia, it would provide a new reference point: passengers began to fix their mental compass on the Crux Australis. Matter-of-fact Fanny Davis recorded a single entry in her diary after crossing the equator on 15 July 1853:
Saw the Southern Cross at the Line. It is altogether different to an English sky.

The Southern Cross was a beacon in more ways than one. It told of a new political identity, divested of old allegiances. But as a symbolic object—what Kleinian psychoanalysts might call ‘a good object'—the Southern Cross offered new immigrants the reassuring embrace of affective belonging. Though the constellations ranged across the night sky, and the moon waxed and waned in primordial rhythm, they were permanent anchor points on an otherwise shifting shore. As the horizon is for disoriented seafarers, the Southern Cross became a hitching post for existential certainty when all else was in mortal flux. Before long, that simple constellation would come to have tremendous significance for the people of Ballarat, representing just how far their journey had taken them.