Of Immigrant Ships and Shell Games

 

The Barque Star Queen

      Looking around the net today I stumbled across an article titled, "How To Find Your Australian Ancestors". It wasn’t particularly helpful and linked to mostly pay sites, but it got me thinking about my cousin Alice Dwyer/O’Dwyer who left Tipperary in the spring of 1875 to begin a new life in Queensland. I wrote about Alice earlier, and reading through that blog I remembered I still hadn’t figured out who in Australia had paid her fare. I didn’t figure that out today either, but I did find the incredible details of her journey.

Alice O'Dwyer

     One free site I found useful was that of the State Library of Queensland, where I ran a search for Alice’s ship, Star Queen. Among the first hits was this manuscript-- "Isaiah de Zouche Diary, 1875". Hoping it was digitized, I opened the description to find that this man was the ship’s surgeon in 1875! While not digitized, it apparently could be borrowed. The cost for an international interlibrary loan was $45, not bad but I had my doubts the library in Australia would just ship an almost 150-year-old manuscript to New York. Maybe there were excerpts online? I tried a google search which didn’t produce the diary, but something almost as good did come up. That something was the website, Trove, a free Australian newspaper site that is very easy to search. I typed in, Isaiah de Zouche 1875, and flung open the door of the rabbit hole.

Dr. de Zouche

     One of the first hits began with news that on September 14th officials had signaled the Star Queen to stop at Cape Moreton, Australia, short of its destination of Maryborough, but its Captain Downing had refused to comply!  It went on to say the Colonial Secretary’s Department in Australia had received a telegram from Dr. de Zouche and as a result of its contents had ordered the ship brought to Moreton Bay.  Part of what Dr. de Zouche had written:

There should have been provisions on board for 140 days. Our biscuits were exhausted on the eighty-ninth day, when in longitude 65 E., with the exception of three and a half bags reserved for the crew. On the 31st, of August the date of our arrival, [at Melbourne] having been out 110 days from Gravesend, we had no biscuits, no preserved fresh meat, no potatoes, no molasses, and only six day's supply of salt meat and eight day's flour for passengers and crew. The passengers have conducted themselves throughout the voyage in the most exemplary manner.

     No wonder Captain Downing didn't want to stop in Moreton.  At the time Alice left Tipperary a program was in place to aid emigrants relocating to Australia, with the Colonial Office there and its counterpart in England sharing the cost. A look at the passenger manifest of the Star Queen shows that only twenty-six of its 322 passengers paid their own way, the rest were assisted or free. The Star Queen had left England on May 13th, supposedly stocked as required for 140 days at sea. That is where the trouble began. A fraud was hatched between the ship’s captain, the purser and the third mate to line their pockets using supplies intended for their passengers. 

     Conditions became so bad that on August 31st the Star Queen was forced to put in at Hobson’s Bay in Melbourne to take on provisions, this must have been when Dr. Z was able to send his incriminating telegram to officials.  In his testimony at the later enquiry, Dr. Z added that the captain was intemperate and had used threatening language in addressing him. The press had a field day with the story, Trove found far too many articles to read them all, but a common theme came through. Only a single newspaper, The Age, attempted to downplay the incident asserting the ship had, “merely put in to replenish supplies then continued on its way”, but that was early on before all the facts had come to light.

     Further testified to at the enquiry, and indeed verified by Australian officials, was the existence of barrels marked bread on one side and split peas on the other in order to deceive inspectors in England into believing the proper number of stores were onboard. Mr. Bellamy, the third mate, testified that before sailing, biscuits that had been counted and stowed were surreptitiously brought back on deck by him to be counted a second time. It was further found that Mr. Wright, the purser, had weighted the scales on the ship, the buckets supposedly holding 30 pints of water in fact held only 20, the ship was “disgustingly dirty”, there was insufficient deck space for the number of passengers, and incredibly, nineteen men from Wales and County Clare had emigrated under assumed names provided to them by crew members. The skullduggery didn’t end there, as supplies dwindled the captain ordered provisions intended for the assisted passengers be diverted to cabin passengers.

     Nor did Mrs. Currie, the ship's matron, have anything good to say for the Captain, accusing him of not supporting her in the performance of her duties and complaining of the short rations that left all the "girls" hungry, as well as the lack of water for them.

     Captain Downing was found culpable and given the choice of paying a fine of 211 pounds or spending three months in prison for breaches of the Passenger’s Act. He chose the fine. Oddly, no mention was made in the newspapers of any charges against the purser or third mate being pursued. After slogging through more articles, it came to light Dr. Z had promised to request immunity for the pair if they revealed to him all they knew of the scheme, which the Colonial Secretary agreed to.  As a result, they were never charged. It’s well known that this sort of embezzlement went on during the years of famine immigration, but with the passage of various passenger acts such flagrant violations became thankfully, not as common. The outrage over the events on the Star Queen was universal, inspiring the song below within months:

     The writer of this amusing ditty, cursing the Star Queen’s beams, would get his wish a few years later when at the end of July in 1878, the ship ran aground on the treacherous Murray Reefs located off the coast of southwestern Australia and was wrecked, fortunately with no loss of life.  I would imagine Alice and her fellow immigrants, who were unfortunate enough to have been passengers on the horrendous voyage of 1875 aboard the Star Queen, shed  few tears.  As for Captain Downs, his name appeared on the passenger list of the ship Ramsey, bound for London on the 12th of November in 1875.  A few names away from his in second cabin was that of Mrs. Currie. That must have been an interesting trip.