Pākehā voyages

Apart from the story of the waka traditions, and waka voyages to New Zealand, we also have, on the Pākehā side, an entry all about the voyage out to New Zealand. And let’s just go there… now this really tells the story of how people from Britain mainly, around about half a million of them actually, came out to New Zealand really from about 1840, through to, well until very recently. And this really tells the story of that voyage.

In this little entry for example, Departure to Landing, if you go through the images and resources you learn the story. Here for example we see all the immigrants collecting at the ports in Britain, where they usually came…. a very high proportion of them actually came…they got free passages, usually paid for by the New Zealand government. The thing is, it was such a long way from Britain to New Zealand, that in order to get people to come here, you really had to give them a bit of a subsidy, a bit of a bribe. So they usually got a free passage, and they would then get…..assemble at the port, usually in London, and get put on these boats. There were quite sort of strict regulations about how much room they were allowed, and what the food was like and so forth. And it was often a pretty sad moment for them.

This little thing here is a package of English soil that one family brought out to New Zealand because they felt so sad about leaving their homeland. And across the top it says ‘Dulcis Domus’, which means in Latin, sweet home. And this packet of soil was actually on the mantel piece of one of the people who works for Te Ara…..works with us, on her grandparents’ mantle piece… a kind of sentimental… Gives you some sense of how difficult it was to come all that way.

And you can…we also include things like this diary. This was a diary written on the night that this woman left England. And she talks…if you excuse me, I’ll try to read it. She says, “Have had no sleep all night, the noise overhead is tremendous, what with the thumping of the pump which draws sea water. It’s a continual tramp of the officer keeping watch.” And she goes on, “Left home for New Zealand, but much too lonely and miserable to notice, particularly with things going on around me.” So she’s pretty upset.

So we try to add these… little… stories and documents, plus things like this; this is a drawing done on board ship, this is New Year’s Eve on the Royal Dane. You know there were always a couple of celebrations on board ship. One was when they would cross the line, when they would all dress up, and get thrown into the water and so forth, but also celebrations like New Years Eve was always a bit of party. And there is some lovely drawings, you know people had a lot of time of course. This was…is simply called passing the time, and as you can see the person was bored, so they sat down and had a game of chess while someone else sketched them.