All At Sea

After a 15 month hiatus, I have finally returned to a further portion of Edward's trip. I left him in Newcastle from where he was travelling by boat to Sydney. In Sydney he embarked on the SS Madras to travel via Melbourne, Adelaide and King Georges Sound (Albany) en route to Ceylon and eventually, England. I will need to return at a later date to cover his visit to Sydney but Trish and I decided to do a cruise that departed Fremantle, visiting Albany, Kangaroo Island, Adelaide, Burnie, Melbourne and Port Lincoln before returning to Fremantle.

While we visited ports in the reverse order to Edward, I felt that this was a way of experiencing at least a part of his sea voyage under modern conditions and to visit the ports that he did, plus several others.

Edward traveled by P&O which had the mail contract between England and Australia and therefore competed the journey on a regular basis. They allowed passengers to book a fare all the way to England but to leave and rejoin the trip on a regular basis - a sort of early "hop on, hop off" service. That is something that isn't available today because the cruise industry operates in the Southern hemisphere in our summer and then sends the vessels north for the northern summer. Hence they only do the Australia / UK route at the end of each season and don't allow for the "hop and off" concept.

The fare for the entire Sydney to Southampton journey was 150 pounds in a shared three berth cabin. While this equates to just over $12,000 in current terms which isn't significantly different from current prices, bear in mind that the price Edward got for the best of the horses he sold in Sydney before leaving was 75 pounds. Edward chose initially to take a cabin just to Alexandria in Egypt because as we will see, he wanted to be flexible in his route later on.

Sun Princess anchored off Kangaroo Island. The only port where we had to lighter ashore whereas Edward did at all of them.

We traveled on the Sun Princess and paid about $1600 each for a 13 night cruise. The Madras was about 1200 tons and had both steam and sail whereas the Sun Princess is 77,000 tons with not a sail in sight.

The Madras took about 3 days to travel from Melbourne to Adelaide and then about 5 days to get to Albany whereas the Sun Princess took about a third of that time (allowing for additional stops that we made) so given the difference in land travel times, sea travel hasn't increased pace that much although I'm willing to guess that it's much smoother sailing today. Certainly Edward describes his fellow passengers on the second day as being yellow and flabby, casting themselves into nooks and corners, reckless of personal appearance; whilst others, with desperate effort, reach the companion and dive below and he describes himself as spending his first couple of days on his berth, avoiding food. On the Sun Princess there was little evidence of seasickness although Trish became a little queasy during some rougher weather re-entering the Bight on the way home. Some modern medication purchased in Port Lincoln quickly solved the problem, however.

Something that hasn't changed in the 160 odd years is the racial divisions of the crew. Edward indicates that apart from a handful of European senior crew, the majority of operating crew were Lascars (Indian or SE Asian) but the cabin servants were primarily Chinese. This is replicated today with the Captain and senior crew being European, the deck crew appearing to be mainly Indian or Indonesian while the cabin and dining attendants are mostly Filipino or from other developing nations such as Mexico or Eastern Europe. Presumably then as now, the basis for these distinctions was largely economic with varying pay scales for the different roles.