Logging a life at sea

A rare sailor's diary casts light on the reality of travel to the antipodes in the 19th century. Charmian Smith takes a look.

Life at sea in the 1860s was hard for passengers, as we know from many shipboard diaries, but there is little that records the even harder life of a sailor.

The extracts below are from a diary, written by a sailor, probably from notes taken while on a voyage from London to Port Chalmers and back in 1866-67.

It has recently been acquired by the Dunedin Public Library heritage collections.

Few sailors kept a journal of their life at sea, probably because many were illiterate, says Anthony Tedeschi, rare books librarian.

The name of the writer of this journal is unknown, but Mr Tedeschi and Delyth Sunley, who has transcribed it, have done some detective work and think it may be one William Edeson.

In the diary he is referred to as "Bill" and at one stage the second mate calls a list of names, one being Edeson, but this name is not mentioned again.

In Port Chalmers he meets a sailor from Kings Lynn, his home town, who asks if he knows the Eyres brewery there and Bill says his father was a brewer.

The librarians have found a William Edeson who was born about 1845 - in the diary Bill mentions October 19 was his birthday - whose father worked at the brewery.

He would have been in his early 20s on the voyage.

In 1861, William worked as an office boy and in the 1881 and 1901 census records was a maltster's manager in Worksop.

When Bill returns to London he finds his parents have moved to Worksop.

A great deal of the diary is devoted to the work on board: rigging, furling and otherwise wrestling with sails 150 feet aloft, both in fine and in heavy weather, struggling with anchors, enduring wet, cold and danger, fighting the wheel in heavy seas, and the interactions with the other crew members, who were a medley of races.

The passengers are seldom mentioned - although the pet racoon belonging to one of them causes a deal of trouble among the crew.

Sometimes Bill even mentions what they had for dinner - shark steaks when they caught a shark in the Atlantic, and pork sea pie, when they killed one of the pigs carried on board.

A sea pie is a layered pie containing meat or game of various kinds and topped with a dough of some sort, whether a suet crust or ship's biscuits.

On a visit to Dunedin he buys fresh bread and butter and relishes the change from hard tack.

The diary was spotted in an antiquarian bookshop in the US by one of Mr Tedeschi's former colleagues, who alerted him to its availability.

Purchases of items for the special collections are funded from bequests and trusts, not by ratepayers.

Several forward-thinking people set up such trusts, such as A. H. Reed who gave his collections to the public library so the public could have access to such items, according to Mr Tedeschi.

The full transcription of the diary will eventually be available on the library's website, but the original, and other items in the special collections, can be seen by making an appointment with him on the third floor of the library.

The sailor's diary starts with the Alexandrina sailing from Shadwell Basin, London on June 9, 1866, when "all the hands came on board most of them drunk", so much so that "the 1st and 2nd mates had to lend us (that were sober) a hand to rig out the jibboom".

A few days later a gale carried away the mizzen topsail yard, blew the sail to ribbons and forced the ship to shelter in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

But by Friday, June 22 they were on their way with a fair wind.

"Saturday had a bad pain in my gills what they call ashore toothache.

The racoon (a wild animal belonging to one of the passengers) got out and bit two of the dogs, one of them a fine Shepherd Dog very severely.

Set Studding sails at night.

Fine fair wind."

"Friday [July] 6 in the Tropics to day so now we are in the N. E. trade winds & can depend on a little fine weather.

When we left London we were 2 men short so the captain shipped 2 fresh ones at Gravesend and neither of them have been to Sea before.

They cannot steer or anything so the wheels lookouts &c come round quicker & of course gives us a deal more work to do.

One of these men is a Frenchman, we call him Frenchy, so as he could do nothing the mate tried him at going aloft, so he sent him to grease down the main from the Royal truck down. & he went aloft and got as far as the Main Topmast Crosstrees & stuck there & dare not go any farther.

The mate wanted to go & drive him up but the Captain persuaded him not on account of the passengers.

So they called Frenchy down and gave him a job of cleaning the sheep and Pigs out.

Some Flying fish seen to day."