Voyage
The First Fleet was the first set of ships to transport convicts to Australia, it sailed in 1787. Ships continued to transport convicts to Western Australia until 1868. The beginning of the transportation years brought ships at inconsistent times and the death rate on these ships remained high; in the Second Fleet, 267 out of 1,006 prisoners died at sea. However, at the peak of transportation, the death rate was a little more than one percent.
Ralph Clark, an officer on board the Friendship in the First Fleet, kept a journal of his journey to Australia. In his journal, he described the women on board as "abandoned wenches", contrasting their characteristics with the supposed virtues of his wife in England. At one stage, after several male convicts were caught in the place where the female convicts were lodged, Clark wrote: "I hope this will be a warning to them from coming into the whore camp — I would call it by the Name of Sodem for ther is more Sin committed in it than in any other part of the world".
Despite the critical attitude towards the female convicts, some seamen developed relationships with the women whilst on the voyage. Women often used their bodies as a way of bettering their conditions. On the Lady Juliana, a ship in the Second Fleet, female convicts began to pair off with the seamen, which mirrored the arrangement in subsequent voyages. John Nicol, a Scottish steward recalled, "Every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath." These relationships were not always exclusively sexual. Nicol himself expresses his desire to marry and bring back to England his convict "wife", Sarah Whitlam, after her release.
Read more about this topic: Convict Women In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word voyage:
“He makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a true water clock who delays too long.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But where is laid the sailor John
That so many lands had known,
Quiet lands or unquiet seas
Where the Indians trade or Japanese?
He never found his rest ashore,
Moping for one voyage more.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)