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Authors: Clare Wright
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to some shenanigans going on in the womenâs quarters. The single females were making a noise at night , Menzies wrote, and the doctor went down and told them to be quiet and some of them was saucy to him, he told them that he would have a prison made for some of them . It wasnât a bluff. The shipâs carpenters were called in. They used three-inch quartering to make uprights across the berths of the offending women. Menzies, who for some reason was a witness to this, chuckled that it put me in mind of the wild beast cages at the Surrey Zoological Gardens.
A farcical display of power aside, here was the contradiction that lay at the heart of the gold-seeking impulse: immigrants aspired to change their own lives yet expected that everyday social distinctions would remain the same. Could they have it both ways?
For some ships the danger was not over once seasickness passed and the saucy lasses had been given their comeuppance. Sexual misadventure might have been anticipated on a long journey of young, unchaperoned, often-intoxicated thrill-seekers, but some calamities were less predicable. Take the case of the Sir William Molesworth, the ship chartered by the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society with young Scot Alexander Dick on board. It was widely known that one child had been cleared of scarlet fever just in time to board. But others, it seems, had been incubating the disease. By the time the ship docked at Port Phillip a staggering five months later, ten per cent of her passengers were dead.
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 islandsâ 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? Itâs 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 Clendinnenâs beach, the shores of Botany Bay, the British and the (Indigenous) Australians find common ground, dancing hand in hand like âchildren at a picnicâ, mutually lowering their guard in an act of âclowning pantomimeâ.
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
A farcical display of power aside, here was the contradiction that lay at the heart of the gold-seeking impulse: immigrants aspired to change their own lives yet expected that everyday social distinctions would remain the same. Could they have it both ways?
For some ships the danger was not over once seasickness passed and the saucy lasses had been given their comeuppance. Sexual misadventure might have been anticipated on a long journey of young, unchaperoned, often-intoxicated thrill-seekers, but some calamities were less predicable. Take the case of the Sir William Molesworth, the ship chartered by the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society with young Scot Alexander Dick on board. It was widely known that one child had been cleared of scarlet fever just in time to board. But others, it seems, had been incubating the disease. By the time the ship docked at Port Phillip a staggering five months later, ten per cent of her passengers were dead.
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 islandsâ 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? Itâs 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 Clendinnenâs beach, the shores of Botany Bay, the British and the (Indigenous) Australians find common ground, dancing hand in hand like âchildren at a picnicâ, mutually lowering their guard in an act of âclowning pantomimeâ.
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
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